Ep. 113: Black Friday | Breaking Free from Feast or Famine: Transform Your Business with Everyday Profit Habits

Join the Tiny Marketing Club's Black Friday Deal

Unlock the secrets to breaking free from the feast or famine cycle and transform your business approach with me, Sarah Norrell-Block. Having once been overwhelmed by the volatility of relying purely on referrals and facing the burnout of an agency model, I found a way to reignite my passion and stabilize my business through strategic sales processes. Discover the power of "everyday profit habits" and learn to seamlessly integrate sales into your daily routine. I share actionable strategies designed for consultants and service providers struggling with inconsistent sales, unclear messaging, and reactive marketing, offering a pathway to consistently attract leads and nurture client relationships.

Revolutionize your service offerings with customizable productized offers, and create a structured offer ecosystem that adapts to client needs without sacrificing consistent pricing. Dive into a comprehensive three-pillar system that includes crafting compelling client messaging, enhancing discoverability through collaborations, and expanding your reach with signature series. And don't miss out on the benefits of joining the Tiny Marketing Club, where personalized coaching and strategic marketing support await. This episode provides all the insights you need to build authority, connect with your dream clients, and scale your marketing efforts effectively. Tune in to transform your business strategy today!

Mentioned in this episode >> Ep 98: Ten Everyday Habits to Skyrocket Your Revenue

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Chapters

• 0:00 Feast or Famine Business Cycle
• 13:25 Custom Productized Offers and Client Messaging
• 18:46 Marketing Club Membership Benefits

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:47

Welcome to Tiny Marketing. This is Sarah Norrell-Block, and this is a podcast that helps B2B service businesses do more with less. Learn lean, actionable, organic marketing strategies you can implement today. No fluff, just powerful growth tactics that work. Ready to scale smarter? Hit that subscribe button and start growing your business with Tiny Marketing. Growing your business with tiny marketing.

Speaker 1: 1:15

Hello, gorgeous, I am coming at you from my garage right now, so it's going to be the weirdest video ever, but welcome to episode 113 of the tiny marketing show. I'm Sarah Noelle Block and we're renovating our house right now, so I'm out of my normal podcast cave and hanging out in our garage. I'm going to blur the background because it's like workout equipment and everything, but just trust me that it's not cute. All right, today I want to talk to you about the feast or famine cycle that so many businesses go through and how you can overcome it with a systematized approach. So shall we get into it? Okay, let's start off with a story. So when I started my business, almost five years ago now, I was running off of good vibes and referrals. I had a great network of people that would send clients my way because they were excited for me. I had just started a business and I'm sure that most of you have experienced the exact same thing, have experienced the exact same thing. You start a business and you get that first, like that initial oomph, from people. They want to support you, they want to see you thrive when you first begin, and almost every business owner I have talked to they do get a ton of referrals at first. I have talked to they do get a ton of referrals at first, or people who are willing to try them out Because maybe they've interacted with you in a corporate role and realized how amazing you are. But as you get deeper into your business, they go and support other smaller businesses and you end up in that messy middle where you're getting tons of leads at one time and then maybe you go months with no leads at all, and that's what my business looked like.

Speaker 1: 3:24

I was crazy busy for years and completely booked out, to the point where I was burned out. I just couldn't sustain it anymore. I had started off like I'm going to freelance on the side, but it grew so fast and I had so many clients that I eventually, pretty much within a few months, moved to an agency model and I was managing a group of contractors that would support my clients. I would lead the strategy, they would do the execution, and it was great for a few years. But it became really exhausting. I ended up becoming a glorified project manager and I was dealing with more people issues than strategy the thing that I was in love with, the thing that I wanted to do. So I decided to restructure so I could be back in boots on the ground and working on the strategy and working one-on-one with clients again, because that's where I really got my groove. That's what I really loved. So about three years into my business, I switched to one-to-one projects and that allowed me to complete projects in intensives and then take a break when I needed to and then book more. While before I was in a retainer structure, I worked with the same clients over and over. That means I could close six sales a year and that would get me to multiple six figures. That's great, but I'm also working constantly. So when I hit that moment of burnout and switched to project-based work, I had a whole other thing that came up Like now I wasn't burning out on client work, I was burning out on sales work. I needed to be selling all the time and it was exhausting, but eventually I found my groove and I found a system that really worked.

Speaker 1: 5:46

I call it my everyday profit habits, and it makes selling just an everyday part of my routine, the same as marketing has become. So anybody who has listened to this show for a long period of time knows that I have my Monday morning marketing routine, where I do all of my marketing on Mondays, no matter what. As you can tell, since I'm recording this podcast episode from my garage, it's Monday, I'm doing it. I also do my social media posts, I do my emails. On that day I set up my events that I'm going to host within the next couple of weeks during that time. So Monday morning marketing, that's when I do my marketing. But then I have my everyday profit habits, which allows me to sell every single day without it feeling like it's taking over my life.

Speaker 1: 6:35

So if you are a fractional, a consultant or a service provider who needs to sell more than you used to, you can't rely solely on referrals anymore. Maybe you got tired of doing retainers and working with the same people over and over again and you want some excitement in there. Or maybe you're tweaking your business model and you have to learn how to sell in a new way for the first time, then these strategies will help you. So this cycle happens with this feast or famine because you have a lack of systems, you don't know what you need to do, you don't have a repeatable process that you can do over and over and over again that consistently brings in leads that turn into clients. You have unclear messaging, turn into clients. You have unclear messaging. Maybe you're amazing at what you do, but it's not clear based on the way you talk about it publicly, the transformation that you provide for your clients. Or maybe you do reactive marketing.

Speaker 1: 7:48

So you get into that famine mode, you are in panic mode and you do reactive marketing and it's like sell, sell, sell, promo post, promo post, promo post and that doesn't really engage your audience. You missed out on that no, like trust factor during the lifetime of your business, that when you're sending out these promo posts, people aren't reacting because you haven't earned their trust yet. You haven't earned them, even recognizing that you exist yet, and I mean this happens to a lot of people. You are not alone if you're listening to this right now and you're like, yeah, that's me, I've done all of that. I understand, because I'm talking to business owners every day that feel exactly the same way.

Speaker 1: 8:44

You are stressed, your shoulders are boop up to your ears because you don't have any control over your cash flow. It's unpredictable. You're either burnt out because you are overworked and you have too many clients at once, or you're freaking out because you don't have a pipeline that's ready to go, ready to deploy. Maybe you're missing out on great opportunities because you haven't implemented any of these everyday profit habits that can really move the needle into consistency, where you can pick and choose the projects that you want to choose and you can work with the clients that you want to work with, because that's absolutely positive. You can do that, I promise you.

Speaker 1: 9:39

So if this sounds like you, you are dealing with a feast or famine mode, you have a lack of systems, your messaging isn't clear, people aren't raising their hand and saying this offer is for me, or you're going into reactive mode and all of your marketing that you do eventually end up doing is pure promo and doesn't earn the trust of your audience Then you're going to want to hear this. So in the tiny marketing club, we have a three pillar. I say we, I, I have a three pillar approach. To break that cycle you don't have to be in feast or famine mode. Okay, so pillar one of the three Pillar one is the offer ecosystem.

Speaker 1: 10:35

Of the three Pillar one is the offer ecosystem. So we look at your offers and we create offers that naturally upgrade clients to the next milestone. So oftentimes we'll go to a service provider or a consultant and we'll be like provider or a consultant and will be like what is it that you do? How can you help me solve this problem? And that's because you don't have an offer ecosystem that is moving people through your offers. So the first offer, the first two offers in this offer ecosystem are free offers. They are in the lead generation category. These are passive lead magnets. So these are things that people can download and enter your list and it should help them solve a problem about three steps before they'd be ready to work with you. And then the second offer that's free is an active lead generator. So these are time sensitive lead generators that promote a flood of people entering your list at one time and people are more likely to consume that content because it's time sensitive. They can only consume it during a certain period of time. The third in the offer ecosystem is your micro offer. So this is an offer that's $97 or less and it helps them at about two steps before they're ready to work with you. One to two steps, and you want them to complete something within a day within a day. So a micro offer could look like a mini course or it could look like a paid workshop, but a micro offer is paid $97 or less.

Speaker 1: 12:20

Next up is the gateway offer, and this is very important. You want every single client to go through your gateway offer because what you produce during that phase of the offer ecosystem sets the foundation for your main offers. It's what makes sure that they all go perfectly, because you're setting up the strategy, you are understanding their goals, you are understanding their challenges and without that information and setting up a strategy and getting there okay ahead of time, you're not going to have a perfectly executed project or retainer. Next up is your main offer. So your main offer should follow your own framework. You might not even realize you have a framework, but you do. You are taking your clients through a journey and that journey is essentially a framework. So you just need to take a little bit of time to map out what it is you're doing with your clients, step by step, and that will make it a lot easier.

Speaker 1: 13:25

From there we can create a downsell and an upsell that allows pretty much anybody, no matter what problems they're going through, to be able to go into a productized version of your offers. So whenever I say productized offer, people put their hands up. They're like nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Not for my clients, they're very custom. But the thing is your productized offers can be super custom. Mine are. So during that gateway offer, that's when you're building the customization and truly understanding what your client needs, and then you can customize each of these productized offers based off of what they need. So it is very custom. But you make sure that it falls within one of those categories, so you're pricing it the same. It ends up being kind of a wash. If they need a little bit more than the main offer, then they go to the upgrade version. If they need a little bit less, then they move to the downsell version. A little bit less, then they move to the downsell version. But it should pretty much even out hours wise for you and profitability wise for you. But that's something that we will work on within the Tiny Marketing Club. We'll help you figure out exactly how to productize your offer, so it's easy to customize while still being able to say okay, you fall into this category, this is what you'll get, this is how much it costs, and you can forecast a lot easier. So that's the offer ecosystem.

Speaker 1: 15:02

Next up is the dream client messaging pillar. Now. Your dream client messaging allows you to speak directly to your dream clients and know where they're spending their time, so you don't waste time on channels that don't matter and you're speaking to them about the challenges and the goals that they have. What is it that they really want? Make sure that it's weaved throughout your messaging on your website, on social, on emails, on all of the things. So that's pillar two. Pillar three is the discoverability factor. So you want to build visibility and earn that know like trust factor with your dream clients, and you don't have to be everywhere to do that.

Speaker 1: 15:47

I use two tracks for that. So track one is a hybrid actively generator. We are collaborating with someone who shares the same audience as us, and we're doing it in a way that it's gated, so someone needs to submit their email in order to access it. Could look like a roundtable, a panel, a webinar, something like that, but it's always in a collaboration, so we're borrowing someone else's audience and we're growing so much faster than if we were just doing it on our own. That's track one. That's for the newbies, people who are just starting their content marketing journey.

Speaker 1: 16:23

Track two is a signature series, something like my podcast that you're listening to right now. But a signature series is such a great way to be able to have a stage that you're offering other people. So it's a biz dev opportunity, it's an authority building opportunity and it is a great core content that allows you to repurpose it into so many different ways. You can create all kinds of content babies with a signature series. You can create all kinds of content babies with a signature series. So that is the three-pillar system that gets you out of the feast or famine cycle. I like to layer that with my everyday profit habits and we can get into that another time.

Speaker 1: 17:10

There is a podcast episode on that. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I just want to remind you that we are in the trenches of the Black Friday deal, so you can join the Tiny Marketing Club for three months as a trial. It is $2,500 as opposed to the annual price. And if at the end of those three months you don't want to continue with the tiny marketing club, where you get courses, you get one-to-one time with me, you get coaching, you can get DM access to me, you get feedback, you get a content strategy that's done for you all sorts of goodies. If at the end of those three months you're like not for me, that's totally fine and you do not need to continue.

Speaker 1: 17:58

So if you are interested in grabbing that Black Friday deal, which is only good until December 14th, go to the show notes page because it is right there. You could either sign up for a sales call if you have questions, or you can go straight to it and get early access to our one-on-one strategic spark where I will build out your lean marketing engine blueprint for you, and you can also get early access to some of the courses. Then the rest of the time, like the full tiny marketing club experience, is from January to March for this Black Friday deal. But you get that one-on-one strategy early. You get access to some of those classes early, so it's a good time. The earlier you get in, the longer you have access to everything.

Speaker 1: 18:46

All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode. Remember, head down to the show notes page I love you, I love you. I love you. Sorry for this ugly video this week. Next week I'll have my office back, my podcast cave. All right, goodbye. You love all things. Tiny marketing Head down to the show notes page and sign up for the wait list to join the tiny marketing club, where you get to work one-on-one with me with trainings, feedback and pop-up coaching that will help you scale your marketing as a B2B service business. So I'll see you over in the club.