The Fierce Business Babe Podcast Ep 269: How To Know If Your Strategy Is Working

Today, I am diving into everything you need to know to figure out if your business strategy is working for you. I am going to share my rule of thumb for trying new strategies and some key points for deciding if your strategy is working for your business. We’re also going to chat about learning to trust the process so that you can find the best strategy for your business.

HOW TO KNOW IF YOUR STRATEGY IS WORKING

By: Melissa Lin

Welcome back to another episode of The Fierce Business Babe Podcast. Today we are diving into a topic that I get loads of questions about. The question I always get asked is, how do I know what strategy is the strategy to utilize in my business? How do I know if this strategy is going to work for me? How do I know if my strategy is working? This is a big topic that is asked about often and I'm really looking forward to getting into this topic today. I have some answers for you all around how to know if your strategy is working. We'll be getting all into some of the key points to determine if your strategy is working, my rule of thumb when testing new strategies out, how to trust the process, and so much more.

DETERMINING IF YOUR STRATEGY IS WORKING

The first thing I really want to chat about is some of the things to look for to determine if your strategy is working or not. I want to share with you that most strategies will work as long as it feels aligned to you and your business and if you've given it enough time to actually work. Yes, you do need to give your strategies time to actually work. It might not be the first launch that you do. It might be the second or third, once you've really given it enough time. You might need a little more brand awareness, your audience needs to like, know, and trust you a bit more. Sometimes it just takes a little bit more time. The first thing to keep in mind is if your strategy has had enough time to work. Have you been consistent with your strategy for 60-90 days? When I say consistent I mean actually showing up with your strategy every single day and really leaning into that strategy. If we're hopping on social media once per week and your strategy is to add value five times a week and we aren’t consistent with that, then it makes sense that you don't feel like your strategy is working. We're not consistent with it.

For example, something that I see some entrepreneurs do is start launching their next program and start to create some excitement around it. Then three to four days into their pre-sale if nobody has to respond I'll see them disappear from social media and completely lean away from their launch. Maybe they feel if nobody bought during the pre-sale then no one's interested and no one is going to buy it at full price. In my experience, that isn't always true. We have had some launches where 50% of our sales came from our pre-sale and 50% came from full price once the early bird doors were closed. We've also had some launches where nobody bought from the pre-sale, everybody purchased at full investment. You are here for the long game in your business, you are not here for just a few months. You're here for the years and years and years of business. You get to give your strategy enough time to actually work. My rule of thumb is usually 60 to 90 days. Then you can tweak and improve from there and give it time to work. Give that new strategy another 60 days.

Something else I want to add in there is being consistent with it. If you're consistently changing niches or consistently changing your business model because you feel like the last one wasn't working, it may not feel like anything is working because you may not have given it time to really work. At the end of the day, most strategies that are being taught will work as long as you give it the time to work. Again, give it 60-90 days minimum to really work. If you look at someone’s business that you've been watching for a while and you're wondering, how did they do this overnight? How did this all happen? How did their business grow so fast? It’s usually because that person has been spending years and years building their brand awareness and their different programs they've created. They were definitely not an overnight success, they were doing things behind the scenes for a long, long time. I've been in business since 2014 and there are some people who just found me yesterday. There is so much that goes on behind the scenes. Again, give it enough time. Make sure you are doing everything that is aligned with that strategy that you chose.

The second thing I want to share with you to determine whether your strategy is working or not is I want you to zoom out and see where something might be broken or where the gap might be. For example, if you are currently selling an offer in your business and you're not seeing as many sales as you were expecting to, I want you to zoom out and take a look at what might be going on. If you have a freebie, what does the optimum rate look like? Are you looking at that? Is it a 20% opt-in rate? What is that number? Has it increased over the past month 2 or 3 months? Has it decreased? Are your emails being opened for that opt-in you have? How does the click rate look? Find out where something has changed or started to dip down in the sales process.

An example from my business is early last year my team and I noticed something weird was happening one week. There was a small dip in sales, however, our number of leads coming in was about where they were on average. We did some digging and it turned out that one of our funnel automations was not sending out emails. It had been three days or so where none of our emails were being sent to that funnel. It was a full technical error on the email server side, so we weren't even able to fix it on our end. We had to get our email services support team to come in and their technical team actually spent an entire day doing coding to fix it. Again, there was nothing that changed on our end , but something happened. We zoomed out and followed our sales process to figure out where the gap was . We just needed to figure out what had changed and get to fixing it.

The third thing to think about is if you have given your strategy 60 to 90 days and it has worked in the past, but maybe it's not working as well as it had been, it might be time for a refresh or an update to your current strategy. When you set your business up, it's not a one-and-done setup. We don't set up our funnels and then walk away and have things continue to work for the rest of our lives. Something that we get to do is we get to update some of our strategies and revamp things from time to time. If you set up a funnel it's not something you can walk away from and have it continue to work for you. You get to revamp and update. For example, we have a quiz funnel that we created and it brings in over 400% ROI. That is an amazing ROI, especially for a quiz funnel. From time to time we make updates and tweaks to our funnel emails, our sales pages, and to our ads. The world and social media are also continuing to change and shift, so we get to adapt with some of those changes and pivot when needed. For example, when COVID arrived we quickly saw that our messaging needed to change a little bit to bring a few more opt-ins each week. When new updates come to Facebook and Instagram, we need to make changes to our ads and things like that. We make updates and refresh things from time to time, so it might be time for that. If you've been using your strategy for a while and it's been working, maybe it's time to make a quick update and refresh some things. It's like a computer, you do need to reboot it and refresh it from time to time. It’s the same thing for your business and your strategy, it might be time for a quick refresh.

MY RULE OF THUMB FOR TESTING NEW STRATEGIES

Now that we've chatted about some key points to determine if your strategy is working, I want to chat about my rule of thumb when testing a new strategy. I’ve had clients ask, is it time for me to try this new strategy? My answer to this is to experiment. If you come across a strategy that is exciting to you and you want to test it out and see if it's a business model you want to create for yourself, I would test it on one single thing first, not your entire business model. Let's say you have a new idea for a program or how you want to run your business, test it on one program or with a few clients and then decide what you want to do next. There have been a few times in my business where I really wanted to shift a few things and I'm really happy that I tested some of those changes first. As I was testing them, I realized that the shifts weren't exactly turning out as I had hoped. Instead of shifting my entire business model, I tested that change with one program or one project and then decided whether I wanted to continue that change with the rest of my programs. That's one of my favorite things about running my own business and being the CEO, we get to make up the rules. We get to try new things. I do recommend experimenting and testing to see what works for you.

You may see a strategy working for someone else, but we don't know how long they’ve been working on that strategy behind the scenes. They may have been doing it three times as long as you’ve been working on your current strategy. Make sure to test your new strategy first and see if it's something you really do feel aligned with once you test it with an item or two in your own business. Just because something works with somebody else doesn't mean it's going to also work for you in the way that you see it working for somebody else. It may end up looking a little different. That is my rule of thumb for testing new strategies– test it on one or two things, not your business model. I've seen people swap out their entire business model or make a huge pivot that affects their entire business model and they end up going back to it and turning their business into chaos for a few months trying to get back to what they had originally because there's too big of a shift. So again, test it on something and then start to play around with testing it on the next thing if you do end up really enjoying it.

LEARNING TO TRUST THE PROCESS

I want to chat about how to trust the process. This is a phrase I use often. Trust the process, what does this mean? How do we trust the process if we haven't been through the process ourselves yet? The first thing I love sharing with clients is to look at the evidence around you, look at the evidence you've already created for yourself. If you're wondering, how do I know this is going to work to help me get my first client or my first $5K month or $10K month, look at the evidence that you already have around you. For example, new clients join our programs for many reasons. One of the reasons is because they've seen our process work with other clients. They’ve seen the evidence that it can work. Get that evidence and remind yourself of it anytime you start to have doubts. Another example, when you continue to grow your business if you ever have doubts or that lack of trust around your own process, go to your evidence. Look at the evidence you've created for yourself. You can go look at those client testimonials and look at the evidence that you already have around you.

The next thing I like to do, and I remind my audience and clients to do as well, is to get really clear on what it is that you actually want to achieve in that process and create goals that match. This is actually one of the very first things that we have our clients do in all of our programs, set goals. We do this with a mix of overall program goals, monthly goals, weekly goals, and daily goals. In some of our longer programs we will even get into quarterly goals. When you have goals in place you have that opportunity to take it to the next step in going through the process, and it'll give you an outlook on how it can happen. We need goals that we’re striving for and wanting to achieve before we can even trust the process. Having that plan in place makes everything feel more doable, so once you have your goals, start setting your plan up. Does this mean that you need to follow your plan to a tee? No, definitely not. It does, however, make everything feel more doable and you can tweak and refine and adjust your plan if needed.

When clients come into my Academy, which is my beginner coaching program for clients who are wanting to start their business and grow and scale, we have a process set up for our clients. We teach them how to map out their first program and get those foundations put together for their business. We have the steps on how to create their market research survey and create their first program and start to sell their program and sign clients. We have that plan in place for our clients to follow, however, some clients come in and already have some of those foundational pieces. They may not need to stick to it to a tee, but they already have that plan and then they can tweak from there. We also teach our clients how to create a sales process for their business. We have structure around it to teach them how to do it and we also continue to support our clients on how to improve it. Not every sales process is going to work for every single person. We support our clients with creating a foundational process for it and then refining and tweaking from there. I have some clients who only do sales calls and I have some clients who don’t do any sales calls. It's all about creating the process and the plan, then continuing to refine and tweek over time. Again, just having that plan place makes everything feel more doable.

The next thing I want to share with you to help you really trust the process is I recommend some type of accountability. Whether you're holding yourself accountable or you have others help hold you accountable. This may be a mentor, a business bestie, or a group program you’re in. Lean into that support. A great way to hold yourself accountable is by creating some KPIs or some metrics to track yourself on. I actually have a full podcast episode about KPIs, what to track in your business, when to track, and more. Definitely take a listen to that podcast if you’re wondering what you should be tracking. We track numbers in our business all throughout the week. I absolutely love having a pulse on how the business is doing, what's going on in the business, and how our clients are doing. We look at a ton of those metrics. You can start with just a few of them, it does not need to be a ton. It's all about what's most important to you at that moment and where you want to see growth in your business next, those are the numbers to focus on. If you're wanting to really grow sales, focus on a few of those sales metrics to be moving the needle forward. We've touched on some key points to determine if your strategy is working, my rule of thumb when testing new strategies out, how to trust the process, and so much more. We are already getting ready for next week's episode and I cannot wait to share it with you. It's another amazing, juicy topic. We will see you in another brand new episode of The Fierce Business Babe Podcast bright and early next Monday morning!

Topics we cover include:

Refreshing your strategy
Finding the missing link
Making shifts in business

And so much more!

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