3 Kisses Of Cash Flow Death

Tough love to help you get over the mental blocks stopping sales for your business.

This piece is going to throw up a mirror and reflect back exactly where you’ve been lacking if your actions have been sabotaging your business’ cash flow.

If you’ve been experiencing a standstill in your business’ cash flow and you’re not sure how to move forward, it’s likely that you’re stopping yourself from seeing that path forward. You’ve got a mental block.

These are real objections I’ve received from small business owners so I know that there are more of you out there who are letting these stop you short.

If it were easy for you to overcome these objections, you would have overcome them a long time ago, so I’m going to offer up some practical baby steps to spark action while sprinkling in some tough love to get you moving.

This Won’t Work

If you’re talking smack about a marketing strategy that you’ve never employed for your current business, and immediately discount it as a channel that “won’t work”, you need to humble yourself right now.

Even if you’ve put some effort into a content marketing or social media strategy, but didn’t do it 100%, this still applies to you.

Assumptions and half-assed work kill small businesses.

I don’t care if you sell gold-plated dog bowls adorned in Swarovski crystals —if shoppers typically flock to Pinterest and Instagram for dog supplies, that is where your brand needs to be.

You cannot let your ego infiltrate sound marketing strategy and deny existing consumer shopping behaviors.

You cannot discount specific social marketing channels because you feel that your brand is too elevated for them.

If your competitors are actively using the strategies that you believe won’t work for your business, then it’s clear that someone has it wrong here.

If you’re not a marketing and sales expert and you’re making less money than your competitors, humble yourself to the possibility that you’re avoiding a strategy because of your personal holdups rather than sound business acumen.

How would you feel if you held off on a channel that “won’t work”, only to find that it brings in 90% of your yearly revenue? Isn’t the possibility of that reality worth exploring?

If you suspect that you’re suffering from chronic “this won’t work”, take this baby step: question where your belief of “this won’t work” is coming from.

Use the 5 why method (ask why 5 times) to get to the bottom of it. Here are some good starting points:

Do you believe this because of a past negative experience? Why?

Are you fearful that this method won’t work for you? Why?

Where is your belief coming from? Is it coming from a place of fear, scarcity, jealousy?

What’s the worst that would happen if you tried this strategy for your business?

I Want A Quicker Fix

Do you keep avoiding the long-term work you need to do in order to try out shortcuts that’ll help you reach results right now?

For example, have you been avoiding starting an email list because you’re overwhelmed by the upfront setup work? Have you been avoiding opening an Instagram account because creating that much content sounds exhausting?

Here’s the thing about quick fixes: they don’t have staying power and most quick fixes don’t practice compound interest.

Quick fixes will look different for every business, but they usually have some or all of these characteristics:

• Low ROI. You end up spending a lot of time, money, emotional and mental energy for little return.
• Don’t cultivate recurring sales. Once the sale is made, the customer doesn’t repurchase from you.
• Fast sales. A quick sale in exchange for a deep discount.
• Transactional sales. Marketplace platform sales (Etsy, Upwork, EBay, Amazon, etc.).
• Lacks an element of sustainability. You can’t do business using this quick fix tactic for the long haul because it’s not profitable or it’s a time drain.

The marketing and sales channels that are not quick fixes and require long, consistent commitment are things like blogging, social media marketing, and email marketing.

These are strategies that don’t have super quick turnarounds, but they have huge payoffs once you consistently stay at it. They also compound, so audiences you built a year ago through your email marketing for example, continue to drive leads and sales for you.

When you’ve compounded months and years of work on these channels, you can see how this easily translates into a rhythm of consistent monthly sales.

Constantly desiring a quick fix also delays the benefits you’d reap from audience-building through these compounding channels.

So the longer you’re obsessed with quick fixes, the further you push away a reality of receiving monthly sales with ease.

Take this baby step if you find yourself in quick fix territory: find one consistent action you can take every week on one of these channels: blogging, social media marketing, or email marketing.

Commit to completing that action every week for the next 3 months. If you start to see value from this action, continue doing it. When you feel ready, add another consistent action you can take.

I Don’t Have Time Or Inspiration

This is a common one — a lot of entrepreneurs know what they need to do next in their business, but they procrastinate or push off the work because they’re not receiving hits of inspiration.

The only person you’re hurting is yourself if you believe that there’s an external force removing you of time or inspiration.

If you found time and inspiration at one point of your life to birth a business, you can find the time and inspiration to do whichever task you’re pushing off right now.

If you’re at a standstill with this, there’s only one way to get more time or inspiration, it’s by doing things drastically different than you’re doing now.

Here are some baby steps to get you moving:

Need more time? End your workday 30 minutes early and dedicate those 30 minutes to the thing you’ve been pushing off.

Need more inspiration? Start small by brainstorming ideas for 30 minutes, or put together a Pinterest board of inspirational images. Idea dump and don’t delete anything. When you delete what you’ve put down, you’ll feel like you got nothing done if you finish exactly where you started: with a blank page.

When the next day comes, take it a step further and stack another baby step and keep improving.

I’ll get straight to the point — if you’re looking to make more sales, join my free 5 days sales challenge and I’ll help you do exactly that.