Confessions of a self-aware salesperson
Lessons learned from selling something new, Jan 2022
Last week I closed the doors to my new membership community, Hush Club and welcomed ten founding members. I thought it’d be cool to share some of what I noticed during this recent stint of promotional activity, a dose of reality and some numbers.
I’m calling this “lessons learned from selling something new” because the first thing I have to get off my chest is that I dislike the term “launching”.
It’s important to be aware of how the words we use affect us
The term “launch” conjures up an image of a huge, chaotic engine room, a team of sweating engineers with rolled up sleeves, mainlining industrial strength coffee, tearing their hair out whilst chewing on the ends of their pencils and staring intensely at complex equations and spreadsheets: It means hard work, long hours and exhaustion. Just me?
The truth is, promoting something as a company of one, a small team or even a large team, doesn’t have to be remotely comparable to this. Unless (for some reason) you want it to be.
Calling it “a brief period of promotion” or similar is calling it what it actually is. No drama. No big deal. Much more appealing.
Lesson 1: It doesn’t have to be a big song and dance.
Lesson 2: Choose your words with care.
Your ego may show up during an intentional period of promotion
People don’t really seem to talk about this, which is a shame. At the risk of outing myself as the only one who ever felt like this when promoting something, allow me to welcome you to the inside of my mind During the three week promo period my ego regularly threw its toys out of the proverbial pram:
“This is stupid”
“I hate this”
“I can’t sell”
“I hate marketing”
“I should just get a normal job”
“Everyone is bored”
“I’m bored”
“No one is even reading these emails”
”I’m talking absolute garbage”
“How can I say this again”
“I can’t do this anymore”
“No one cares”, etc.
This mostly occurred when I was tired or thirsty. Here’s the thing: Noticing this and simply allowing it was a game changer. Previously, I’d have pushed those feelings down and away, tried to deny them altogether or felt shame for feeling them. That, my friend, is exhausting. Feeling the feelings and letting them drift on by, is not.
Lesson 3: Have supportive practices in place to allow your inner critic to do it’s thing without throwing you off course (journalling and breathwork for me — I’ll resist the urge to launch into a Hush Club pitch here)
A vague and simple plan can be good enough
As a former project manager and avid planner, this is quite the shift. I’ve planned and executed many detailed plans in my former career. Yet in my business I’ve found it works better for me to approach things casually and flexibly with a high level view of the overall plan — we’re not talking NASA-scale projects!
How this pans out is less expectation, less stress. More celebration, noticing and learning for next time. There’s no need to overcomplicate things. Change is inevitable, so expect it and keep the plan fluid so you can be responsive. The beauty of being small is this agility.
Lesson 4: The way you think you want/need to do it might not turn out to be the way that works best for you after all.
There are many ways to skin a cat
A low cost membership doesn’t make commercial sense without high reach/numbers on the face of it. Whilst this is true on one level, differing objectives and values call for different supporting strategies. Some people want to go big or go home, others like a more gentle approach.
My intention with Hush Club is to go slow, test, learn, and iterate. At this stage, it’s not intended to be my main source of revenue, but a more accessible option and potentially a feeder for other work. What’s most important (for me) is choosing what feels right, not what is logically correct.
Lesson 6: You don’t have to do it the way anyone else does or the way anyone else says you should.
The numbers
Goal: 10 members (stretch goal: 15–20)
Email list: 300
Total sign ups: 10
Conversion rate: 3.3%
Number of emails sent: 12
LinkedIn posts: 5 (which resulted in exactly zero sign ups)
Freebies delivered: 2 (19 sign ups, 11 showed up live)
Number of people I messaged/emailed to follow up: 13 (multiple times!)
This is a great indicator for how much more time and effort I’d need to put in for the next stint to meet my stretch goal.
I’m really happy with how this went given it’s my first time selling something without Instagram or Facebook (I deleted all content and shut down my accounts in November 2021 — read about it here) and I’m excited about trying out different avenues to grow it in the future.
So there you have it. Transparency. That’s how I roll.
A version of this post went out to email subscribers in Jan 2021
To hear more on my efforts to build a slow business without reliance on social media and other bits and bobs from the inside of my brain, sign up to my weekly newsletter A Word of Caution
