Business in a slump? Here is how to haul it out!

Everyone hits slumps in their business at some time or another, and I would be shocked if you didn't. It's not only normal; it's to be expected. You can avoid having too many slumps in the future with good marketing and solid consistency, but what do you do if you're in the slump right now? 

If you're stuck in the mud and you can't see a rope to haul yourself out, you're not going to be thinking too much about how to avoid the slump in the future, no no no.. you just want out! 

So, let's pull you out of that slump … and… put measures in place to avoid falling back into the quagmire of business quicksand. 

In today's episode, you're going to get insight into how you got into the slump in the first place, and the reason is not at all what you probably think it is. 

Then, we will talk about quick ways to haul your cookies out of the depths of business stagnation. Finally, we wrap up with a five-question checklist (you can see it below in case you don't have time to listen to today's episode .. but you definitely should!). 

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Transcript

Melanie: 0:25

Welcome back profit lovers, I have just realized I never introduce myself. So if you're new around here, I'm Melanie Miller, and you're listening to the profit lovers podcast. Everyone hits, slumps in their business at some time or another. I'd be really shocked if you haven't hit one or two along the way. I know I certainly have. It's not only normal, it's to be expected. You can avoid having too many slumps in the future with good marketing and some solid consistency. But what do you do if you're in the slump right now, if you're stuck in the mud, and you can't see a rope to hold yourself out? Well, you're not going to be thinking too much about how to avoid the slump in the future right now. No, you just want out of the slump you're currently in. So if you are in a slump, let's pull you out of it. And by that, I mean put measures in place to avoid falling back into the absolute quagmire of business quicksand. In today's episode, I'm going to give you an idea of how you got into the slump in the first place. The reason is not usually what people think it is. And then we will talk about the quickest ways to hold your cookies out of the depths of business stagnation. So actually, even if you're not in a slump right now, but you know that they come along, you can prepare yourself for the future. And we are going to wrap it up with a five question checklist. So let's get into today's episode. There are a few red flags to look for to figure out why you've hit a roadblock in your business. Why it feels like you're dragging a bag of rocks through wet sand. The usual go to reasons are my customers or clients just aren't spending money right now. My prices are too high and everyone's going to someone cheaper, or nobody wants to invest in X offer or product anymore. They will always be periods of flux in most target markets where people become more hesitant to spending money. It's times like when elections are being held, we see a momentary drop in some areas of spending, when there is talk of a recession around cost of living is rising. Or when interest rates rise. Those periods do tend to be shorter. And rarely does it knock out an entire industry right now putting the pandemic aside for a moment because that was completely unprecedented. And some businesses were able to flourish. Like anyone who sold let's say desks, for instance, my gosh, desks and chairs were sold out everywhere, office desks and chairs. But it was awful for a lot of businesses, right? So we want to put the pandemic aside in this instance. And think about this as just generally in business. Putting blame of why your business isn't working on to your customers or clients is unfair and unwarranted in most situations and circumstances. It also takes you out of a position of control, and hands off your business success or failure, which also includes your profitability and your future ability to create financial security. Like it has nothing to do with you. Like you have no impact on the outcome, like it's somebody else's fault or problem. When you assume your customers or clients aren't spending money, right now, for example, if customers or clients you're interacting with aren't spending money right now, they're likely not spending as much or as often, but they're still spending. Perhaps in the past, you've had, for instance, a base of say 100 customers or clients and they were all spending on average about $50 a month with you. The most likely scenario is now less people are spending less money with you. So now maybe you have 70 people on average, spending $35 On average a month with you. That doesn't mean people aren't spending it means that they're not spending as much maybe as often. And you need to find more people and work on ways to increase that average dollar spend. When you do things like assume that your prices are too high and that everybody is going to somebody cheaper, everybody's choosing your competitor. You're blanket calling every single customer or client that you have price sensitive, and from a psychology of buying perspective that is simply not true. What is happening is you now likely need to be even more persuasive as to why your offers or your products are the best value best investment provide the best outcome. I remember this very clearly from the GFC, the global financial crisis. Back in 2008. There were so many businesses who had done very, very, very little in the past to win business. They'd had it really easy. They were bitching and complaining that the GFC was the reason that they were losing out on sales, sales were dropping, profit was dropping, and they were heading towards bankruptcy. The reality was they had cruised along in business during the bare minimum, for so long, that when people became more conscious with their spending habits, they were looking for businesses who more closely met their needs, they were thinking a lot more about where they put their money. Then buyers needed more information, more nurturing, clearer and more consistent messaging, before they made their buying decisions. And those businesses that had cruised along, put the blame straight back on the customer or client, nobody's got any money to spend with me anymore. Instead of taking affirmative action and correcting things in their businesses, that made them a lower choice down amongst all of the competitors. Now, if you're assuming nobody wants to invest in your offer or product anymore, you're kind of dead heading your own business to have right. If that is what you really think, then it's time for you to change up businesses. Here's the thing, it's likely not the case anyway, unless you're blockbuster, trying to rent DVDs in the time of Netflix or your Kodak ignoring the progress of digital media. But if you're in a business with a run of the mill offer, like website building, photography, mindset, coaching, nutrition, coaching, hairdressing, or just about anything else, the reason that you're in a slump isn't because people don't want to invest. They just don't want to invest with you. They're simply just not that into you anymore. And it's up to you to rectify that situation. So how do you pull yourself out of a slump? How do you claw back some momentum? Well, let me give you three great tips to get you started. One, you work with reality, not assumptions. So before you diagnose your business with any ailment, you need cold, hard facts. What data can you access to allow you to identify where the problem begins? Has the number of hands who have I don't know let's go with have had the number of fresh eyeballs on your offers dropped, or less people seeing your offers? You can find that out by checking your web traffic Google Search position, local walk by traffic, if you're a bricks and mortar store, or the number of times you'll phone rings, pay attention to that initial eyeballs or inquiries to your business. If you've not had a drop in fresh eyeballs of your goodies or fresh inquiries, then move on to question number two. What inquiry and sales conversion? Are you getting? Of all of the new eyeballs coming your way? How many of them are inquiring and then converting to a buyer? versus how many were inquiring and converting to a buyer before you hit the slump? As the number of people choosing to spend dropped? And if so, is there a reason that you can identify for that drop? Now I want to give you a little PS here, if you're about to claim that a price increase is why you're not converting anymore, then we need a much deeper chat. It's not your price. I'm telling you, it's not your price. And then number three, how much are people spending on average? If the issue is not fresh eyeballs or inquiries, and it's not your ability to convert to a sale? If they're not the issues? Then you move on to how much are people spending with you per transaction? On average? Has that amount dropped significantly? Or are they buying from you less regularly? If so then that is a matter of buyers needing to watch their pennies a little more. Or it might be that you're simply not putting in the efforts that are required to upsell or cross sell or to get them to purchase more regularly. Maybe you already have in place a follow up sale sequence that you thought was working but it stopped working. Go back and check it. Maybe your website's not converting the way it should because of glitches. Go back and check those things. Get curious and don't sit back and put the blame on customers or clients or the UK on me or anything else get curious and pinpoint why you're in this slump, I can almost guarantee that 90% of your problems lie within the data that I've just mentioned, there are very few total total mysteries in business. It is like one big science experiment with cause and effect is quite predictable. The best part is that these causes and effect numbers are trackable, and they're measurable. And you should already have the data already. Business is no place for making estimates or assumptions, when you can get data and accurate data. And it's so easily accessible. I bet there are some of you listening right now that are thinking, Well, I didn't have that data. Yet you downloaded the profit lovers plan and track you might have even invested in the upgraded version, the plan and track ultimate, you just didn't commit to using it. There will be plenty of you saying to yourself, but Melanie, I don't have time to find all the information and record all of that information because I am too busy. Well, I don't know what to tell you. But I heard you had prioritized data collection, you'd be able to diagnose your issue in minutes. You know, I love to give you some real life examples. So I'm gonna give you two example one, a business owner who had increased their prices, because the business was not profitable without the significant price increase, assumed a lack of new bookings was because of said price increase. And so they freaked out and they wanted to drop the prices. Now one, that would have been a pointless exercise because dropping the prices might have bought in new business great. But they were still never going to be able to make money. They weren't profitable at those lower prices. So there's no point in being a business. Being in business and selling things to customers or clients does not automatically equate to to profit my friends to the price was never the issue. Because the book now buttons on their website were no longer functioning. So people were clicking off and buying somewhere else. If they did want to book, they had to jump through a heap of hoops. Now how did we figure this out? Good old Google Analytics showed us that traffic to the site had not dropped. It was coming from all of the same high quality sources as always, and it was coming from within a 400 kilometer radius of her area, which is exactly what we wanted. But the booking Details page was getting no traffic. And people were exiting her site on that initial bookings page, which was very odd behavior for her business. We knew this, because we track to these things, a quick look at the site. And what do we see the Buy Now button or book now button, I should say, had stopped functioning correctly. Now did fixing the buttons fix the issue? Not entirely. Because she had lost a lot of momentum. Because a lot less people were booking there was also a lot less opportunities to rebook people when they visited her business. And she was great at doing that, right, they'd come that first time. And then they'd want to keep coming again and again and again over the years. And so she'd lost some of that momentum. It took time to build that back up. But the fact that we could go in and look at that Google Analytics data identify that something significant had changed. And that now if somebody wanted to book in, they had to jump through a heap of hoops and dig around a bit to be able to get to the bookings area, had just sent people elsewhere because it was just too hard, right? So a few people were managing to filter through mainly it was old clients coming back and rebooking, but a whole lot of fresh new clients weren't coming in, it really stalled her business for a period of time. Let me give you another example. A business who assumed that because of the competitors in the market, their product was no longer selling as well, to many competitors to me pop up new people around. And now we can't be competitive because their prices are cheaper than ours. And so once again, they wanted to drop their prices so that they could be more competitive. So once again, on the data hunt, we looked at new inquiries, follow up sub inquiries, the first order average value and the reorder, average value and how often people were reordering. What had happened an FYI, her online cart software produced all of these reports. So we didn't even really have to hunt for them. We had to push a few buttons and contact support to get them to tell us how to extract a bit of information. Right. But what had happened was the business had previously been very proactive in following up new inquiries, and walking them through the process of putting together their first orders. And then there was a follow up reminder that would happen in six weeks to check how the first order went, and to do a top up order. But the team got busy, they were more focused on other things, sales were just coming in and resales were coming in. So they just stopped doing all of the stuff that had gotten them where they were, they dropped the ball on their new customer processes. And the conversion values are dropped, and the average order values are dropped, and the repeat orders had dropped off. And so all of those things mixed together equaled a significant drop in revenue, that had nothing to do with their competitors and everything to do with them forgetting to follow up not following their own processes, not nurturing their new customers and clients, right. So a couple of pretty solid examples there to get you thinking. So let's keep talking about how you pull your business out of a slump. Once you've looked at the data, and you've compared to previous peak times when your business was running well, and identified, if there are any quick fixes, the next thing that you need to do, if there are no quick fixes, and you need to keep moving forward, go to your list of contacts, or your list of subscribers and engage them personally. Yes. Personally, I know that the experts are all about leveraging the pants off business, doing less automated scaling, and all of that good stuff. But if you're in a slump, then personally connect with actual humans, living breathing people. If you've got a list of subscribers, figure out who on that list is the most engaged, you can do this once again by running some pretty quick reports. And if you don't know how to run the report, to see who the most engaged of your subscribers are, then contact support for your platform and ask them to help you. Once you have that list, start reaching out to them personally, if you don't have a list, or once you've hit up your list, move on to customers or clients who've purchased in the past. And reach out to them one by one and keep doing it. Until you see an increase in inquiries and sales. Keep connected with people. Oh, I do have a great example of this that I'll tell you in a moment. Once you exhaust that option, then start reaching out to people that you don't know who could help you people who have the type of customer or client that you're looking for people that could put you in contact with the type of customer or client that you're looking for. Yes, it's uncomfortable. And yes, you likely won't want to do it. But I can't tell you how many businesses that I've worked with that were on the edge of real disaster, they were in a real slump. And their self confidence was taking a massive hit. But we were able to write the ship and build that confidence and get momentum happening really quickly. By doing these things. Once you're out of the slump, you need to take a serious look at your data collection to make sure that it's up for scrap up to scratch your list building to ensure you always have new people to engage with, and your visibility and marketing efforts to make sure that you've always got fresh eyes on your goodies. People get out of the slump, and then they do nothing different, right. And then they just end up back there time and time again. And that's how you end up in that real feast famine cycle that a lot of businesses experience, it's because during that famine, they'll do a whole lot of things to get themselves out of it, business starts to come in. And instead of rectifying the issues that got them into the famine, they are in phased mode. And so they're just not really thinking about it. It's frustrating for me as a business coach. And it's actually the reason that I've disengaged with clients before because it you know, it's all this work to get somebody out of a slump. And then they either won't put the effort into rectifying how they got in the slump in the first place. Or they do what clients do follow all of the good systems and processes and goals that we put in place. And then as soon as they get busy, they just stop doing all of that stuff. And then they'll call me and say hey, I'm back here again. And it's frustrating. All right, a quick story. Quick sidenote, I have a client that I work with. We started with a business that was you know, around 60 or 70. I think it was in turnover. It was years ago now so I can't quite remember. We are aiming for a million dollar year this year. And probably just in excess of a million actually and she is one of the clients that I work with. There's a few that I enjoy syst on having coffee dates regularly, every single month. And so for this client we've had over the past couple of years, some real cashflow, holes, some real struggles that we've had to get through. And whenever that cashflow Panic was happening, her immediate response would be to sort of hold a sale, drop prices, that sort of thing. Instead, we started to go to her list, go to past customers and clients and ask them if they had any referrals or connections, she should be talking to reengaging past customers or clients to allow her to get back some momentum. But as soon as she got back that momentum, we went hard at rectifying other things that are going on in her business. And from that, we also decided we were going to put on top her a layer on top, that she would constantly be connecting with new people. Does she love it? Not really, does she do it consistently every single month and has done for years? Yes. And the opportunities and connections and flow of business that has come her way has been epic, absolutely epic. I've got another client, we do exactly the same thing with her. I am very focused on making sure that she's getting out and she's connecting with people all the time, she is naturally a great communicator and someone who really enjoys connecting with other people. So we focus a lot on utilizing that. And she does these irregular, digital online coffee dates, so that and she does some in person so that she's always talking to new people from that she has made significant commercial connections that have made her a very well respected audible author. She is working with some incredible large companies. And once again, she has another client that's well on her way into excess of a million dollars. So sometimes these things are quite simple. And we overcomplicate them, it can be as simple as connecting with people, when you're in that slump, having conversations with existing customers and clients asking for referrals, asking if they can introduce you to somebody else going back to your list, re engaging people going back to the list of people who may be made an inquiry with you and never actually purchased. All of this can have significant impact on getting you out of a slump. As soon as you're out of the slump, you can work on putting things in place where you're not going to end up there. Yes, sales drop off, yes, things get a bit sloppy from time to time, that our aim is for you to be in a slump that instead of you know, usually say earning 10 or $15,000 a month and getting into a slump where that reduces right down to three or four, we want you to be in a, you know, 5060 $70,000 slump that maybe slides back to 40,000. Right, we want you to slide back to a slump where they're still fat and margin within your revenue so that you can get yourself out of it. And that's where I think a lot of people get quite stuck, is they fall back so far that they don't have any money in their business to help them get back out of that slump. Right. So I'm gonna give you a wrap up checklist, as I always try to do so that you take value away with you. And so this podcast is always actionable for you, I want you to ask yourself, these five questions, are you keeping your marketing fresh, old ways of marketing can quickly become stale and ineffective. And so you need to keep your marketing fresh, and you need to keep eyes on results to make sure that you're always bringing in new eyeballs and those eyeballs are converting? Are you growing your list of either connections or subscribers. If you're not growing your list of connections, subscribers, potential buyers, you will very quickly exhaust the list that you have. And that will impact your sales. And I see this a lot where people manage to get their list to that first sort of 1500 2000. And then they don't grow beyond that. And they exhaust their list particularly in the online course coach world. Are you so involved in the day to day running of your business that you're not focusing on being visible to fresh new eyeballs all the time? That was question number three. Question number four is Have you added in a heap of offers or products during these slumps in order to convert new customers or clients or to resell to people? And now nobody really knows what you offer and your potential customers or clients are just leaving you confused because now you've kind of created a bit of a mess of offers. And now For five are you keeping on top of your marketing metrics, and your customer conversion metrics, your average sale metrics so that you know where to look when sales stagnate, you can quickly identify whether it is not enough eyeballs, conversions have dropped, average sale offers dropped, people aren't coming back whatever it might be. Now, if you want to put in all of the framework to make sure that you can avoid stagnation, and you can avoid being in a slump as much as humanly possible. If you want to beat that funk have cashflow peaks and troughs, and feasts and famines, then please make sure that you are on the waitlist for members club. We address your visibility, we customize your metrics to match your business and your goals. We create custom customer journey maps for your specific business so that you can easily identify why your slump is happening. We clean up your brand messaging and your communication strategies and so much more to build out a really robust framework for your business so that you can focus on the things that matter and you can scale your business and you can hit that 100k Plus in profit and you can replicate it year in year out. Head on over to the profit lovers to check out member's club or shoot me an email. Melanie M at the profit lovers.com. I will respond. If you have clicked through to this podcast from the email, hit reply on the email, I'll respond. I am thinking I was going to run member's club again in September. I have a different project that I'm also kind of working on. So what I think I'll do is kind of put the call out see who's interested and if we get enough numbers. We will do an intensive member's club that's very focused on 2023 planning. That's it for me today. Happy profit loving