Welcome back to our recession series. If you’re new here, check out the previous articles and recordings including:

For everyone else - welcome back. Hope you’re hanging in there.

Today’s topic? It’s a spicy one: how to make more sales. Yes, more. Of course, you know me, I’ll never bullshit you — this comes with qualifiers:

  • Can you make more than you’re making now?
  • Can you make more than… before waves hand all this?
  • If you’ve already been hit hard with a revenue drop, can you make that back up?

Yes… it’s all possible. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not saying you’ll be able to do without making a lot of changes. And I’m definitely not claiming it won’t be more work than the beforetimes.

But I’ve talked to bunch (>14) of entrepreneurs across a variety of business types: training, subscription content, service/platform, consulting, marketplace, technical product (framework/downloadable), personal/consumer product,and SaaS. I even talked to an expert in direct-to-consumer ecommerce.

Some of them have seen little or no change. (I’m jealous.)

Some — including me! — have seen a big initial drop, although they (and I) are now beginning to see improvements again.

Others have seen growth. (I’m even more jealous.)

I’m going to share the complete interviews with you down below… and I’m going to give you some questions to ask yourself to figure out things you can try in your business.

But first, I want to give you the broadest of broad brushstrokes on what I’ve learned:

  • audience — who you sell to — matters most; if your audience is totally screwed, well, so are your chances of making more sales without dramatic repurposing, probably; but if your audience continues to do well or even fairly well, you stand a good chance of staying the same, recovering, or even doing better;
  • pain — why they buy — matters second most; an audience that continues to do very well will continue to spend on things that are nice-to-have; an audience that does fairly well or ok will continue to spend on things that are urgent and money-producing; an audience that is doing badly will either spend on money-producing products and services, or nothing
  • creative repurposing is the name of the game: whether that’s switching up your sales pitch, getting your product closer to the money, increasing your product’s urgency/power, offering more value than the competition, going higher or lower in your positioning — or perhaps even targeting a different audience altogether

These interviews got to be so juicy (and so many) that I couldn’t reasonably fit them into a single page. But I also didn’t want to add 14+ pages to our site just so you could read them.

So I turned them into a baby book, a booklet if you will, 42 pages and 8,500 words that you can download, print, scribble on, or read on your screen or iPad.

This report took me many days to produce and, if your business is struggling or you’re worried, I’m delighted to offer it to you for free. You can pay $0.

But if you choose to pay $5, $10 or more — I will donate 100% of the proceeds to the COVID-19 relief fund for the Navajo Nation, our neighbors in the Southwest who are being hit hard by the systemic defunding of their health system.

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All interviews by Amy Hoy, including: