OK so this might sound like I’m stating the obvious. In order to be successful in business and generate income and grow you need to be making offers to prospective clients and customers.
You probably think this is a no-brainer, but all too often when we start to work with a new business and ask them to show us offers they have been making, and ads they have been running we get a blank look.
This goes hand in hand with I like to call “getting ready to get ready”. This is when business owners and staff spend so much effort on preparing for customers that they never actually get out there and promote themselves. It can be very easy to lose ourselves in this kind of busy work. Things like picking a logo, or making our premises look perfect, or reworking a presentation multiple times can seem like being productive.
This makes us feel like we are moving our business forward when in reality we are not.
Whilst it manifests itself in busy work. The real reason this happens is generally for one of these 3 reasons:
We like to operate in our comfort zone
Most people that start a business do so because they like doing the thing that the business does. If you’re a Yoga teacher then that is likely because you enjoy Yoga. So setting up your studio and making it feel like a perfect retreat for Yoga seems like an important task for a yoga business right?
Wrong! The most important task in any business is to get customers, as without customers you have no business.
But getting customers requires a completely different skill set than Yoga teaching, or whatever it is that your business does.
We are afraid of rejection
Another reason for hiding in the busy work of our businesses, is that deep down we are afraid of rejection. What if we make an offer and nobody is interested? What if I call a prospect and they say “No”.
It can be hard not to take this personally and to feel uncomfortable. Human nature is such that we then try and avoid this uncomfortable feeling, so we subconsciously decide to not make offers to protect our ego.
We have seen this lead to business failure so many times. Often business owners suffering from this will blame everything else, the economy, the competition even the weather have all been excuses we heard!
There is no easy way around this, but if you want to be successful in business then you need to stop taking it personally, and build a thicker skin. You don’t need to turn yourself into a cold calling monster but you need to get out there and not be afraid to promote yourself.
The truth can be scary
The worse case we came across of this was with a woman named Sue, she had invested thousands of Euro into a questionable business venture. She had spent lots of money on her premises, fitting out everything and all the bells and whistles.
When we met her she had ‘been in business’ for 6 months but hadn’t had a single customer!
Rather than developing the minimum viable version of her product and testing reactions from the marketplace she had completely bypassed this step. It turns out her business just wasn’t viable. Rather than facing that early on she had wasted all that time and money avoiding the truth.
The bottom line is that if we are not actively making offers then we are standing still. When we make offers in the market then we quickly get feedback. If people like our offers and buy then we can be sure we are on the right track.
Without making offers and just assuming people will buy from us one day we are deceiving ourselves.
What new offers can you make to new and existing customers today?
Brainstorm a list of them and write them out. Then set yourself a target to implement them. Take some action to make at least and offer to at least 5 people per day. Over a month that will be 150 people. Once some offers work then you can scale them with advertising campaigns and from there you have a strong platform to grow.
If you are struggling with Making Offers to Grow Your Business then perhaps you might benefit from our BBR Kick Start Program. In this program we work with you to set up online marketing system that makes offers to your prospective clients automatically.