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What you’ll learn in this episode:
In this week’s episode we’re diving into a crucial topic: how to break free from sales plateaus. As a business owner, you’ve likely encountered these plateaus, especially after being in business for a while. It can be frustrating, but there’s no need to panic. The key is to avoid making rash decisions, such as completely revamping your offers or launching a flurry of new products. Instead, I’ll share strategies based on my experience working with clients and growing my own business.
Sales plateaus are a natural part of business due to market changes and shifting consumer behavior. To succeed and thrive, you must navigate these changes and elevate your sales. Often, business owners respond by throwing everything they have at their business, believing that more is better. We’re conditioned to think that doing more will lead to more money and sales. However, I’m here to tell you that it’s not the quickest or most efficient path to growth. It can actually slow down your progress.
So, what should you do to break free from a sales plateau? Take a listen to today’s episode to find out.
In this episode, you will learn:
- Don’t Panic: Sales plateaus are common, especially for established businesses. Stay calm and focused.
- Avoid Overhauling Your Offers: the temptation to completely redesign your offers when you hit a plateau. Your existing offers have value, and you need to understand why they’re working.
- Don’t Add More Offers: instead of launching numerous new products, be intentional and focus on what’s already working in your business.
- Lean into Your Data: Analyze your data to identify what’s working, what’s not, and where the gaps are in your sales funnel and customer journey.
- Let Data Inform Decisions: Use your data to make informed decisions about where to focus your efforts. Prioritize actions that will have the biggest impact on sales.
- Harness the Power of Targeting Existing Customers: When introducing new or improved offers, prioritize existing customers and those who already trust your brand. This approach is faster and more effective than targeting cold traffic.
Mentioned in this episode:
Canyon Ranch Fall 2023 Retreat
Work/Connect with me:
Canyon Ranch Fall 2023 Retreat
Jessica Miller (00:00)
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s episode of the It’s Your Offer podcast. I’m Jess Miller and I’m so excited to be here with all of you. We have a lot of new listeners on the platform so I want to welcome all of you that are here, that are new, you’re in for a treat with today’s episode and of course to everyone who has been here, tunes in every week, welcome back. I’m so excited to be here with you to talk about how to get your sales off a plateau. So this has been something that’s come up quite a few times recently and I thought, you know, this is a topic to come in here and really share some of the techniques that I use with my clients and some of the things that I’ve used in my own business to help get our sales off of a plateau. If you are a business owner who is, especially if you’ve been in business for a long time, you have had periods of time where your sales are hitting a plateau. This is totally normal. But what often happens is people freak out about it. And especially if we feel like we’re working, you know, twice as hard just to get the same results, it’s really frustrating.
But here’s the thing, you know, the marketplace changes, things change. And so that fluctuation in the behavior of our sales and our sales numbers and things like that is totally normal. However, in order to succeed and thrive in your business, you need to be able to navigate through those changes and you need to be able to get your sales up off of a plateau. What I often see when I work with clients or I speak to other people in business and they’re in this place is they, basically throw everything in the kitchen sink at their business with the hopes of driving more sales. As entrepreneurs, we are absolutely conditioned to think that more is better, that if we want to make more money, we have to do more things. If we want to sell more product, we need to launch more offers. Things like that are just part of the rhetoric that we hear out in the marketplace, out in the arenas where we hang out in as business owners.
But I’m actually here to tell you that is not the fastest way to grow. I am not going to say that you will not make money doing that and you will not generate sales doing that, but I will say that it is not the easiest way to grow. It is not the fastest way to grow. And frankly, doing that, actually, if you’re just looking holistically at your growth, it actually slows it down. So today I want to talk about some of the things that I talk to my clients about and work with my clients on.
Jessica Miller (02:25)
When it comes to getting yourself off of a plateau and generating growth. And you can take all the things that we’re going to talk to today, and I promise you, you’re probably going to hear some of them and think, yep, I’m doing that, which is totally normal. You are not alone, and there’s no judgment here because I was that person, and sometimes I find myself being that person as well, but you’re going to be able to take these things and actually implement them in your business immediately and generate some sales. And if you’re stuck and you’re on that plateau,
And especially if you’re an established business owner and you’ve been doing this and you’re in those growth phases and now it just feels so much harder or your team is working harder and things are just not creating the results that you want, this is for you. Okay, so we’re going to just jump right into this. So I want to talk first about a few things not to do to get your sales off of the plateau. As I said, out in the marketplace, we hear a lot of rhetoric about, you know, throwing more things out there and you know, getting, you know, launching more, doing all this stuff, essentially more and more and more and more and more. So we are in this kind of head space of, in order to propel yourself forward off of this platform, in order to generate sales, it has to be this like a major thing. You have to like move heaven and earth in order to move your business. One of the things that people do when they’re looking at their business and their sales are becoming stagnant, is they kind of overhaul everything. They sort of blow up their offer.
I want to tell you, don’t do this, okay? The answer to generating more sales or kickstarting that growth in your business is not blowing your offer up. Don’t go in there and start changing everything, creating a new offer, like all these things, blowing it up in the hopes that you’re going to generate more. Because if your offer has been selling, there is valuable information there that can inform what to do next.
There is something that is working about that offer, but something needs to be examined and needs to possibly be tweaked. But blowing up that offer, all it does is essentially makes you do a ton of work, you know, start from scratch, and it allows you basically to move forward with no information. When you launch a new product, especially if you’re doing it in a time where you’re trying to overhaul your sales,
Jessica Miller (04:52)
you essentially are putting this thing out there with no roadmap. You don’t have anything to lean back on as to how it’s going to perform, how your audience is going to receive it. You’re kind of running blind and that slows you down. So the first thing I want you to not do to get your sales off a plateau is to blow up your offer. The second piece that I alluded to before as far as the more, more is what I don’t want you to also do more offers. People really get into this like offer happy place because again it seems very logical that if you want to generate more sales and make more money you should do more offers right you should offer more things but I’m here to tell you that is not the case. You want to be very intentional with your offers. You want to take what you have and really critically look at that. You want to focus and constrain to drive growth and sales.
When you add in more offers, just like when you blow up your offers, what you do is you add a ton of time and energy and effort to the equation and you’re also kind of running into a whole new arena that you have to navigate. And that makes it much harder for you, much harder for your team, and it really slows things down. So although the knee-jerk reaction, when we see our sales stalling and we start to panic, is to kind of go into hyperdrive, I’m actually suggesting that the opposite is actually the better approach. The opposite is actually slowing down, getting intentional, looking at what it is that you’re doing, making some good decisions based on the information that you have, and making sure that it is tied very tightly to the outcomes that you want. How many sales do you want to drive? How many clients do you need? And so you’re really, really ratcheting it back and essentially putting all your energy and all that potency into one place versus fracturing it either doing a bunch of things or launching a bunch of new things, and/or blowing up your offer and having to recreate all these pieces that just becomes a total time sink for you and it also requires you to now you know pull in a ton of other resources. And you know relaunch the thing and all of that which is just exhausting. And it slows your growth.
Jessica Miller (07:16)
So this probably sounds familiar to many of you. Like I said, we’re all doing this. I did this too I still find my like squirrel brain going like when I hit a you know Speed bump in my business or something’s not working the way that I want. I’m like, well, what about this thing? What about this thing, you know again, no judgment totally normal again not saying it doesn’t work but it’s not your best opportunity and that’s not where you want to be going. So what do you want to do to get yourselves off of a plateau? What would actually make it better? And here are some thoughts that I have around that. So the first thing is you want to lean into your data. You want to lean into your business and you want to look critically at all of the pieces that are touching your offers. You want to look at what is working, what has worked.
You want to look at the pieces of that. You want to look at your whole sales funnel and your customer journey to really determine what’s working and what might be broken. What might be slowing this thing down? Where are the holes? Every sales funnel, every customer journey has leaks. It happens. And the reason it happens is because, first of all, in your own business, a lot of times it’s hard to see that. So we have, you know, we’re immersed in our own business and then we have, you know, journey or our funnel in front of us, and we’re just not looking at it from an objective place. So it’s hard to be in your own business. So there’s gaps all the time because of that. Second, because the marketplace shifts and buyer behavior shifts, it causes the environment around your funnel to shift. And when that happens, things break. They can break or leak. And so you end up being in this situation where there’s gaps and you’re – and things don’t move through those funnels or through those, the customers don’t move through that journey as easily. So you want to really go back and look at the data. What is going on there, right? Where is there a leak? What worked? What is working now? And you want to find out essentially, what is the problem now? You want to be a detective, right? This is about diagnostics. Looking at your business, looking at the information, looking at the things surrounding this offer.
Jessica Miller (09:40)
And getting really clear on what are some good places that you might want to tighten this up. What could be causing this sales plateau? So going in and looking at the data and making sure that you have clarity around what is going on. The second piece that is super important for getting your sales off of a plateau, which will allow you to make good decisions and actually save you a ton of time and money and effort.
is to let the data that you have found inform your next move. So when you go in as a super sleuth into your business and you start uncovering these problems or uncovering these gaps, guess what happens? You find a roadmap. You find some really good calculated next steps, essentially like calculated risks in a sense that you’re going to take in order to kickstart your sales again. And the reason it’s so important is because it’s not done in you know, a silo, it’s not done in isolation. You’re making these choices based on things that you’ve seen, based on information in your business that’s allowing you to have a good next step. Yes, you could throw things at the wall. Yes, you could throw, you know, kind of tinker with 7,000, you could rewrite all your emails and do all your social media. But why would you do that if you could, in a better sense, go and actually touch the things that might not be working versus overhauling all the stuff that’s already working.
Jessica Miller (11:07)
And this is like a million dollar tip I’m going to share with you. I share this with my consulting clients all the time. When you go in and look at your business critically, and you start to break it down to the different pieces that are working in that customer journey and that funnel, you start to find a lot of stuff that is actually working. And when you do that, you absolve yourself of the responsibility of having to change it. So to give an example, I have a client who runs a membership. She’s amazing. The membership is awesome. She wants to generate more sales. When we talked and we looked at her business, one of the things that she mentioned was like she’d really love to change the sales page. But when we actually looked at the data, her sales page is performing really well. So when we think about generating more sales in her business, that is not an asset we want to change. We do not want to spend time and effort.
Jessica Miller (12:02)
Rewriting the copy on this page, getting the graphic designer to redo it, because the data suggests it’s working. Whether we think it looks cute or not, or there’s things we would change on it, it doesn’t matter, because from the data, it’s performing. So that means something else in that customer journey is what we have to tweak. And for her, what we’re finding is it’s actually making sure that we’re consistently getting more people into that funnel.
And putting the information out there and making sure they know about the memberships and things like that, that are really important. But there are pieces of that journey we do not want to touch. This is true for all of you too. When you hit a speed bump, you have to go and find out what’s actually going on so that the data can tell you what to do next. Because again, you do not want to spend your time and energy overhauling the stuff that works, not only because it’s a waste of your time and energy, but you risk breaking it.
Like if we change that sales page, we might change it so that it’s working less well. And we don’t want to do that. So you want to make good decision and let the data inform you on those decisions. And you really want to look at it from the perspective of where is your best opportunity for this growth? So where you might find the gaps or the things broken, where are those opportunities for you to move the needle? And the things that are working are not those opportunities. Also you want to ask yourself, you know, what will make the biggest impact? Right, so you might look at, you know, your data and you might see a variety of things that are happening and we often do. Which one of those things requires your attention right now? Like which one of the things if you changed it would make the biggest impact towards your goals in generating those sales versus just changing something? Sometimes depending on your timeline of when you’re doing this, it’s also like, what’s going to be the biggest lift? Because sometimes we don’t have the time or the resources.
To do something like redo our entire website, for an example, but maybe it’s just doing the copy on the front page or the landing page that would make the biggest change, or just making sure you have a killer headline. So part of these things is where’s your best opportunity, what is the biggest opportunity that you have, how do you measure that with the resources and the time that you have that will make sure that you can actually take something that’s going to have a big impact on moving the needle and generating those sales.
Jessica Miller (14:28)
And not trying to overthrow Rome in a day here and do it all because all that does is just creates a lot of chaos, slows you down, and breaks stuff that is not broken. So you want to be really careful and you want to let the data inform that. Also while thinking like what is the easiest lift? What is the thing that I can do in the most streamlined way in an easy way that’s going to get me the results that I want but not require a lot of time and energy and effort – if maybe that’s something that you don’t have.
And then the last thing that I tell my clients, which is super important, after you have gone in and, you know, leaned on your data and let your data inform what you’re going to do next so that you have a plan, once you’ve done this and you’ve tweaked it and you’ve created some of those changes, the most important thing is you have to get your offer in front of people. And I know we’ve talked about this a million times, but I’m going to say it again.
No one can buy your offer if you’re not making offers. And on top of not making offers, you have to make offers to the right people. So if you’re going to redo something and juzge it up as my friend likes to say, and make it better, the next step in that is you have to kind of like launch it out there. You need to get it out there in an intentional way. And what I tell people to do is to really think about who are the people that could buy this thing that you know that is in your ecosystem. And one of the best places to look for people to buy your new or revised offer are people who have already bought from you, the people that are already in your ecosystem. Who are those top 10% of people that buy all your stuff? They’re making up a huge, huge amount of the revenue that is coming into your business. Can you get these offers in front of those people?
If you are in front of those people, if you want to generate cash quickly, you want to go to your hottest people, right? The hottest leads. And those people are often the people that are already in your business, they already love your stuff, and they’re already buying it. And so if they’re one of these people who either haven’t bought this offer, or maybe they need it again, depending on what your offer is, you want to get it in front of them.
Jessica Miller (16:46)
And taking the time and leveraging those relationships and that part of your business in order to generate sales and get your sales off of this plateau is one of the fastest and easiest ways to do it. Yes, you could take this offer and go launch it to a bunch of cold traffic and yep, maybe you will get people to buy, you know, that have not heard from you before, but I promise you it’s not your best opportunity. It is the slowest and it is the biggest lift because if you want to grow, you need to generate that know, like, and trust.
Well, the slowest way to do that is to go to somebody who doesn’t know you at all. So you want to go into your business and find the people that know you, who have bought from you, who could benefit from this. Really think about those people and go and put this offer in front of them. So maybe that means launching a reactivation campaign. Maybe that means that you’re going to go and personally reach out to a bunch of clients that are your top clients, depending on how big your business is and what your model is.
Maybe it means that you’re going to DM a bunch of people very intentionally that you know could benefit from this offer, but whatever it is, you’re getting this new and improved offer in front of people who need it. And that is the fastest way to grow your business. And I want to say, side note, this is the way you generate sales and grow your business all the time. If you’re on a plateau, this is the fastest way to get off of it. But whether or not you are, this is how it goes.
You are constantly iterating. You are constantly putting something out there. You are looking at what happens. You are tweaking it. You are creating the next version. You are moving forward. That’s how it goes. And then once you get the asset actually converting in the way that you want, it is a rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, because it’s now so optimized that you can then just run it and run it and run it. And if you want to change it or put it in a different format or whatever that is, you can.
Because you have so much data and it’s optimized to be performing the way that you want, that you can then change it so easily. This is how it goes. Throwing everything in the kitchen sink into your business all at the same time or trying to overhaul everything so that you can generate sales and growth in your business is the slowest way to grow. The fastest way is to get clear, really intentional, constrained, focused, and reverse engineer.
Jessica Miller (19:09)
What you want for your growth based on where you are and where you want to be. And that is the secret to success. It really is doing less and creating more. It really is focused on creating a high return on your investment, really controlling your time and your energy and really being mindful of what it is that you’re doing and why you’re doing it. And that is how you build momentum and generate results very quickly.
So in summary, just to go back, how do you get your sales off of a plateau? The first two things you do not do, you do not do is you number one, you do not blow up your whole offer. You don’t just like scrap the whole thing because you’re on a plateau and start something new. That you do not want to do. You have a valuable offer, it’s proven. You need to look at it and know why it’s working, what’s going on there.
Two, you do not want to add in 10 more offers and launch 25 more things because you’re trying to get your business off of a plateau. No, you want to generate sales by focusing in and constraining on what is working in your business. And you want to do more of that. Okay, so then what do you do to get yourself off of a plateau? One, you lean on your data. You find out what’s working and what’s worked. You start to become a super sleuth at what is going on in your business so that it can help you do the next thing, which is make good decisions from your data.
Let your data inform your next best steps. From looking at what is happening in your business, you can make a choice at where there might be gaps or where it’s broken, so you can tighten those things up and you will find your best opportunities for growth. You will find the things that are the biggest impact that are going to move that needle toward what you want and that is really where you want to be focusing.
And then once you have jugzed it up as my friends say, and you’ve made your offer stronger and you’ve plugged some of those holes and now you’ve got this new and improved, right? Offer 2.0, you now need to get it out in front of people. Right, now you need to get it out in front of those people who are going to buy it. So look for your top 10% of buyers, look for the people that you know who could really benefit from this. Maybe there’s some people in your ecosystem that haven’t bought in a while that would be warm targets. You want to essentially socialize this thing in front of people that are very likely to buy.
Jessica Miller (21:30)
And the good news is those people are the people who are already in your business. You’ve already spent the time and the money and the energy to pull them into your ecosystem. Those are the people you want to share this with. And that includes people who have bought from you before, especially the people who buy all of your stuff. There are those people, we all have them, those top 10%. And then also looking at just the people who have come into your world.
So they’re on your email list, they’re in your social funnels, they’re around you because they know, like, and trust you. So when you take a super juicy offer and you put it in front of them, they are much, much more likely to buy it. And that’s the people that you want to be targeting. So sales plateauing is totally normal. Every single one of us on this call, especially as established business owners, has been in this place. Here’s the thing, do not panic. Just take a step back. Go back and listen to this podcast and look at every single one of these things I told you. It is the quickest way to create more while doing less. It is the way to increase the return on investment of your time and energy and the money you’ve already spent to get yourself off that plateau and to start making more money right now. Until next week, everyone, see you then.
