Sarah Lakhani Consulting

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Your Business Needs a Strong Foundation to Grow

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Here’s why… and how to get there.

In today’s online world, where more and more businesses are either expanding to online services, pivoting to become fully online or are launching as an online business from the get-go, having strong business foundations for your online business is key to secure your growth and longevity.  

There are 4 essential building blocks to an online business, and in this article, we’ll dive deep into each of them.

The four building blocks are:

  1. An aligned Business Model
  2. A strategic Offer Suite
  3. Magnetic Marketing
  4. Feel-Good Sales Strategies 

Business Model

Online business models vary – there are many tried-and-tested business models out there that you can use as is or modify in a way that works for you, your business and the lifestyle you desire. The important piece here is to find a business model that resonates with the type of work you want (and like) to do and deliver.  Some things to consider are whether you’re a natural content creator and would prefer to spend your time bringing in new leads and clients, after which the fullfilment of their purchases is highly automated or low-touch, or whether you’re more of a “deep dive into one client/project” person who would prefer to charge higher fees and have less clients. 

1. Subscription-Based Model

This model is usually based on a monthly or annual fee.  

Examples of this in the online expertise-based world are masterminds, miniminds, and memberships.

And you can get creative with this business model by offering subscriptions that give your clients access to paid masterclasses (or a set number of masterclasses per month), access to you or your team (like a retainer) or a combination of these services.  

2. Commission-Based Model

This model is built on taking a percentage of the deal/contract that you help materialize – or a percentage of the eventual revenue or profit that is generated from your services on the project.  

Examples of this in the online expertise-based world are kick-backs or referral fees if you generate business for a partner/colleague/other business, structuring a program at a low(ish) fee and adding on a percentage of the revenue or profit growth due to the expertise you provided in your service.

You can get creative with this business model by incorporating it into your 1:1 coaching, consulting or DFY services, by structuring the price as a base price + percentage of revenue/profit growth.

3. Freemium Model

This model is built on offering a free version of your product/service with an option to upgrade to a paid version for more access.

Examples of this in the online expertise-based world are offering a free lesson from an online course so your potential clients can get a feel for your course and teaching style before making a full purchase of your course.

And you can get creative with this business model by incorporating it into DFY (done for you) services by offering a free audit or assessment, with the option to then purchase your full program or services to bridge the gap between the client’s desired goals and the audit/assessment findings.

4. Agency Model

This model is for DFY (done for you) services, where a client pays you to have something created specifically for them.

Examples of this in the online expertise-based world are in areas such as social media marketing and other digital services such as website development or systems set-up.  It’s also used by consultants who offer DFY services such as taking on and completing projects end-to-end.

You can get creative with this business model by creating a team of freelancers, other businesses or service providers to offer a larger array of services to your clients, as a one-stop stop.

5. Value-Add Model

This model can be added onto any of the other models simply by providing additional add-ons that your client can choose from and add onto purchased services.

Examples of this in the online expertise-based world are having a “menu” of add-ons that you offer clients such as additional 1:1 time, access to paid-for resources or additional time on a retainer or program (e.g. extending the support timeline).

You can get creative with this business model by providing an additional support upsell within a group program or self-study course or offering on-going support for a set duration e.g. 3 months after the closure of a group program or 1:1 package.  

Offer Suite

Whichever business model you choose, the next step is to ensure you have a strategic offer suite.  This means choosing an offer suite that works best for your strategy.  

Typically this looks like having 3-5 offers that clients can “move through” as a customer journey within your business services.  The offers are priced at different price points, in alignment with the work/content provided and the transformation or results delivered.

This allows clients to make repeat purchases, increasing your customer lifetime value (i.e. allowing you to make more revenue per client) because once they’ve purchased one of your services/programs/offers and had a great experience with it, they’re likely to then make another purchase for another one of your services/programs/offers. 

What’s most important here is to make sure your offers don’t canibalize off of each other.  This is a common mistake in offer suite development, and results in potential clients not being able to easily decide which offer is right for them – which ends in them not making a purchase at all.  

Marketing

Most people don’t enjoy marketing.  I personally have a love-and-hate relationship with it myself.  However, if there’s one thing that’s the most important thing when it comes to creating consistent growth in your revenue, it’s marketing.  

So, how can you make marketing fun – or at least more tolerable?  

The first thing is to change the way you look at marketing.  Marketing doesn’t have to be showy at all.  It’s allowing your potential clients to see how you can help them by guiding them to change their perspective on what they’re currently stuck on, sharing a new perspective with them (i.e. what you do and how you do it) and taking them behind the scenes to see how this works, and what results you’ve been able to generate for others.  

Marketing is more about connection.  It’s not necessarily sales, although the two get blended a lot in the online space.  Marketing is about sharing your business and services with your audience, but making it about them – not about you.  

Your goal is to get people to see themselves in your marketing, to help them build a connection with you, see you as an authority and begin to trust you.  

Most of the time, people get stuck on marketing because they don’t know what to share or talk about.  This is where content pillars and filters makes marketing much easier.  By having topics you consistently talk about, and ways in which you talk about them, you can easily create content for 2 weeks, a month, or more in advance.  

So think about what you offer, what the key pillars are, and the different angles in which you can talk about these topics.  Create a table with pillars down the rows and filters (angles) across the columns, and spend an hour or two popping in ideas.  Not only does this simplify marketing for you, but it also helps you maintain a cohesive set of topics that you regularly talk about, making it easy for new potential clients to easily understand what you do, who you do it for, and what your take in your industry is.

Sales

Lastly, we have sales.  There is no business without sales.  If you’re struggling to make sales, it’s time to change what you’re doing on the sales front because your business needs to make money to survive – and ideally from there, to thrive.

Like marketing, many people dislike sales.  But sales doesn’t have to feel “sales-y” or “icky”.  Sales is actually a service to your ideal clients.  By reframing the way you look at sales, from it being a “I’ve got to try to get a client” mindset to “I have something that I can provide that someone else really needs” mindset, you’ll eventually come to realize that not doing any sales activity is actually selfish! Your potential clients need what you offer.  There is something they are struggling with, and you have the solution for it – whether it’s coaching, consulting or DFY services.  

When it comes to sales in the online space, there are two main categories of sales strategies – live launches and evergreen funnels.  I always recommend having both set up.  A live launch allows you to show up fully, take your audience on a deep dive of your current offer/service/program and get them excited about it and ready to buy!  On the other hand, an evergreen funnel allows your sales system to be fully automated, typically detonating from a freebie through to a series of emails that ends in a pitch for one of your offers/services/programs.  Having both these sales strategies in your business allows you to continue to make sales even when you’re not live launching (i.e. through the evergreen funnel) and also allows you to reap the excitement of a large revenue influx (i.e. through the live launches). 

So when it comes to sales, you’ll have a situation where your marketing tees up demand, with a live launch then taking your audience through the full sales experience, or you’ll have a situation where your marketing has CTAs (calls-to-action) to grab your freebie, which then denotates the evergreen funnel.  

Choosing one over the other is a matter of preference, and there are many business owners who skew one way vs doing both, but I implore you to consider having both in your business.

Want to Work on Your Business Foundations?

If you’ve recently launched your business and are looking to have the foundational business elements in place in a strategic way, check out Business LaunchPad.  This program covers all the above topics, in a 3-month timeframe so that you can develop the powerful and strategic foundations for an online business that thrives! 

Can you learn to love sales?

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Ah, sales.  You can’t have a business without it and yet, many business owners despise it.  What type of person are you when it comes to selling and – perhaps even more importantly – how can you learn to love sales?

Sales is a fundamental activity for your business success

First, we have to acknowledge that sales is an incredibly important activity in any business.  Without it, you literally don’t have a business.  As many people have said before me, if you’re not making sales in your business, you’ve got an expensive hobby.  In order to have a business, you need revenue coming into it – and without sales, that just won’t happen.  Sure, you might have some word-of-mouth and referral traffic, but even then, particularly when it comes to services, there is still a good chance you’ll have to get on a call to pitch your services and close the sale.  And, something to be aware of is that referral traffic may dry up eventually, so you always want to be able to generate your own sales so that you’re not dependent on an outside source for it.

So… what do you do if you’re not the amazing salesperson you want to be?  

Let’s look at the three types of salespeople that exist

Type #1: The Believer

This type of salesperson loves to sell because they believe in their product/service and they want to serve as many people as possible

Type #2: The Anti-Salesman

This type of salesperson hates to sell because they’re repulsed by the idea of being salesy

Type #3: The Snow-to-Eskimos Salesperson

This type of salesperson wants to sell their products/services to whoever will listen, no matter whether they’re a good fit or not

What type of salesperson is The Believer?

If you happen to be a Believer, then hats off to you, keep doing what you’re doing.  The reason why the Believer sells so easily is because of their perspective on why they’re selling.  They focus on serving rather than selling.  They understand that when someone purchases their product or service, they receive something that they have been wanting or needing.  If you like to think of things in terms of push and pull, they don’t push their products to their customers, they allow their products to be pulled by their customers.  This is easier said than done, but we’ll get into some key principles in just a little bit. But before that…

What type of salesperson is The Anti-Salesman?

If you relate to this type of salesperson, you definitely feel resistance to selling, and most likely equate selling to being “salesy”.  You don’t see a middle ground, and likely just put your offer out there and tell yourself that if someone wants it, they’ll buy it.  But the issue with this perspective is that very often, we intend to purchase something but we get distracted, or we need to feel better about the purchase, or we have questions that haven’t been answered, or a whole host of other reasons that get in the way.  

What type of salesperson is The Snow-to-Eskimos Salesperson?

You hopefully don’t really relate to this type of salesperson, but it’s likely that you are repulsed by the idea that you could be perceived as this type of salesperson.  If this sounds like you, then you’re The Anti-Salesman above, but let’s explore this type of salesperson, too, and dive into the persona of the salesperson you don’t want to become.  The Snow-to-Eskimos Salesperson is on a mission to sell their product or service to anyone.  This is the pushy salesperson with the morally questionable tactics.  You shouldn’t want to be this type of salesperson.  And the good news is that you don’t have to be!  You can conduct sales activities without becoming a Snow-to-Eskimos Salesperson. 

The question, therefore, is: how can you feel good about selling? 

That is, essentially how you’ll learn to love sales, right?  

  1. Remind yourself that you’re not taking anything away from your customers.  You’re not forcing anyone to buy.  You are simply offering your product or service – which they have decided they want – in exchange for money.  Break it down like this and you’ll soon start seeing this as the fair exchange that it is.  
  2. Have a way to gauge interest and ask those who’re interested to “raise their hand”.  You don’t want to be The Snow-to-Eskimos Salesperson, so make sure that whoever you’re selling to is genuinely interested.  There are so many ways to do this: you can host a free event (on a topic that relates to your product/service) and ask people to sign up, you can invite people to a discovery call (if you’re a service provider), you can sell via your own channels (social media and email) giving those who aren’t interested the opportunity to unfollow or unsubscribe or you can open up a waitlist or pre-sale as part of a campaign.  There are probably plenty of other ideas too, but these are some to get your creative juices started.  
  3. Learn more about peoples’ buying habits.  More often than not, we need to be reminded of something several times before we actually hit the purchase button.  This is true even of things we already know we’re going to buy.  It’s not about convincing someone to purchase.  It’s about providing them with multiple opportunities to make the purchase.  Study your own purchasing behaviors – and those of the people around you.  And then remind yourself of these behaviors when the time comes to sell.  
  4. Understand – deeply –  how your product or service benefits your customer.  If you understand this, you’ll be able to explain clearly, concisely and with conviction, why someone should purchase your product or service.  And this changes the conversation from being a situation in which you feel like you’re trying to sell something to someone to a situation in which you’re able to demonstrate empathy and provide a solution to someone.  It’s a very different energy.
  5. Lastly, build a relationship before selling.  Create marketing content that speaks to your ideal customers.  Connect with them via comments and DMs on social media.  Set up free events that they can attend to become better acquainted with your products and services.  Have a website and social media accounts that provide the information your ideal customers are looking for.  Selling in the 5th or 10th encounter with your target customer is much easier than selling in your 1st or 2nd encounter.  Create a community or a customer journey that your ideal customer goes through before you ask for the sale.

Learn to love sales: The Conclusion

Essentially, everyone can learn to love sales.  I truly believe that.  It’s a skill and a change in mindset, and if you’re not there yet, follow the 5 steps above and you’ll see a shift in your sales.  After all, you have something to share with the world, and the more people you get it to, the bigger the impact you’ll make.  This is about more than just you and the discomfort you currently feel about selling.  It’s about serving and creating an impact in the world.  

Did this article help change your perspective? Share it with others who might need the same!