A subscriber-only Q and A, answering sales and marketing questions asked in our member-only Slack community. 

This month our questions are from the mysterious anonymous bunch. Here’s what I’m answering:

How Do You Avoid The Drought In Business?

What do I do with my content once it's created?

What's your view on discounts?

What did it feel like when Learning Heroes took off?

What's your advice on getting too many leads? Should I go get investment or stick to bootstrap?

Is it possible to market yourself without a 100K Marketing budget?

What are the best marketing stunts you have done?

How to control self-doubt?

Would you do anything different in your current business based on your previous business experience?

Let’s get into it. 👇

"How Do You Avoid Periods of Drought In Business?"

You've got to prospect for new business, even when you are in a feast season. I always set aside a certain amount of time every day to do outreach, follow up on any content I've posted, and see who's engaged with my content. I call them my 1’s and 2’s. 

So, first, it’s reaching out, and introducing yourself. Finding out what I can potentially do for them. I do that every day, even if I've got loads of sales to close because I know it might not always be like that.

You know the old adage “make hay while the sun shines”, that is what I do. Just do so much prospecting that you never, ever get to a drought.

I explained my full process on how to avoid feast and famine sales cycles here: How to Beat the Feast or Famine Problem in Your Business 

"What do you do with your content once it's created?"

Loads. Strap in. 

So, there are numerous places you can put content. If you think you can just bang your content on YouTube and people are gonna find it and then start buying your products and services, you're gonna be bitterly disappointed. 

That’s why I always recommend a search-first strategy. 

What type of content would your ideal client be searching for when they need to buy something or learn something? 

So when your content is shown to them you look like an authority, you're credible. You give them the information they want, and then they're more likely to use you when they are ready to buy. 

We’re YouTube first, so we store our video there (making sure it’s optimised) but you then need to take that content and use it off YouTube. You need to share it where your ideal client hanging out. 

For most B2B companies in VAMO, I’d say that place will be LinkedIn. But how many of you actually post a video to LinkedIn? 

Make sure you’re sharing your content on the platform, utilising some sort of structure. 

For instance, you've got a LinkedIn company page, so you might now upload your videos to your company page.

When somebody sees any of your other content marketing that you do in other places, they will go on your LinkedIn company page and then they will be shown your best videos, your best content, and the stuff that kind of removes objections and makes it easier for them to purchase your products. 

Don’t worry about view counts. Views won’t count on YouTube when you upload the content natively. 

So, when you see people saying, “Well, that video has only got 200 views on YouTube”, that same video uploaded directly to LinkedIn might have 2,000, 3,000, or 10,000 views. 

You're not trying to go viral. You just want your content in all the right places. 

To help, get other people in your business to share it too. 

So it might be, you've got John, Carol, and Gaz. There are three people that you've identified as your lead gen. They do prospecting, they do sales on LinkedIn, so you will then look at what videos they can release, and they might release the same video every week, but on slightly different days. So you might do Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, same video.

This results in a slow and steady release of content across LinkedIn. 

It’s shared on your business page, your personal page, and distributed evenly through the team. That’s how you maximise how many times it’s seen in someones feed. 

Hopefully, you get some engagement (if you don’t, you’re putting out the wrong stuff). 

When you do, this is what I do. 

If my ideal client likes my content and they're not connected, I'll send the connection request to them. And, If I know what video's coming next week, I will already proactively start to connect with the people I know that video will be relevant a week beforehand.

So, when my content's released, they'll see I'm creating the stuff that talks directly to them about their problems in their business, and I could potentially fix them. Or if they're already connected and they engage my content, I'll reach out to them and talk to them about the topic that they actually engage with. 

Content marketing does NOT replace outbound. It helps it get easier. 

"What's your view on discounts?"

I don't really like them as a general rule. However, I do get it when they can be used strategically.

I will never say “never do it”. But most people use them when they're not confident in their product or they're not confident in their sales ability.

“If you just do this now I'll, I'll take 500 quid off, or I'll take 50 pounds off”.

Don’t do that. 

If the product's good, you can position the value and stick to the full price. 

Yes, discounts can get clients over the line, but you’re instantly not making as much profit, you're probably not gonna do as good a job for those clients that you've got anyway. So you probably would've been better off holding up the full price and getting slightly less work, but making exactly the same amount of money.

My own experience is you don't actually close that much more business by giving them a discount because they probably would've bought from you anyway. 

Those that are only closed because of a discount in my opinion (and I might be wrong) they're usually the biggest pain in the arse. 

They expect the world and they're not even giving you the same amount of money as some of your less hassle clients. 

So, I would say to avoid them where possible, unless it's strategic and you know there's a reason for it, like a long-term value of a client, or it means that you've got lots of capacity to take on a lot of work, and you just want to keep people busy. 

"What did it feel like when Learning Heroes took off?"

It was a good feeling. 

It was difficult to get started because it can feel like a thankless task when nobody even has heard of your business, let alone understands what you're trying to do.

But it feels really good when it starts to pay off (hitting sales targets, getting press coverage, customers recommending you, etc.). 

It does get better. And it got to a tipping point where people started to know me for solving e-learning problems. I was the “saving the world from boring e-learning” guy. 

Over time outbound switched to inbound.  We had people that had never worked with us recommend us. And then it got to a point where I was so sure that we were gonna hit our goal.

And I would say that came after maybe 12 months. So 12 months into that three-year journey, I was a hundred percent sure that we were going to do it.

We had a good product, we marketed well, and we were aggressive with our sales and marketing. 

There was nothing too clever, it was just about doing the hard yards every single day. 

So, how did it feel? It felt fucking brilliant. 

"What's your advice on getting too many leads? Should I go get investment or stick to bootstrap?"

I can only talk from experience and I've never ever got investment because why would you give equity away if you are at a stage where you know that it's gonna work?

What is an investor really bringing, unless it's mega-money and they want very, very little equity? 

But then even when you're thinking about investors, and this is just my opinion, are they just investing for a financial return or are they actually opening doors for you? If I had a product that I could sell in the supermarket, Joe Blogs comes along - a local businessman with no links to supermarkets offers 50 grand to invest in my business. It's a pointless investment to me. 

But if it was one of the Dragons who's actually got multiple products in supermarkets and they can give me access to their little black book, then it might be worth it. But from my own experience, I wouldn't get an investment.

I'd look at maybe strategic partnerships and build that way instead. 

"Is it possible to market yourself without a 100K Marketing budget?"

100% 

You can take more risks, and you can try more things. You need to be smart with it. You don't want to just waste money and do stuff that doesn't get any results, but you've got so much freedom to try different things.

But honestly, the best form of marketing, if you've got no money, is content marketing. The stuff that you say in posts. But you can't just hide behind that. You need to be talking about your product, the problems that you solve, connecting with the people that you sell your product to, hearing what they're talking about, and engaging with their types of content.

You can beat some of these huge companies with huge marketing budgets because they can spend a lot of money and make lots of mistakes. You can take the piss out of their marketing, you can rip off their marketing, you can talk about their marketing, but yet it's very easy to do.

I explained specific examples in more detail in this previous newsletter: Cheap marketing strategies to get your business noticed.

"What are the best marketing stunts you have done?"

So there are two stunts I did at the beginning of Learning Heroes.

#1 - I needed to find out who the most affluent companies in the UK were on the basis that they would have a bigger budget for their L&D department. So I drew up a list of 50 people and sent them a box (so lumpy mail) and when they opened it inside would be an animated explainer video that auto-played on a screen. It cost about 2k. They would explain who we are and what we did. Out of the 50 that went out, 26 signed up to Learning Heroes in the first 12 months. So we got a huge return on that, and the response was, we've never seen anything like that before.

#2 - So for £10 we had the stickers that we've well documented. We spoke about it numerous times in VAMO. "Don't piss away your L&D budget." And we put them in all the urinals and all the toilet cubicles at our events because everybody has to go to the toilet.

It was funny, a bit cheeky, a bit tongue in cheek, and we knew it'd get attention. 

People photographed it and shared it on socials.

I think we made £100k worth of sales in the 30 days that followed that. 

"When do you know when to pivot?"

We've done it lots of times, but what I think we are good at is we don't throw everything out. We try and learn. Our aim is to be 1% better every week.

We're constantly looking at mistakes that we've made. You know, things haven't gone quite as smoothly. The processes aren't right. 

Always look for small improvements. 

But you don't want to flog a dead horse, but equally, you don't want to give up too soon either. 

But I think the problem with a lot of people is they really believe in their product too long, when they're quite clearly isn't a market for it, and they burn through money.

I think you need to be smart enough and objective enough to look at what you are doing, who you are targeting, and the response that you're getting, and take feedback from the people that you're trying to sell to. 

We targeted the wrong people early on at Learning Heroes and we didn't really make any sales for the first five months.

It got to the point where we actually thought, “If we don't get a sale for Christmas, we are gonna pack it all in”, and you know the story. 

We carried on for another two years and we ended up selling that business for 8 million pounds. 

But a key moment for us was switching the target market we were approaching and it allowed us to go from a £40 B2C sale to a 5k B2B sale.  

There’s no rule book sadly. You’ve got to trust your gut. But in a nutshell, you should pivot if you're not getting the results that you want to get. 

"How to control self-doubt?"

We all have self-doubts, right? I think we live in a world now where a lot of people fake it before they make it, and they see other people doing things, so they try and convince themselves they can do it.

If you actually have evidence that you can do things (you've achieved something yourself) that self-doubt is reduced. 

I feel like I'm confident and qualified to talk about marketing content and business because I've actually done those things in real life. 

There’s a quote from Alex Hormozi that said, you should outwork your self-doubt.

I like that. You need to outwork your fears so they’re replaced by actual evidence and time-serve successes. Do that are your self-doubt will disappear. 

A wise man, Ian Darlington once said to me,

I think there's some truth in that.

I like processes. I like following through with the same activities each day because I know roughly what the outcome will be. For example, I know if I speak to X amount of people, that are the right person, I know I will close a number of those people. 

The problem is (and this is where you do get imposter syndrome and doubts) when you don't do that work and therefore have no evidence you can do the things you say you can. 

So yeah, outwork your self-doubt. 

"Would you do anything different in your current business based on your previous business experience?"

Yeah, lots. I'll enjoy the journey a lot better, and I think I'll be better prepared for the results that I'm a hundred per cent confident we're gonna get.

We're getting better systems in place, we're getting paperwork in place, better-managed accounts etc. 

Things like that that we didn't really do in the beginning part of Learning Heroes. My new business is being set up with those things in place from day one because I know how important they are down the line. Sounds obvious, but the basics of business are the same, but the processes that you use to achieve those goals and achieve those things change over time.

So, yes, I will change lots of things, but the actual main fundamentals don't change at all.

That’s all for this week.

Thanks for your questions, I really enjoyed answering them. 

Don’t forget to submit your question in the private community if you’d like to be featured (by name or anonymously). 

I’ll be back next week with more ways to grow your following, sell more, and market better.

A subscriber-only Q and A, answering sales and marketing questions asked in our member-only Slack community. 

Let’s get into it. 👇

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This subscriber-only email is where we answer your questions submitted in our member-only Slack community.

Let’s get into it. 👇

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