3 questions to ask yourself when nothing seems to work in your efforts to get new customers.

Not everything works.?

Not every tip leads to sales.

Not every process wins new business.

Not every business succeeds.

Not everything works.

Well, that's a lovely way to begin a Saturday morning.?

Yet it's the reality for a lot of people who have been slogging away at workshops, webinars, running launches, running ads, posting on social media and obeying every command that their favourite gurus give them.

It's discouraging when it happens. It breaks your heart. And it makes you want to give up.?

If that's you, here's what you do next.

Let's go!

The 15-minute sanity check

There's two times a year when small business owners tend to weight everything up.

End of financial year, when they get to see if they actually made any money. And end of calendar year when they might get a little time off to do some soul searching.?

These “sanity check” times are important for us to take a step back from all the madness of our everyday activities and work out if we're actually doing the right thing.

And for some of us, what we're doing isn't working.

I had one of these in March 2022.

I had a bit of?KonMari ?moment. I looked at everything I did in my business activities by categories. I then asked myself if it was working and if I even wanted to do it anymore. If the answer was no, I dumped it.

The trouble was that I stopped doing two of the things that made me the most money. Which wrecked my balance sheet from March through to at least October.

By November, things improved. Now they are much better.

But boy, it hurt!

I DON'T suggest you do what I did - at least not as brutally as I did it.

But you can give yourself a sanity check of sorts, by asking yourself three questions about what you've been doing to get your business moving - and whether those things are working.

And it should really only take about 15 minutes.

Q1: Is all this stuff I am doing actually working?

That old definition of insanity quote about doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result applies here.

I see it a lot in side-hustles and home businesses.

People who spend countless hours on coaching calls, watching YouTube videos, following gurus and attending workshop after workshop.

They're not dumb people. They are just wanting to learn how to do things the right way so that they'll be able to attract customers to their fledgling business.?

Yet, few of them are asking themselves if any of this is really working.

So is it working?

To answer this, you need to move away from popular metrics that a lot of social media marketing people use to indicate if you're doing well. Then move on to the two metrics that matter most.

Likes, Followers, Shares, Comments and Engagement don't pay your bills.

Customers and Profit do.

Social media people don't tend to know how to turn social media followings into customers and profit because they are social media people.?

So the two metrics that will tell you if what you're doing on social media and in your marketing are often ignored in favour of much sexier numbers like, “I gained 120 new followers last month” or “That post got 1000 likes.”

If you are not gaining customers and not generating profit, you had a problem. Which brings me to the second question.

Q2: Have I allowed enough time for all this stuff to work?

In a world that wants instant results, it's hard to sell the idea that things take time when it comes to building a business and running marketing activities to help build that business.

I have been putting content on YouTube since?March 8, 2017 . But it wasn't until June 2022 that I got my first client from it.

I have since gained another 20+ pieces of client work from my videos on YouTube as far as I can tell. And I expect that there will be many more to come.

But it took time. Over 5 years from that first video that I loaded into YouTube to gaining my first customer.

That's a long-term marketing investment. Though it really wasn't that huge an investment because I was repurposing recordings of my webinars with?Business Station . I'd just cut off the waffle at the start and the waffle at the end and send it up to YouTube.

There wasn't much effort involved.

But with each video gaining a few views, over five years those views added up. And the algorithm in YouTube started learning who my ideal audience was. And five years later, my views are accelerating gently and finding the people who my style and approach seem to suit.

Search Engine Optimisation is much the same.

You'll do some work on your content and website pages and not notice any difference in your ranking on Google for around 9, or even 12 months!

You begin to develop a bit of patience in this game.

Q3: Do enough people want what I am trying to sell to them?

Oof. That's a hard one.

Imagine that you've been pursuing a passion for a decade, only to finally work out that there's not enough people in your town who are interested in what you are doing for you to build a successful business on.

Yet that is what do many of us do.

We so easily fall into the lies of prosperity gospels, mindset manifestations and positive thinking to somehow magically conjure up customers where no customers exist.

And when those customers don't appear, we blame ourselves for not believing hard enough or not creating a good enough vision board - and we dig in our heels, do another workshop, pay another guru, attend another webinar, read another book…

And still nothing happens.

But we're heard all those stories of people doing so well at what we're doing. We actually KNOW some people who are killing it.?

But it's not working for us.

A popular saying when it comes to business is “the riches are in the niches.” It rhymes better when you say it like an American.

It states that you are more likely to do well if you find a specialty area and work on that. After all, there's less competition. And people in those niche interests come looking for you - you don't have to go hunting for them.

What this platitude conveniently leaves out, is the fact that niching down only really works when you're either located in a city of over 1 million people (of which we only have five in Australia) or you have access to a massive audience online.

But even having the big audience online doesn't guarantee the riches, because once you wander outside your own geographic area, the competition increases.?

Your approach might be niche in your town, but there's thousands of others just like you on the internet.

With this in mind, you need to ask yourself a very serious question.

If I can't compete with the thousands of others online who do what I do, then are there enough people in my local market who want what it is that I do??

If the answer is no, then you need to consider either upping your game enough to compete online, or shutting down your business.?

Or perhaps, if you live in a smaller city or larger town, you could spend time introducing what you do to people over time. Educating them on how you can help them solve problems that they didn't even know they had.

But that does take time.

That's all for this weekend. Just one short read on three questions you need to be asking yourself when things aren't working the way you hoped that they would in your business.

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P.S. When you're ready, here's a few ways I can help out.

Working out all the things out that we've been talking about today isn't easy on your own. One of my roles is that of an Entrepreneurship Facilitator for small businesses in the Northern Territory. If you live or work in the NT and want to chat about this, or any other topic regarding your business, you can book me at no cost thanks to Workforce Australia's Self Employment Services.

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