🔎 If I looked into your business for 60 mins…[SAF#169]

Hey Reader,

“I need a roadmap, something I can follow to grow my business”. “I’m doing all the right things but I’m not making (enough) sales”. “I need to diversify; what product can I add?” — these are the top three challenges my 1:1 clients bring to me.

They all have different solutions, of course. In fact, even when I hear the same challenge from multiple clients, I never offer the same solution to all of them. How could I? They’re different people with different businesses and different skillsets.

What is the same, though, is my process for helping them with their challenge. Because, in B2B, the ultimate challenge is always money.

This is a hill I’m willing to die on. If you sell B2B, like I am, you’re ultimately selling money. You can call it whatever you want (strategy, clarity, coaching, copywriting, productivity hacking, design, astral illumination), but it’s ultimately about money.

So, as a strategist for solopreneurs, my job is to follow the money — or lack thereof.

Plot twist: one of the things I look at is money lost because there’s no system to follow up. More on that below. Before we get there, I want to introduce you to a solution that can help with that — a CRM that’s been a revelation to me, your friendly CRM hater.

I don’t use CRMs because I find that they’re clunky AF and add more work to my plate rather than help me get shit done faster.

Well, I’ve been testing Mimiran lately, and it’s NOT that. It’s the CRM built for people like me, without sales reps on payroll and without the patience to learn a complex tool.

📣 Brought to you by 📣

Mimiran

If you want your emails to get you *into* the *right conversations* instead of getting you out of talking to people, you need a CRM that makes it easy to follow up. But traditional CRMs are for the VP of Sales to track the sales team and force prospects through a pipeline before the end of the quarter, not for non-sales people to create and nurture relationships.

Enter Mimiran. By and for solo consultants who love serving clients but hate "selling".

Get Strategic AF, then get organized AF.

Follow up flawlessly. More, better referrals. Boost the power of your newsletter with lead magnets that convert to conversations and clients. Schedule meetings. Automate proposals. Stop fighting your spreadsheets or your enterprise CRM.

Show up like a doctor, not a sales rep.

Start your free trial!

Want your name up here? Reserve your slot! (Sold out until the end of May)

If you’ve ever booked a strategy session with me or were a part of my Growth Intensive, you already know this form is the first thing you see.

I ask 3 intentionally broad questions to have a starting point for my research. I need the links to know where I can find my clients online, and I need to know what their challenge is (obviously).

The third question, about what works and what doesn’t, helps me gauge whether there’s room to add additional channels or not.

Note: I never show up to a session without advance prep work and research. Sometimes, this prep takes me more than the session itself but it’s what helps me offer real solutions, not vague “be consistent and post more often” BS advice.

Here’s a sneak peek behind my prep work.

1. Spend no more than one minute on their website/social media profile

…at first. If it’s not clear what they do and WHY within a minute, I make a note of it in my research doc (they get access to it at the end).

I’m looking for signal density here. Is your perspective clear from what I’m seeing, or do you sound like all your competitors?

The purpose of this minute is to assess congruence too. Does the LinkedIn profile have a similar look and feel to the website? If not, there’s another note for them.

2. Look at what they sell — and how

On this, I spend way more than one minute because I look at the business logic AND the way they market their offers.

For instance:

Is their pricing public? Does the pricing make contextual sense?
Do they have a landing page for their offer? Is it good? What about positioning?
Can I see social proof? If not, why not?
How many things are they selling? Is there business logic behind the way their offers are structured, or are they spraying and praying?

For example, I recently saw a ~$2000 price tag on a client’s course. Contextually, that’s A LOT.

On-demand (pre-recorded) courses sell for way less than that. So I dug deeper; I read their whole landing page and figured that the description does not justify the premium pricing.

During the session, however, I found out that it was a simple matter of copywriting and of leaving out the exact details that justified the price (I won’t tell you what they are to protect my client’s privacy).

What I will tell you, though, is that a few changes to the course description made the price make sense.

My client was not overcharging; they were underselling themselves.

3. Look at their content — everywhere

This is a big one and, candidly, I’ve been guilty of it too. Most of us don’t create content for our (potential) buyers but for our peers.

Yikes!

This is how we end up with intricate frameworks to describe simple processes when our buyers simply want to know that we are the person to help them with the throbbing pain they feel.

My recommendation to them is this:

(This is a screenshot of one of the slides in my presentation for The Newsletter Growth Bootcamp in The Council. Feel free to save it, I know it will come in handy to you sooner or later.)

4. Bring it all together

By now, I should have a clear picture of why my client doesn’t generate the revenue they thought they should.

While there’s no one-size-fits-all here, the most common reasons are:

They’re playing the wrong game: they try to sell high-ticket services on a creator’s playbook OR they try to make it rain by selling $100 products to an audience of a few thousand people.
They have a tiny audience. I get a lot of pushback when I say audience growth should be a priority for almost every solopreneur. The truth is that no business was ever harmed by having a large audience, quite the opposite.
They shy away from things that are 100% normal, despite what the gurus say. Ads and outreach are chief among them — you need one of them or both, in most cases.

Typically, the problem identified here becomes the focus of our session together (if it’s just one session) or the red thread that shows up every time we meet.

This is my second favorite part of my work. Very few things compare to seeing my clients’ faces light up when they realize what the fix is — yes, even if it’s something they don’t particularly like doing, like outreach.

But my favorite part is this:

5. Identify revenue leaks/low-hanging fruit/ignored growth levers

Everyone has them. EVERYONE! If you’ve been in business for more than 6 months, you’re very likely to have at least one of them.

I love this part because it’s the solution to what we all want, whether we say it out loud or not: making as much money as possible by working as little as possible.

In most cases, those are not instant wins; they’re not hacks that can get you $10k in one hour. This is foundational work that ensures you don’t have to be glued to your laptop 24/7 to meet your revenue goals.

These blindspots we all have (yes, marketers and business people included) usually show up as:

No systems to create passive value → this is typically the easiest one to set up and maintain. I’m talking about ways to get discovered by the right people without endlessly massaging social media algorithms.
Value ladders. Not necessarily in the classical start low, go medium, then go high way because attention is not linear. It’s rather about lateral moves and showing up for your clients in more ways than one.
Lack of a retention strategy aka letting go of clients too soon, even if they’d be more than happy to keep paying you.
Improper nurturing strategy. Honestly, I’m guilty of this too, which is why I started looking into tools like Mimiran. I tend to give up on a lead too soon or simply not follow up with people who expressed interest in one of my products/services.

One of these things, when properly chosen and implemented, helps you say goodbye to feast-and-famine cycles. Whether it’s a lead gen/nurturing strategy that keeps your pipeline full or a way to grow your audience on autopilot so you always have new people ready to buy from you — to me, it’s the way to avoid sacrificing your sanity on the altar of revenue.

You know what’s funny?

The most common reaction I get after my consulting sessions is “I’ve got my work cut out for me. But it’s so clear now!”.

Because, candidly, everything requires work, even the low-hanging fruit. The good news is that it's very likely you've already done most of that work. Whether that's true or not, that feeling of knowing exactly why you’re doing something and what you can expect out of it is second to none.

Obligatory caveats

None of this is set in stone. My strategy looks VERY different for each client. I will say this, though: it’s almost never about the product or the offer itself, but about the way it’s sold.

And no, this is not me getting high on my own supply: most of my clients tell me they get referrals (which means the offer itself is solid), but it’s hard to convert people without referrals.

Think about it this way: if you don’t have angry clients demanding their money back, it’s the marketing, not the product. People haven’t experienced what you’re selling yet — so please, PLEASE stop adding a hundred bonuses and features to your offer. That’s not the problem.

Fix your marketing first! Then talk to your buyers and see if there’s something you can improve in your product.

If you need help with improving your marketing, schedule a strategy session with me to go through everything above together or hop on my Growth Intensive program.

🔦 Community Spotlight

You’re SO going to love this! In the past few months, I’ve been binging on a new (to me) newsletter. It’s saw raw that you can’t stop reading.

And I love that because, when the polish is stripped away, business boils down to one thing — messy humans. That’s why I love my friend Kristin’s newsletter, Drunk Business Advice.

No, she’s not drunk when she writes it. Maybe just a little buzzed.

Kristin has spent the last 20 years running (sometimes ruining) her own businesses, and slaving for some pretty soulless corporations. Now she serves up unfiltered, human stories about the world of work, exposing how we’re all obsessing over the aspects of business that make us miserable — while ignoring the shit that actually helps us grow.

So go subscribe to Drunk Business Advice. You’ll feel better. I promise.

The Council Bulletin

Right now, The Council members are working hard on their first homework in The Newsletter Growth Bootcamp — and I’m working hard on offering them feedback. This is so much FUN and we’ve had quite a few breakthroughs already.

In the backstage, my friend and Council member Lee Densmer and I are prepping a session she will be leading. It’s on writing and publishing a business book that generates revenue.

If you’re not part of the Council, you can get access to this session here. It’s happening on March 17th and I can’t wait to pick a published author’s brain!

That's it from me today!

See you next week in your inbox.

Here to make you think,

Adriana