When you’re self-employed, you’re the one responsible for bringing in the cash.
No one else is there to blame low revenue on, and if you don’t make bank, you don’t pay the bills.
On top of that, the scary part of being self-employed is that you can never 100% guarantee people are going to show up and spend money on you.
There are, however, daily habits you can implement to swing those odds in your favor to make more sales happen more frequently.
So… what are those habits? And how do you get started?
Glad you asked:
1. Every single day, sell to the “masses.”
It doesn’t matter where your “masses” congregate or how many people are in your “masses” list.
Maybe you’ve only got 200 followers on Instagram or 30 people on your email list right now; that’s fine.
Every single day, take the time to write a sales message.
It doesn’t have to be one of those overly-cheesy, slick, sales-y messages that makes everyone cringe.
No, absolutely not.
Write a message, and email, or share a tip that’s useful whether the reader buys or not, and add a call to action at the end to purchase one of your products related to the message or to book a discovery call with you.
2. Have a 1:1 sales conversation.
Selling to the masses is great and can definitely generate significant income, but if you don’t take time to have 1:1 conversations, you’ll let a lot of potential profit fall through the cracks.
Why?
Spending money, even on something a big business sells, is a very personal thing. People work hard for their money, and they need to know you’re a trustworthy person (or company) willing to step in and deliver in exchange for their hard-earned dollars.
By having 1:1 sales conversations with people who are ready to buy or almost ready to buy, you’re basically guaranteeing yourself more sales.
Any time I tell one of my clients to start building 1:1 conversations into their daily habits, their sales go up by around 10% to 20% within the first few months, for about five to 15 minutes of direct message conversation each day.
The best part is, this is SUPER easy to build in. Anytime someone starts following you, sends you a connection request, or signs up to your email list, you can reply with a simple message that says, “Thanks for connecting! Was there anything in particular about my content that stuck out to you?”
Not everyone will respond, but the ones who do will be an incredible source of audience information AND a lot more likely to become paying customers much quicker. (Plus, they’ll remember you as the girl/guy who’s friendly enough to actually DM and isn’t just there for the numbers or the faceless dollars.)
3. Implement or improve one piece of automated selling.
When you’re growing and scaling a business, automation (like automated email sequences) is everything. It lets you scale your time and your sales like no other business strategy.
Plus, if you commit the time to work on one piece of your automation every day for a year, you’ll basically have a cloud-based machine that does all the marketing and selling for you by the end of 365 days.
If you’re starting from zero, your one piece of automated selling you work on each day could be to write one email of an email funnel every day until you have a full funnel written.
If you’ve already got a basic email funnel in place, it could be adding an upsell to another product after purchase, playing with subject lines to get more open rates, or starting an ad campaign to drive more people into the funnel, to begin with. Pick one tangible item to work on each day, and you’ll be amazed at how your sales start improving over the next few months.
4. Follow up with one old client or customer.
This strategy works best if you’ve been in business for a while or if you used to work in a customer-centric role and have a lot of people you can reach out to let them know you’re running your own business now.
The idea isn’t to reach out with a cold sales pitch to someone you haven’t talked to in a year or more.
Instead, the idea is to reconnect and ask them how things are going with the work you did for them six months ago, a year ago, or even three years ago.
Ask them how their business is doing, and see if there are any discussions there to be had about how you could step in and help them further.
If not, no worries. You’ve just put yourself back on their radar for when they might need you again in the future.
But if there is an opportunity there, you’ve just found yourself an easy-to-sell prospect (because they already know and trust you) for a project that could be worth a few thousand dollars or more.
5. Share a piece of old content with a call to action.
Got a cool blog post you published two years ago that a lot of new followers haven’t seen?
What about an amazing podcast interview you did six months ago that you haven’t shared since?
Or maybe a really insightful IGTV video that didn’t get its fair share of views that you want to re-share?
SHARE IT!
It’s 100% okay to share old content, and even more okay if that old content has a call to action at the end of it that prompts people to a sale.
Sharing this content means you get more runway out of work done in the past, AND you get to put your intelligent content in front of more people with a relevant sales message. (And you don’t even have to write it from scratch.)
Share this content to one or all of your social profiles & let people who aren’t *quite* ready to buy from you absorb it so they can become more familiar with you and the idea of purchasing one of your services or products.
Start with one daily sales habit, then build
These five habits are all fairly simple, but I get that bombarding yourself with five new things on your to-do list every day can feel like a lot.
So instead of going all-out at the beginning, set yourself up for success by picking one habit and doing it for two weeks straight. Then build in another habit for another two weeks.
Keep going until you’ve got all five habits built-in, and you’ll be amazed at how much more you’re selling (and how much more money you’re making) in just a few months’ time.
