Hey, welcome to this week’s episode: Two actions to take when your sales confidence is low, low, low.

Again, I’m super excited about this one.

But, you know, my main aim for this podcast in particular is I want to activate your sales confidence. Because when your sales confidence is low, we actually need to stimulate it and kind of bring it back. We need to lean in and go, no, come on, let’s reactivate it. So that’s my main aim for today.

And let’s talk about one of the, you know, the many reasons that you have a drop in sales confidence and the obvious one is that you’ve got a sales drop.

Now if you’re listening to this and it is September 2024, there has been some economic challenges within New Zealand, right?

So you may have had a literal sales drop and often those things can be out of our control so we do need to like just be a little bit kinder on ourselves.

But if you’re having a sales drop and there aren’t economic things to pinpoint and you’re just maybe off your game, you feel a little bit overwhelmed, you stop showing up and you’re pulling back, because your sales are dropping, you’re going to make them drop even further.

And another kind of reason or flag for your sales confidence is you’ll actually become quite apologetic. So you’ll apologize for your creations, like you’ll see people doing it like I’ve got this thing I want to share but I don’t want to offend you so please know that this has come with a good intention for example. People will start to show up apologetically, where we actually want you to keep showing up unapologetically.

So that’s how bad, say, having your sales confidence low is, and it actually really disempowers your expertise. It makes you second guess many, many things and can actually be a real self-confidence punch in the guts.

So I just want to give you a big virtual hug if you’re feeling all these feels because it can be a really really disheartening scary place to be, particularly if you’re a highly driven person who really has a success metric on how well your business is doing.

So you will have that really intertwined or you know in an unhealthy way that when business doesn’t do so well you’ll make it mean something about you and your self-worth. So what happens is you will pull back, you will stop showing up, you will feel overwhelmed and you will literally start questioning everything.

I think one of the big things that happens is that you then start to make assumptions.

You don’t make offers because you don’t want to offend, and you also then assume that people aren’t spending or don’t want to buy from you. And so in one of the other podcasts I’m going to talk about where sales is actually part of your customer service and so you actually become slack at customer service so you’re actually not doing well on the customer service front either alongside your sales piece.

So you know come and listen to this podcast so I can make you feel even worse. But I just want you to see that you need to move out of it because you’ll start to make weird assumptions and you’ll show up really differently throughout your whole business and that’s we don’t want that I need you to come back so there’s two ways we’re going to tackle this two actions and how we’re going to tackle this now I’ve given it some funny names, but I’m going to get you to double down.

Now, that isn’t the KFC.

I’m not telling you to go get double downs from KFC.

Is that even what they’re called?

It just reminded me of KFC.

I’ve never had one.

I know, I need to go try one.

Anyway, it’s time to double down and take stock.

Now, the stock is spelled S-T-O-C-C, not S-T-O-C-K, but it still sounds cool.

Double down and take stock.

These are the things I want you to do.

So we’re going to break STOCC down, okay?

S stands for keep selling. I’m giving you Nat Tolhopf’s permission, Sales Queen, to keep selling. Even during your sales drop, your drop in confidence, maybe your drop in revenue and the economic time, the worst thing we can be doing is stop selling, stop offering.

So the only metric that really matters in your business is how many offers are you putting out? Are you following people up? Are you telling people how they can work with you?

Are you in these conversations? That’s the metric.

Like if I want to sell, and I’m like, “oh, there’s no sales coming in”, the first metric I go to was like, well, how many offers did I put out there? How many invitations to work with me did I put out there?

And a lot of time when we’re feeling a bit low, that number will be extraordinarily low.

I want you to be able to have permission to keep selling and it might mean that you have to unpack and unbundle or add different incentives for people to start working with you, does that make sense?

So sometimes if something’s not working, we have that ability, particularly as small business owners, to be agile and rearrange and change things. So keep selling! I want to give you full permission to do that.

So these are the things I want you to double down on. Keep selling. That’s the S for the STOCC.

T is next. T is training.

So really take this time to come back to some sales basics for yourself but also for your team. Where do you need to kind of upskill?

One of the first places to look at is to make sure that you know how to increase your average spend of a client. Don’t just get them to buy once, continue to sell to them or let them know there’s other things that they can sell once they’ve had this first thing.

It’s really important to get those sales basics down.

Now’s the time if you’re a little bit slow actually to come back and really look at your customer service, the entire journey, how you treat someone once you have them, once they’re with you at the end, when they finish, like really come and have a look and Improve this area.

Now customer service can also look like going out and giving testimonials and reviews, because we get that beautiful feel good and getting into conversation with our clients can really boost our confidence because again when your sales confidence is low you’re setting an assumption which you think that the people who are buying from you think you’re shit where actually if you went and spoke with them they’re like man this is so good I love it and you’ll be like oh yeah Okay, and it will get you to show back up again.

Another cool thing to do during this time is to have a look at your efficiencies.

So where do you need to kind of, and this is under training, like where do you need to train your assistant better? Where do you need to be delegating to an assistant, right?

Because if you’re doing $10 an hour jobs and you could be doing $100 hour jobs, that’s what we want you to be doing.

So it’s kind of like looking at your efficiencies and your systems and really looking at where are you double handling?

Where can you put a process around that?

Where can you copy and paste something?

Where can you put those systems?

It’s a really good time to be doing that. So that’s the T in stock.

So we’ve got the O next. So O for opportunity.

When you’re feeling low, I need you to lean in and increase your visibility.

So what that means is increase your marketing.

It’s kind of like doing that zig when everyone else is zagging, when everyone else is pulling back marketing, I need you to lean in to your marketing.

Though, even though you don’t feel like it, I want you to come and listen to the podcasts I’ve spoken about.

Three ways to stop winging it.

I think that’s coming up soon and it does talk about in there some of the things you do need to be doing in business whether you like it or not.

And one of those is just showing up regardless of how you’re feeling and disclaimer if you are having some mental health issues then disregard it because you need to go look after those things.

So what you’ve got in this opportunity when your sales confidence is low and you’re doubling down and you’re keeping selling because I’ve given you permission and you’re going to come back to some sales basics and look after your customer service, you’re going to increase your marketing so we’re in this opportunity phase is you’re going to actually come back and create a new offer.

You’ve got the opportunity now to maybe Sell some stuff that you’ve always wanted to, make a decision, get rid of something.

You get to come and create some new stuff and get rid of some old stuff, which I think is really exciting.

You can use this opportunity to start a new project, finish some projects you’ve done, like use the downtime to come and make some cool shit happen, so you’re ready to go when it’s time to go. Do you know what I mean?

Like all those athletes at the Olympics, they would have still been training even though the Olympics was three years away. They’re still getting ready for when they’ve got to show up and that’s what I want you to build that muscle in.

So, coming to the first of the C’s in STOCC, so the first C is customers.

Where can you build some better retention?

Where are you not rebooking?

Where are you not having conversations to bring them up through to your sales ladder?

So this is something that I try and teach my clients as they

They’re experts in what they do and then they’ll often be doing this cool stuff and I’ll be saying to them like, well do your clients know that they can have that? And it’s like, oh no.

So we go and create the service and we start offering it to clients. Because you know it’s the next great thing.

So, C for customers. Let’s not forget about them. Let’s get into some conversations with them and just take stock of what’s around you and who you’ve got.

The second C stands for collaboration.

So, who can you… because business gets lonely, right? And sometimes our sales confidence will because you don’t shit alone. And one way to boost it up is to collab.

So, collab was someone who you have shared audiences but you sell different things.

So it’s a really obvious collaboration, a little bit like the sponsorship on my podcast, The Accounts Department, incredible accountant with a team of accountants who works with my ideal clients and obviously she doesn’t offer my services and I don’t offer her services and so we’re a beautiful collaboration to be together.

So we’ve got a shared database and we can help each other’s databases.

So a collaboration is something really nice to look at.

I’ve done a lot of collaborations through sharing workshops with people. Nat Coombe and I used to do a pricing and sales workshop.

For example, there’s many many things that you could do and in particular If you’ve got some local people you can hang out with, doing some cool local collabs and community events is something really cool because when your sales confidence is low and you stop showing up, I’m pretty sure you’re physically not showing up.

So you’re not even talking to humans apart from maybe your family. And so by collaborating and being local, it actually gets you out from behind your computer and gets you back into it.

Do you know what I mean?

And that’s what I need. I need you to lean in and show up.

So time to double down. Double down on activating your sales. You’re going to double down because you’re going to take stock. Take stock of what’s around you and what you can control right now.

And that’s what’s important is making a little bite-sized plan to get your way through this.

And something else I wanted to offer you off the back of this podcast is I’ve just released these mini sales audits.

They’re called Sales Breakthrough where I’m going to ask you a shit ton of questions and I’ll look through all your answers.

I’m going to do some business stalking. I’m then going to send you a kick-ass Loom video with a little bit of a report to go, hey, I think you could pull your sales socks up in this piece.

And help you get a little bit of a breakthrough with your sales.

So I appreciate you listening to this.

I appreciate where you’re at.

I think you’re doing amazing.

I would love for you to be kind about yourself.

Everyone goes through a drop in their sales confidence but it’s actually about your business resilience and how quickly you can come back.

So If you’ve got a mate or a friend who is having potentially a little bit of a downtime, feeling a little bit down the boat, send them this podcast because I’d love to help activate their sales confidence too.

Catch you later!