POV: You launched and sold nothing. What do you do now?
I dealt with this SO MUCH during my time of running Cleveland Flea, and to be honest it’s one of the main reasons I wanted to take a break and dive into this more. People were really struggling with this moment in their businesses, and it was causing so much emotional distress and then also less and less sales. I began to think that there was more we should be studying about this part of entrepreneurship. And I’m really glad I’ve taken my time studying it.
Here’s the situation–
A client of mine was invited to be a part of an event and she put her all into production and preparation and then she got there and after being there for 5+ hours, she’d only sold 4 items. She was deflated. And exhausted. We had our coaching call on Sunday and so we spent some of our time unpacking it together.
Here’s how we handled it–
First, we together acknowledged her real feelings. She was truly disappointed, but in a really deep way. Most people rush to try and fix what ‘went wrong’ and they miss the crucial moment of just acknowledging the human experience in front of them. Also, in an effort to skip this truly human moment, many people will just minimize her experience. When we do this, we encourage a few unhelpful things. We encourage disconnection from the human. She’s in pain. If I’d just disagreed with her pain, that would cause disconnection. It would not help her or us in our coaching relationship. It would also stop her processing her true feelings. We need to process what’s real for us and for it to move through our bodies. I didn’t want to contribute to her emotionally bypassing (avoiding her real feelings and replacing them with something more ‘appropriate’). The result of being with her as a human was that we remained connected, she was able to process her emotions and move toward different thoughts that would not have been possible until that process was done.
Secondly, we then dived into the experience itself with a neutral perspective. There was no way we could have done that without Step 1. With a new, calm, connected, loving perspective we were able to assess the situation and find out what was positive about the experience, instead of seeing it with a financial / sales lens only. That lens only allowed us to see it as a ‘failure’. It was too narrow. We went through the experience and found that there were many positives to the entire experience.
The event itself spurred her to experiment with new flavors and colors, totally upping her creative game. Without that push, she would have maybe not gotten to that.
She absolutely knows now that her brand is being recognized by the right people. That is HUGE. Her recent collaborators (including 2 other store owners) have brand aesthetics that she admires and they have aligned value systems. Regardless if the customer base was the right customer base for her that day doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of her business. She IS putting out the right (by her own measurement) vibes. Something she’s doing is REALLY right. That’s a really big win. I reminded her that just a few short months ago she had almost no local visibility and now she’s being asked left and right to appear at events and collaborate locally with women / business owners she really admires. SHE created that.
We gathered some customer information about what had happened that day. I had her do a small download for me about some of the customer / non-customer interactions she had to look for similarities or intel. She told me a few things that shined a light on something she can do to help sell her products in the future. She told me that many people mistook her product for something else that seemed more familiar in that setting (a home goods store) and with that type of packaging and ingredients. She was frustrated at the time but then she realized that OF COURSE the humans are operating with an existing framework and certainly if they have distracted exhausted brains (like most of our customer base does) that their brain would go to what was easiest, to what it had seen before. Instead of this remaining in frustration, she was able to see that most humans who we are selling to are not operating at the height of their curiosity. Their engagement is a little low (hey it’s a Saturday morning, I get it! People are just out living their lives and probably allowing their minds to have a break). So if you’re just honest and understanding about that, there are definitely different actions we’d take ahead of time to make it much easier for those exhausted human brains to really see what we’re offering. We never really want to ‘blame’ people, but we want to be honest about their life experience, if we can. We want to exercise empathy instead of blame or shame or frustration. We walked away from this little exercise with much more clarity and direction about what she could do for next time, if she even wants that.
We looked at how much effort she put in that week. It was a lot. We allowed her to be proud of herself for showing up with her more than 100% effort while she’s working a full-time job AND being a mom. It’s a lot. And she deserves to give herself some credit for taking on such a big effort.
She also now has a lot of product already made up that can be saved for the next event, online sales or photo shoots! Although she wanted this product turned into sales for various reasons, she has it for other reasons and that’s cool, too.
We ended up emerging from that part of the conversation with A LOT of intel and clarity for her next steps. It was really generative and also reset her emotionally.
And next, we talked about where she is in her business and the expectations she has about her business. She’s just about a year into her business, and it’s basically a newborn. It WILL require more from her that it gives her. That is normal. It’s not really fun, of course, but it is normal. If we think about what skills we need to have to run a business that delivers to us financially in the way we want, we are new at all of it. In almost every category of her business, she’s still at around a 2 out of 10 in terms of the financial result she’s trying to create. It’s just expected that we will be where we are. In terms of product quality, she’s really probably at a 10 there, because she’s been at it the longest and has taken A LOT of action and approached it with fun, curiosity, determination and excitement well before she ever began a business. That’s what the other categories require, too. Sales, marketing, customer relations– that’s all pretty new to her. So, it’s natural that those areas are not offering the entire return that she’s hoping. This is one reason why business can be really hard emotionally. It often informs us more through mistakes than it does through successes.
There was a lot more that we touched on but this is a really good recap. Through our roughly 2-hour conversation we created clear steps she can take to have better, more aligned results AND how she can care for her human self along the way. She felt more open to what’s next, she was able to reframe the event with much more compassion for everyone involved and she was able to see how being there was actually quite helpful for her business, even if it didn’t give an immediate return via capital.
And here’s something else. Let’s just say that she did sell everything. She would have felt better, sure! But she would not have had the intel she does have now because she would have not believed any of it was necessary. These lessons can be hard to learn, but they’re also there FOR us, too.
