If Sales Is the Lifeblood, Marketing Is the Oxygen
Trisha Stetzel had me on Houston Business Radio, and somewhere in the middle I said something she immediately threatened to steal, which is the highest compliment a line can get.
If sales is the lifeblood of a business, marketing is the oxygen.
You can survive a short while without oxygen. Not long, and not well, and the damage compounds quietly while you're insisting you're fine.
Two reasons people don't market
Trisha asked what actually stops small business owners, and in my experience it comes down to intimidation or inconsistency.
The intimidation is manufactured. People open an app and see enormous brands and influencers with seamless transitions, vanishing mid-air, reappearing, being funny on cue. They conclude there's a production standard they have to meet before they're allowed to post anything.
There isn't. And the inconsistency is the more expensive problem anyway.
Everything works and nothing works
People come to me wanting the magic bullet. Should I be dancing on TikTok, starting a blog, posting twelve times a day?
All of those work and none of them work. They're traffic sources. Traffic sources aren't a strategy.
Start with a presence. Get a website. I won't do business with anyone who doesn't have one — and I genuinely don't care if it's bad. If you haven't taken the time to put up so much as a page explaining what you do, you aren't really in this yet.
Then pick one or two platforms where your people actually are. Targeting teenagers? Snapchat, Twitch, TikTok. Targeting executives? Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn. You do not need to be everywhere and you cannot maintain it if you try.
Then decide what you can genuinely commit to. Not five posts a day. Twice a week. One piece explaining what you do and what it costs, one short video breaking down a single part of your product.
Twice a week for a year is 104 pieces of content. That's a substantial body of evidence that you know your subject, built at a pace you can actually sustain.
If it's for everyone, it's for no one
The question I ask earliest is who your ideal customer is. If I had a nickel for every time someone told me their product is basically for everyone.
Nobody wants a one-size-fits-all anything. Even a baseball cap — most people would rather have a fitted one. And notice that people don't wear NFL jerseys. They wear a Cowboys jersey or a Packers jersey. They want the thing that says they belong to a particular tribe.
Run a business that's open to everyone and people walk straight past it, because nothing you've said has made anyone stop and think that's mine, I have that problem.
Be the pink store, and the woman decorating her house in every shade of it will find you. Be the rainbow store and you're background noise.
Which is why the first of the nine steps in Launch Ignition is building the avatar. Name, location, car, education, preferences — all of it. It's very hard to build something for a person you can't picture.
Where the 100X number came from
Trisha asked about the mission. A little over a hundred people had been through Launch Ignition, and I decided the next number should be a thousand.
My team's reaction was reasonable: it took us two years to reach a hundred.
A thousand entrepreneurs reaching six figures in a year, and a hundred reaching seven. We call it the 100X impact. The arithmetic comes to over $200 million generated inside a single year, and five years of that is a billion dollars — a small economy, built out of ordinary people who had a vision and needed a process.
I set goals I can't currently reach on purpose. I work best with pressure and a target. If you set the goal, you tend to figure it out.
If you're not ready for any of that yet
Get a technology base and stick with it, so your website, payments, emails and texts live in one place rather than five.
Then work on one thing at a time. No website? Give it the next two months. Two hours every Saturday and Sunday until it's live. Then take the next thing.
People overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a year.
And everything takes longer than you think. That's simply how it works. But if you commit to doing the thing regardless of how long it takes, you do eventually reach the finish line. Most people quit while they're still on schedule.
The client I'd point to
Coach Dr. J is a college professor and social worker who spent a decade trying to turn a genuine passion into a business — helping students handle the non-academic barriers that stop them finishing: being far from home, unfamiliar surroundings, time management, anxiety, money.
She'd tried everything in no particular order. A YouTube channel, a website, a blog. Ten years of effort without a sequence.
Within a year of joining the program she has three offers out, two books, multiple funnels, a new site, coverage in the San Francisco Post and education trade journals, and she's negotiating two six-figure contracts.
Nothing about her changed. She got an order of operations.
Listen to the full episode
Watch on YouTube | Listen on Amazon Music
Houston Business Radio with Trisha Stetzel, Business RadioX Network, December 2024.
One technology base rather than five — site, payments, email, text, all in one place — is exactly what Ignite Funnels is for.
