035 - Three ideas to help you improve your sales as a creative entrepreneur

Three ideas to help you improve your sales in your creative business

Show Notes

New podcast! Yeah, it's been a while, but you should have checked out the 10k Creator I did with my friend Joe Pulizzi last fall. 10 episodes on the journey to 10k subscribers and $10k/month in revenue. 

Today, I'm kicking off the podcast for 2023, a weekly series with three ideas around one topic.

Today's topic: sales! When I surveyed my community, the area that got the worst average score was sales at 27%. Yikes!

If you want to get all five ideas, you'll want to come join us in the Society of Independent Creators, my online community that also includes all of my courses and events.

Start with the free scorecard at craftsmancreative.scoreapp.com

Creators & Guests

Host

Daren | Craftsman Creative💡

Film Producer helping Creative Entrepreneurs produce outcomes in their businesses at craftsmancreative.co

What is Craftsman Creative?

A show that helps creative entrepreneurs and business owners build and grow their businesses using proven principles and frameworks so they can survive the present and thrive in the future.

[00:00:00] Hey everybody, it's Daren and my goodness, it has been a while, hasn't it? So I have not done a podcast in months on this feed, uh, because over the fall, in case you missed it, I was a co-host. and the co-creator of the Tilts, uh, 10 K Creator podcast. So if you haven't had a chance to listen to that podcast, it's a a 10 episode season where we talk about the journey from going to basically a thousand dollars a month to a $10,000 a month and a thousand.

um, followers or email subscribers all the way up to 10,000. So I was able to, uh, spoiler alert, reach the 10 k a month, um, milestone, but I'm still at about 3000 people on my email list, so that's growing. But, uh, it's an amazing podcast. If I do say so myself, I urge you to go check it out. But today I'm kicking off, uh, a new.

experiment with this podcast. [00:01:00] I wanna show up here every week. I want to give value, and so I'm gonna pull some, some writing, some daily writing that I'm doing inside the Society of Independent Creators and, uh, put 'em in podcast form 'em once a week. And so if you want the benefit of being able to read these when they come out, to be able to engage in comments with other people in the community.

To get your questions answers to go deeper, then I invite you to come check out the Society of Independent Creators. It's my online community for creators like you who are, have the desire to build a creative business that supports your work full-time. So here we go. I got five ideas for you today. Five short principles, ideas, questions.

You know, it can vary week to week, but here we go. This week was sales week as I dove in for this. Recent 10 K challenge. That was at the beginning of the year. Again, if you didn't learn about that, then I apologize, you need to get on my email list and you need to go, um, you know, be aware of all the stuff that's happening [00:02:00] over here in Craftsman Creative World.

But the, the, the. Biggest weakness that I saw as people were taking a scorecard at the beginning of the challenge to kind of, um, highlighting where their business was at is sales. Sales was by far the biggest struggle. I think 20% or the average score for sales was 27%, whereas some of the others were 40, 50% and more.

And so we spent the entire week talking about sales. And I've got five quick ideas for you to help you if you're struggling with sales as. So here's idea number one. Number one is that context matters more than copy. So too many people are focused on improving their copywriting or their content on their sales page, and what matters way more than that is the context that someone visits that page with.

So the best coaching and consulting clients that I had in 2020. Came to me after hearing me on a podcast. So they [00:03:00] would listen to me for 30, 40, 60 minutes and they would listen to my values and the things that mattered to me and my mission and my vision and the work that I was doing, and. because of that, they reached out.

So I was putting a call to action in those conversations to say, Hey, come check me [e-mail] and learn more about me. And because they loved these values and my approach to creative work, by the time they were presented with an offer, the context was, I can't believe I get to work with Darren.

These are literal words that one of my, um, current coaching con or consulting clients said to me just in the last week. . And so we're helping them start a podcast for the exact same reason. They want to have that same context for people coming over. Um, and here's the thing that was amazing. They sent over the first of three, $5,000 payments an hour after the sales pitch email where I said, Hey, here's what I'm thinking.

Here's where [00:04:00] I think it would benefit you the most. What do you think they said? I love it. Let's go . Is that one of the easiest high ticket sales I've ever done in my career? The reason for that is because of the context. It, I didn't have a website landing page for this new service. I didn't have any copy anywhere.

I hadn't even put together a formal sales pitch yet. I really just created this for them and I said, what do you think about this? And they said, yes, let's go. So, To think what the invitation here with number one is to think about how you're framing your business and your offers. Every time you post online, every time you write a newsletter, every time you record a new podcast interview, you never know when a potential CL customer or client is listening.

And the reality is that the selling starts long before that ideal customer ever reaches your sales page. So that context is so much more, um, effective. and leads to more sales than your copy. So idea number [00:05:00] two is to hone your sales pitch, hone your sales pitch. Since you're selling all the time, from the moment you hop on a podcast to your content and social media all the way to your email sequences and your sales pages, it is essential that you hone your pitch.

The best framework that I've found for this is in the book Key Person of Influence by Kevin Harrington and Daniel Priestley, which I highly, highly recommend. So here's the f. That allows you to do more in two minutes than most salespeople do in two hours. Number one, position yourself as clear and credible.

Two, articulate the problem and how you noticed it. Number three, extrapolate the impact of the problem. Four, suggest you have a way of solving it. Five, prove it. Six, ask for what you want. And seven, leave people uplifted. So it's a seven part F. And you can use this structure or framework in social situations, presentations, [00:06:00] written copy, and more.

So as I was going through this, I wrote down a rough draft version of how I could do this for crafts and creative. So it would sound something like this. If I were at the beginning of presentation out at a conference or maybe someone asked me on a podcast interview to introduce myself, I would do it in 30 seconds or so using that framework.

So here, Hi, I'm Darren Smith. I'm a filmmaker and creative entrepreneur and the founder of Craftsman Creative, where we have helped thousands of creators build better businesses. So that's the clear, incredible positioning. I started Craftsman Creative at the beginning of the pandemic because all of my creative and artistic friends were struggling.

When everything shut down, they quickly found themselves unemployed and underpaid. That's the problem. , I was compelled to help because I didn't want them to struggle or worse give up. That's the extrapolation of the problem. So I started with online courses, which was one of the only options during the [00:07:00] shutdowns of 2020.

And then over time I added a blog, a newsletter, and I wrote a book. And then I added coaching in even events. So there's my. Once I crossed a thousand people on my newsletter and the numbers were growing month to month, I doubled down and created a community of creators who all come together to learn, build, and grow their businesses.

Within a year, the business crossed another thousand creators and six figures in revenue. So there's the proof. If you're a creator who wants to learn how to build a business that supports your creative work, [e-mail] and grab my, you know, take the free scorecard. So that's a call to action.

I'm working to build a future full of art and creativity where creatives can support themselves doing the work they love, and I hope that you'll come join us. That's the uplifting ending. So again, that's a rough draft. I wrote like in the moment as I was putting this post in the community this week, but you can see how much more context you have about me, what I do, why I do it, and what's in it for [00:08:00] you if you engage in that.

and take the next step. So the invitation there is to take a few minutes today, experiment with this framework and get some feedback. Start using it in your appearances, your website, and your sales pitches. All right, so that's number two. I got three more for you. And in the future, depending on how long this, cuz I'm going on eight minutes.

I don't think I'm gonna get it in under 10. So how about this? Why don't we, Three instead of five. So that way you have a reason to come and join us in the community to catch the other, the other two. Haha, look at that. Building a business in real time. All right, so here's the third principle for you today.

Sorry for the bait and switch. There are not five, there are only gonna be three today. The third idea is called how many P P D. So I was listening to a podcast where, uh, the host said that their business does between a hundred and 150 sales pitches per [00:09:00] day. Now they're a global company with 50 or more employees, which I assume means they're doing at least 10 million a year, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're doing 20 million plus.

This metric of pitches per day or P P D is key to their business. , they have to be pitching their business every day to get sales. If they don't have pitches, they don't have sales. If they don't have sales, they don't have revenue. If they don't have revenue, they don't have a business. So the question for you is, how many pitches per day are you averaging right now?

Is it zero? . Now imagine if you simply pitched your business twice a day for the next two, for the next week or two, so two times a day for the next seven or 10 days. It could be as simple as sending a DM to someone you know who would benefit from your thing on. Um, benefit from your pitch, benefit from your offer.

You could post it on social media. You can ask someone to hop on a call, or you can even [00:10:00] reach out to one of your tagged email subscribers who have expressed interest in your business or specific products in your business. Now, I really want you to think about this because what would your business look like if you doubled your pitches this week?

Maybe you currently do one a day or one a week. What if you doubled it to two a day or two? , what would it look like at five a day or 10 a day, or even more? What if you devoted an hour a day to pitching and reaching out to people and trying to set up opportunities to pitch people? The reality is that most creators are not thinking this way, and I know this from, you know, now three years of experience doing this work.

it. It's just not on our radar. We don't think about pitching and sales pitches and sales calls as part of our job, but one of the lessons I took away from last year is that the creating is only 20% of your job as a creative [00:11:00] entrepreneur. If you're trying to build a business out of this creative work you do.

Then you need to be thinking like an entrepreneur and entrepreneurs understand the importance of pitching. And so I'm doing this for myself. I'm, I'm working on sending out 20 cold emails a day using a system that I built, which I've talked about and explained in the communities. So you gotta come over there to check that video out.

I. I did an entire walkthrough of that system and how I've set it up to where it's running in the background. I'm cold emailing 20 people a day, and I don't even think about it. It doesn't take an hour of my time. It takes zero minutes of my time because I built it once. I put in a list of 1500 people and that's gonna run for the next, you know, 300 days or whatever.

Is that 30 or 300? I think it's 300 days. 20 people a. Maybe it's less than that. I don't do public math. Here we go, 1500 divided by 20 is 75. Okay? So it's a lot less, 75 days that that's gonna run. So five days a week, [00:12:00] whatever that is, 15 weeks. So that's a whole quarter worth of context that I can reach out to and I can assess every week.

So I can go in and spend 10 or 15 minutes every Monday when I'm doing my breakdown for the week and looking at my numbers and my analytics and. Is it working? Did 20 cold emails a day lead to any interest or any people signing up as a lead or any sales calls? And if not, then I, you better believe I'm not gonna wait 15 weeks to make any changes to that.

I'm gonna start tweaking after a week or two. All right, there's your three ideas for this week about sales. If you want to listen to the other two, um, or if you wanna read the other two, you'll have to come join us in the Society of Independent Creators. Here's how to do that for free. I want you to go to Craftsman creative dot score app.

Dot com. I'll put a link in the show notes and you can take my free scorecard. This is an awesome way to get a really good overview [00:13:00] of where your business is right now. What are the areas you're thriving in, what are the areas you're struggling in? And I guarantee there's gonna be some things that you'll learn about your business by taking this free scorecard.

And at the end of that score, Is an invitation to come join us in the Society of Independent Creators and to test drive this community for free. So I'll give you 30 days to come check it out, see what you think, and, you know, stick around if you want. Um, if you're not gonna stick around, that means I didn't provide enough value for you.

And that's a signal to me that I need to work harder. Um, but the more people that come, the better the community is. And what's amazing is that you get free access to. The recent 10 K challenge that we did at the beginning of January of 2023, and it's all recorded. So we did six, uh, hour and a half to two hour sessions, and every single one is recorded.

It's now put into a, uh, an online course. You can track your progress and you can really make some strides on building and growing your creative businesses here. So again, [00:14:00] crafts and creative dot score app.com. I hope that you will take that free scorecard and I hope to see you in the community. , thanks for listening, and we will see you next week with another three ideas to help you build and grow your creative business.