Sell some Stuff!

We all need reminding about what matters. If you are a micro, small or fledgling business, execution, selling and NOT perfection is what counts.

Stuck Perfecting?

We work with a lot of service businesses, those clients really pay attention to the look and feel of what they produce. This is a good thing. This is also a bad thing when it gets in the way of sales. When we offered a ‘Done for You’ service through our marketing company we offered web design and these clients provide us with clear descriptions, CMYK colour references and specific composition details. Most times this prompted questions from us because we knew that certain elements will cause a conflict when publishing either to the web or in print and there will, as a result, need to be compromises.

“The design should be clean and uncluttered with good imagery, contact details, a ‘call to action’, our logo, social media buttons and information about what we do. Our logo contains rich pink (CMYK 27, 97, 0, 0) and vibrant green (CMYK 74,0,100,0) so the image colours should work alongside the logo.”

It sounds interesting and in theory it should work, but it looks horrible. CMYK colour values are for printing, screens show RGB colours and web design colours are in hexadecimal, so your vibrant green translates into #1ec322 for web display. We all lose time whilst this is explained and the client goes off to find another image which is ‘exactly right’.

Take some advice:

Just let go of learning and honing design and graphic skills whilst you are trying to build a business. Most won’t tell you that you are on the wrong track, we do. We want you to focus on what matters – building a business takes more than playing around with the logo and web site. In some ways these are just tools to begin with. You need to have converting traffic and sales highest on your priority list. Your checklist in business should be:

1. Create product or service needed by a specific target market
2. Market to and raise profile of one thing to target market
3. Sell to target market.

What Matters To Your Buyers?

They are looking for a solution to their problems, their sensitivity to logos, web site colours and minute detail is a lot lower than you, the business owner, will imagine. That’s because if you have done your homework and marketplace preparation properly, you will have come up with a business idea and product or service that solves your potential customers’ problem beautifully.

That means their focus is on how easy it is to buy it- they want the outcome, not how it’s packaged. Keep it simple, with no fuss and build something that sells. Don’t get bogged down with tiny details which delay launch and are an obstacle to selling. Create your sales funnels and automation once you get some traction; your customers will tell you and show you what they need from you and that is what you need to put in your sales funnels, not what you want to sell but what they want to buy.

Some of our customers start off with building a business that appeals to them, doing no research into who will buy their service or product and, when that occurs, all the pretty in the world won’t help them and most quickly realise that change is essential.

Keep focused on where that first sale is coming from and not what font the logo needs to be in and save your energy to bring in the cash. Once you are making the cash, then you can buy the logo and site of your dreams but until then keep it clean, simple and done. Execution is everything and ideas are 10 a penny.

Of course, being in business is not ALL about the money, but when you are starting out and testing everything on your target market it kind of is. Without the money coming in you don’t have a business, you have a dream, and as lovely as they are, they don’t buy you freedom.