Are you struggling with sales in your creative business?
Running a small creative business is hard. As the owner operator, you are wearing many hats that all take your attention away from the creative work you love doing.
It's a difficult juggle.
For me, of all the challenges a creative business brings, not having money flowing in is the toughest. I seem to thrive when I'm snowed under with work and tight deadlines, but if I can't pay myself to support my family, that's when things unravel mentally, and I start contemplating what I'm doing.
Recently, we had a couple of financially down months with my production company. We were in the process of moving out of our studio, and new client bookings slowed down. There we were on the 20th of the month, staring down the barrel of another month, unable to pay ourselves.
Something rose up in me in that moment, not willing to roll over and accept the loss. Long story short, in 1 week, we turned our sales around and had a good month financially.
Today I want to write about that in this newsletter, because I think sales is one thing creatives find extremely hard to do.
So, here is a true story about the one word that changed everything for my sales mindset. I really hope it helps you with your business.
Conviction
It's the one word that transformed my relationship with sales.
For the longest time, I proudly wore the 'word-of-mouth only' badge.
Sales… Pffft, that's for creative businesses who don't produce good work.
My ignorance was bliss.
1. Comfort
Our production company was built on word of mouth.
You know how it starts: a young kid with a camera films a little thing for their friend's dad. Then they tell their mates, and then they're pretty busy making videos.
Suddenly, you blink and are in a large warehouse with a photography studio, 6 staff and 3 subtenants.
The entire strategy to get to this point?
Be nice, do good work, and things will keep ticking.
It was comfortable, and it was working.
Until it wasn't.
2. Slow Decline
It was a slow, subtle shift. Our overheads and pricing increased (throw the big C in the mix), and those sweet, low-hanging organic apples I used to catch on my days off no longer fall off the tree as frequently.
Like most creatives, I cringed at the idea of selling myself. I avoided marketing as if it were some dark art form.
Ultimately, I had become comfortably lazy.
But then it happened...
→ 3. Breaking Point
Another month, not meeting targets financially.
Another pinch,
What was I going to do?
They say, things don't change until the pain of staying the same exceeds the pain of changing.
I mustered the courage to take accountability.
I quickly discovered my sales muscle had atrophied while being propped up by that steady flow of organic support. My business body was out of whack. If sales are legs and arms are the creative work, we were looking like Johnny Bravo. Jacked on top with matchstick legs trying to hold everything up.
I grabbed the gym bag and got ready for leg day.
→ 4. Change
Knowing we absorb information based on a dominant goal, I started a tangible project with specific goals.
The project I set for myself was - Sell 5x Brand Films to local Nelson businesses by the end of the month.
Bear in mind the end of the month was only a week away.
With this newfound motivation to grow in sales, all of a sudden the endless noise from marketing gurus and business leaders sharing strategy and techniques online all started to sound more like a symphony to me.
My mind's dominant goal was learning to sell 5x brand films to make a specific revenue target for the month.
Everything not relevant to that goal was easily ignored.
I started studying profiles of people on LinkedIn who spoke with absolute clarity about who they served. They were solving specific problems for specific people.
Inspirational quotes that used to frustrate me started to come alive.
Like that one from Steve Jobs: "Start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology."
I finally answered three fundamental questions I'd been avoiding for years:
- Who am I actually speaking to?
- How am I specifically helping them (what problem am I solving)?
- What exactly is my offer?
I knew we made cool videos, but I had not spent the time thinking deeply about how we actually help.
→ 5. Conviction
I started reviewing our work from the past seven years, seeing the genuine impact our films had made.
That's when it all clicked.
My sales muscle had atrophied because I had lost conviction that my product genuinely helped.
When you truly know that what you're offering creates disproportionate value, you don't hesitate to talk about it. It stops feeling like selling and starts feeling like helping.
One simple word changed my mindset. → Conviction.
→ Momentum
With conviction, it stopped feeling like 'I need to learn sales' and switched to 'how can we get the word out about this and show brands how valuable this is for them!'.
Riding the adrenaline and newfound excitement to help businesses with our value, I pulled a huge week, refined the product pipeline, wrote landing page copy for the new offer, relearned email marketing campaigns in Pipedrive, and sent out nurture emails to our list.
For the first time ever, I sent cold outreach emails!
Half of those emails got clicks to the landing page,
2.5% converted to sales. 3 sales in the first 24 hours.
More dripped in after, and from that push, we ended up making 6 sales for that brand film offer.
Conviction gave me the motivation to share our value with our audience. 6 new customers signed up for a package that I'm convinced is incredible value.
The issue wasn't my client list, or the product, or the camera I had.
It was me.
I needed to find conviction for what I did.
I needed to get uncomfortable again and learn the tools of sales and marketing.
Isn't that cool?
An encouragement for you, friend, are you convinced that what you offer as a creative business is incredible value for your customers?
