You Gotta Make It Obvious

 Lately I’ve been doing a much better job of collecting testimonials from clients and I’ll be sharing their stories more often in the coming weeks and months.

Alycia will be the first of many.

Like 40-70% of we over-achievers, she suffers from a touch of Imposter Syndrome and was greatly under-valuing what she brings to her world, which is coaching interior desigers on how to grow their businesses.

Literally the day before she hired me she lowered the price on her monthly membership site. (We just corrected that yesterday and the results were awesome. Stay tuned for that story.)

As she expounded upon her reasoning for making such a (crazy) move I began peeling the onion that is Alycia and I learned of her vast knowledge and experience in her field of interior design, her passion for coaching and helping others, her edgy, non-conformist style, and her frustration that things weren’t growing like she wanted.

The more we spoke and interacted I was reminded of the words of Henry Van Dyke,   

“Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.”

Alycia is an action-taker. She was tired of waiting. She was tired of fearing she was headed down the wrong path. Her victories were short-lived but she loves what she does.

So we decided to shout her love and expertise from the rooftops in the form of a…wait for it…wait for it…

A pop-up offer on her website. 

“Whoa. Wait? What? Wes, did you really just spend all of that writing above and build up my anticipation only to tell me to put a pop-up on my site? Dude, good thing we’re not in the same room or I might pop you upside the noggin’ and knock some sense into you. I sure hope Alycia got the deep-deep-deep friends and family discount on your coaching. She did, right?”

Hear me out.

I’m taking you on a journey and breaking things down bit by bit, step by step. 

After 20 years in sales, 10 years of owning my business, and working with nearly 3,000 sales people, sales managers, business owners, and executives, I can tell you the path to success is usually simpler and more obvious than we’d care to admit.

Why is it that the moment—literally the split second—we have a modicum of success we start complicating things? 

Why do we forget the K.I.S.S. principle of Keep It Simple Stupid?

Alycia had—and has—great traffic to her site but she had no obvious offer for her visitors.

You and I do not need more traffic. We need more conversions, more opt-ins, more qualified prospects with whom we can begin building a relationship.

So, yes, we installed a dreaded, miserable, annoying, interrupting pop-up with a great offer that we tweaked to make the headline pop and you know what happened? 

Her opt-ins went from 100 the previous 30 days to 383 the next 30 days. (Now do you see why we’re celebrating a pop-up?)

If there is no call to action…there will be no action taken.

Your potential customers are coming to you for help, for guidance, for assistance, for direction.

Make the path clear, easy, and obvious.

Too many people are cluttering the internet and your mind with fancy technology, elaborate funnels, multi-step opt-ins, crazy up-sells going to down-sells going to cross-sells, going to jingle bells.

While there is a time and a place for everything, including elaborate multi-media, multi-step sequential marketing, start with simple and obvious and grow from there.

Now that we have a baseline of what type of numbers Alycia can generate on her site insofar as new leads are concerned, we can begin testing different forms of lead capture, thank-you page offers, email offers, etc. (Which reminds me…stay tuned for that discussion once the promotion is over and I have her permission to discuss the results. I think I might be more excited than her!)

So look inward for a bit and rediscover the value you bring to the world. Reignite that passion, that fire in your belly that isn’t burning as big and as hot as when you first started your business venture but the world wishes it was.

Remind yourself as to why you got into business in the first place. Then tell the world boldly and proudly why you are their best choice.

Hint: You may find this hard to do. Most of us do. We see the splinters in the eyes of our neighbors while missing the planks in our own eyes. That’s why I recently attended an 8-day intensive, immersive, exclusive, expensive course on growing my own business and it’s why I offer my own private coaching to motivated entrepreneurs like Alycia and you.

Wes SchaefferFounder, The W.E.S. MethodOpen the Window to more leads. Engage them authentically. Seduce them successfully.