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Transcript

The Sales Blitz: How to Close the Gap on Your Revenue Goal Fast · Sell Well: Helping Agencies Close More Deals and Grow Revenue

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever been staring down your sales goal with one month left and thought, I'm not going to be able to make this happen?
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: And instead of picking up the phone, you started picking apart your funnel, your messaging, your positioning, your proposal, your target audience.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: You went full audit mode when what you actually needed to do was hit the pavement.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: I've been there and my clients have been there, and today I want to talk about what to do instead.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I call it the sales blitz.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: In football, a blitz is when the defense sends more players than expected to rush the quarterback.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's aggressive, it's fast, and it's designed to get results now.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the thing: coaches don't call a blitz every play.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's a tool they pull out when they need a big moment, when the game is on the line.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: A sales blitz works the same way.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a strategy overhaul, it's not a rebrand.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's you going all in for a short period of time with one goal: close the gap.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: This past year, I worked with a client who we had overhauled a lot of her services and she had invested a lot of time into the back end of her business.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: She had been working on a lot of different service offerings and she had started to offer strategy sessions, which meant that a lot of the people she was closing, uh, she was closing them at a lower rate, knowing that they were going to close later at a higher rate.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: So she was kind of investing in this process.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: All that to say, she was$40,000 below her goal at the end of the year.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: So she kind of had to make a decision.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: At this point, was she going to say, well, it was an investment year and wring her hands and just kind of say, uh, it doesn't feel good, but you know, that's business, baby.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: It happens.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, she got on the phone with her coach, me, and I said, Hey, go find$40,000.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: You need to go track that down.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: You've got 30 days.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: She actually had 32 days.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: And she laughed at me and she's like, Susie, I don't want to operate like a freaked-out freelancer.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: I really want to operate like a big business.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to pause here because I think this is a common misconception that just saying you know exactly where the money's coming from is big business.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: When in fact, I watched my dad, who has worked for some incredibly large organizations worth billions, and he gets calls from his boss where they say, Hey, go find two million.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: You need to go find these deals.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: You need to go find the money.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: And he says the same things to his reps.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually how a lot of big businesses hit their goals.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so diving back into my client, she is at this point where I tell her, go find$40,000.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, as her business coach, I'm not about to just leave her high and dry and say, best of luck, go find the cash.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: I sat down with her and said, You have a lot of options for how you can generate this.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk through what they are.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: And what I'm going to outline in the rest of this episode is exactly how she brought in another$40,000 and had her highest Q1 of all time.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Doing these things actually set her up long term for more revenue, more referrals, and got her out of a revenue rut that she had been in for a while.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: It also bonus gave her the confidence that if she starts to feel like she's not going to hit her goals, at any time she knows she can be like, I'm going to do a sales blitz and go bring in some extra cash.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so let's talk about what this is going to look like in your business.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: You have a couple options.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: So the first thing I want you to do is figure out what you're going to sell that is new and different.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Not telling you to reinvent the wheel.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not telling you, hey, you need to go and totally rebrand everything, but I do think you have a few options.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Option one, launch something easy and newish.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: This is not your biggest, most involved signature offer.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: This is something small and easy to say yes to.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: We've talked about this in past episodes, but I think a strategy session is always a good thing to do.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Or a one-day intensive, a quick turn deliverable.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: The goal is to go back to some of your raving fans, people who already love working with you and say, hey, I thought of you.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: Here's something new that I'm offering, and I thought you'd be a great fit for this.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: Or I thought this would be really helpful in your business.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: When somebody already trusts you, a small offer feels like a gift and not a pitch.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: At one point, I did a lot of one-day websites for clients.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Easy to execute, really fast value, and a really quick turnaround.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Think about what that looks like in your business.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: This worked so well for my clients that we had only done branding for them, especially if it had been a smaller package and I could go to them and say, hey, if you haven't been able to leverage your brand fully yet, I have a new offering where I can actually build your website in a day and I can get you scheduled for next Wednesday.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: And that offer was so appealing to people.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't something that we pulled out all the time, but it really helped us from a cash perspective.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Option two, bundle or discount.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: A bundle is a really smart way to create some urgency without cutting your rate.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: The key here is to package something together that makes it higher value and only offer it for a limited time.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: At Lost in House one year, at the end of the year, I did this with blog content, offered a full year of blogs preloaded onto your website that we designed, scheduled to go out on the first of every month for a flat fee.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: Buy this, buy this date, or it's gone.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: I did this one year with blogging.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I actually set this up where we went back to people that we had worked on their website, we had written their copies, so we knew their voice, we knew their offerings, and we said, hey, if blogging is something you want to knock out next year, I'll actually sell you a whole year of blogs at a huge discount if we can write them all at once and preload them into your website and schedule them to go out on the first of every month.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: I sent this out to specific clients.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I did this on purpose because yes, I wanted my clothes rate to be high on these, but I also sent them out to clients that we really loved working with that had minimal feedback and I knew this was going to be a really high margin project.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: And we had some clients who came back and were like, oh my gosh, this is awesome.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so excited about it.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: I can't wait to work with you guys on this.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for considering me.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't feel like a pitch to them.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: It felt like, hey, we're offering this.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: I thought of you, I thought you might be interested.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it came as a help to them instead of an upsell.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: So in the beginning of option two, I also said you can discount.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that's true.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: You can say, um, you know, we're gonna offer all websites at the end of the year at 10% off.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: The problem though is that for a lot of agency owners, you're already custom quoting everything.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: So discount against what, right?
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: It all kind of feels fake where you're like, hey, we're gonna give you 20% off.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: And they're like, cool, I have no idea what your real prices were because they're all private behind proposals.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not like when Amazon, I can see, oh, it's the lowest price it's been in 30 days.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't have that same effect.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: So for service-based business owners, this can be really tough.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: If you do have something though, that's publicly priced or you have some kind of a template download or something like that, or a strategy session that you talk about often and you want to run a flash sale on that, by all means.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's a great way to do that.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: If you have a membership or something there, um, I do think that offering a discount a couple times a year, maybe even only once a year, is a really great way to um put some cash on the board quickly.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is a lot of people put so much stock into a discount that they're like, oh my gosh, I'm discounting this.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: People are going to love it.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: And they don't see the value the way that you do.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: So discounting can be really tough.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: It can be really effective, but it also can feel like a big gift that the owner's giving and the client actually doesn't feel the value at all.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, option three, go ask your people.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: Go to people that you trust and tell them exactly what you're doing.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: I've got a goal to sell X number of strategy sessions by the end of the month.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know anyone who might be a good fit?
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's it.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: No one is ever offended by that question.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: Think about how you'd feel if a friend called you and said, I'm looking for work.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know anyone?
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: You would want to help.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: And the same goes here.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: Your network wants to support you, but they can't if they don't know what you need.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now let's talk about who you're actually reaching out to.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: There are three buckets here.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: First, you're raving fans.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: These are past clients who loved working with you.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Personalized direct outreach, not a mass email.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: Think about them specifically and reach out to you like you mean it.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: Let them know you thought of them.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Second, the people who didn't buy.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: They got a proposal, they went quiet, it was too expensive, or the timing was off.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: Go back to them.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: And these are people who didn't buy in the last, I would say, six months.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Go back to them.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: Something might have changed.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: I recently was working with a client on her sales blitz, and I had her reach out to five people that had not closed in the last six months.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: And she let me know that one of them said, Oh my gosh, I'm so glad you reminded me.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: I was so excited to move forward about this, but I had some personal stuff come up.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: Let's go.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: And she signed the contract.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's money that's just being left on the table.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: You can go and find those deals, resurrect them, and try to get things across the finish line.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: The third group of people is the Hail Mary list.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: People you talked to a long time ago, early clients, the people you almost pitched but never did, check in, you never know.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: The person that you think of that you're like, oh man, I wish that had worked out.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: Go email that person.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: This is your sales blitz.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: This is not your.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: Should we add them to our marketing list?
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Or I don't know if now is the right time.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's the time.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: Go reach out to them.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: Say something like, hey, I know it's been a while since we connected, but I wanted to reach out and see where you're at with some of these things, hear how business is going, and if there's anything we can do to support you.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's that simple.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: Just try to get the meeting.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's a new lead that you didn't have previously that you have brought back from the dead.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: If this sounds vague, it's because every business owner I've ever talked to, I'm like, who are you not telling me about?
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: And they're like, well, there's this person that I talked to that one time.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, go call that person.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know who it is.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: You've got a handful of these people.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: They might be good partners.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: They might know people, and you've always hemmed and hawed over if it's the right time or whatever.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's the right time.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: If you are in a sales blitz, there's no one you shouldn't reach out to.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now's the time.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: Go leverage all of these connections.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the most important thing I want you to hear about the sales blitz.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: It is not long term.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: This is not how you run your business every month.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want you to go call your Hail Mary clients every month.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want you to have to go and hustle this hard all the time.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's a sprint.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's designed to close a specific gap and a specific window of time.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: You're not trying to fix anything structural.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: You're just trying to get it done.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're sitting there right now and you're looking at a number that you don't think you can hit, I want you to ask yourself one question before you go into audit mode.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: Have you actually done everything you can to find every dollar that's hiding in your business?
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, last thing, and then I promise I'm done.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: So many people tell me I don't want to do a sales blitz because it feels off-brand and this is just not how I want to run my business.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to run ragged all the time just trying to go and do a cash grab.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: I'm with you.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: That makes a ton of sense.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't want to run my business like that either.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: But there's a time and a place.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so my last piece of advice for you is this with your sales blitz, make your list and set a time frame.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: Be like, I'm gonna reach out to all these people in the next two weeks and see what happens.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to reach out to these 17 people by end of day tomorrow and see what happens.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: It needs to have a specific number of people and it needs to have a specific time frame to it.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: And then be done.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the thing: if you don't hit your goal, you can sleep well knowing you left it all out on the field.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, with that, I'm done.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: No more sports metaphors, I promise.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for listening.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: If you are having a hard time strategizing your sales blitz, or you are sitting here going, I don't even know where to begin.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'm feeling so underwater.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to do this alone.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: I can walk you through this, be in it with you, and help hold you accountable to your sales blitz so you, like my client, can go double your revenue and have your highest quarter of all time.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Visit me at suzyconsole.com.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, sell well.