108. Exactly What I Look At When Sales Are Inconsistent

Okay real talk — slow sales seasons are THE WORST.

You're doing the thing, you're showing up, you have a great offer, and yet... crickets. And then your brain starts spiraling into "maybe I need a new niche" or "maybe I should launch something else" or "maybe I'm just not cut out for this."

Stop. Just stop right there.

I've been in that exact place — a 2K month, pregnant, exhausted, no idea how to turn things around. And what I figured out (the hard way, obviously) is that inconsistent sales almost never come from what you THINK they come from. There's a much shorter list of culprits, and once you know where to look, the fix is so much simpler than the chaos spiral your brain is currently on.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why "I've tried everything" usually means you haven't found the specific thing that's broken yet
• The two ways to handle a capacity problem (because sometimes it's not a strategy problem at all)
• What I actually look at first when sales go quiet — and why it's not your offer
• Why your messaging might be the leak and what proof-forward content actually looks like
• The sneakiest sales problem that smart, solid business owners overlook constantly
• What I did during a 2K month that took me to 15K the very next month
• How to build assets that sell FOR you when you're in survival mode
• How to diagnose your own sales leak without burning everything down

Ready to find YOUR specific leak? Grab a Mom Viable Money Map — I'll personally look at your offer, messaging, and sales path and send you a custom Loom video telling you exactly what to fix first. 

First 10 spots are $47 (normally $97): yaelbendahan.com/moneymap

LINKS
📈The CEO MOMS Growth Matrix - feeling stuck or plateaued at your current revenue? Snag your custom roadmap for sustainable growth from $0 to multi-6-figures in this FREE training! >>> yaelbendahan.com/matrix

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💰Offers in Your Pocket - 11 Offers You Can Pull Out of Your Pocket and Sell This Week! Only $9 - yaelbendahan.com/pocketoffers

💃 Apply for the CEO Mom Mastermind if you're ready to scale sustainably to $15-20K+ months. Read more about the mastermind here OR go straight to the application here.
Want to chat about the mastermind before you join? DM me on Instagram - instagram.com/theyaelbendahan

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

When I was in my first really big low, i'm talking like, I think it was like a 2K month. I was exhausted. I was pregnant with my daughter in 2019. Generally not sure how I was gonna turn things around. I made one big change. I stopped trying to offer everything and I sent one. I started talking about this one, one offer that I had, which was my launch intensives, and the next month was a 15 K month, and the month after that was a 20 K month. And I made more in seven months that year than the entire year before with all, all the months combined, working twice as hard.

Speaker 2 0:29

Welcome to the Raising Your Business Podcast. I'm your host, Al Behan, founder of CEO Mom Academy, mom of Six and Lifelong Reading addict. This podcast is here to empower moms to run their businesses and lives like the powerhouse CEO. They are. I want you to believe that you can have the business success you desire. And be present with your family and to give you my best tips and strategies for how to make that happen. I'll be sharing the honest reality of balancing business and motherhood biz models that work for you. Marketing simplicity, and the mindset of A CEO, mom. Now let's dive in.

Speaker 1:12

Hello. Hello. Welcome back to Raising Your Business, and I'm excited to be back here. It's just, it's fun to be podcasting again. So today I have a really good topic. It's been coming up for some clients and I have a new, exciting sort of opportunity for you to get coached by me in a really awesome low. Commitment way, and I am just excited to share it this week. So quick life update before we get into it. I'm currently in full on nesting mode, which if you've been here a while, you know I am pregnant with baby number seven. I'm due in July and I've been going through my house little by little and decluttering, and I'm gonna be out. It's one of my favorite looks on my husband's face is when he comes in the door after work to find. Bags and bags of trash I collected from all over the house. He loves it. Okay. He loves, when I throw things out, he loves, I clear things out. It's it's his favorite thing. And we were discussing painting the house and I was like I feel like we need to, we have a lot of, we have a lot of walls because of, because we had some like internal sort of leaking and things like that. We have a lot of like spots in our house that are peeling and we, I really wanted to get that fixed up before the baby's born, and I just wanted to like, maybe update some colors and a few of the rooms and he was like, yeah, great idea. We should totally, repaint the house and fix everything. I'll just wait until you get into your crazy end of pregnancy nesting mode, because last time I was 38 weeks pregnant I'm not 38 weeks pregnant now, but last time. When I was 38 weeks, I literally repainted and patched up like most of the rooms in the house, like as far as I could reach. I was not climbing any ladders. But basically just re went over and like fixed all the walls that were like, dirty and whatever. And. Because, with six kids, houses do get dirty. And and I did it all by myself and not because he didn't wanna help'cause he was there and ready to help me. I was like, you know what? I'll do this until I get tired, then I'll hand it over to you. And then I just kept going until I was done. And he was, he just watched and he's you sure you don't wanna, I'm like no. I wanna do this. And and so that was how last pregnancy looked. So he's looking forward to seeing how it manifests this time. And also I've been migrating my email list to Kit and Claude has been insanely helpful when it comes to updating all my tags and collecting every single broadcast email and automation email that I've ever sent from ActiveCampaign. I was like, oh my God, this is gonna be such a huge project. I really wanna download all my emails. I wanna be able to transfer my automations over. And it's so amazing and it's also helping me like prioritize which automations to, to create first and all this kinda stuff. I'm really excited to share this with my clients and if you wanna know more about how I'm using CLA to save me like crap tons of time, then DM me on Instagram and let me know. And maybe I'll do an episode about it, maybe a little training. I don't know. We'll see how it goes. So anyway, today is episode we are talking about. Inconsistent sales, specifically why they happen and what to actually look at when you are in one of those, those seasons of what is going on with my business? I haven't had a new sale in a while, and I promise you it is very rarely what you think it is. So I want you to walk away from this episode knowing exactly where your sales leaks could be coming from, because once you can diagnose it, the fix is so much simpler than the spiral that you've probably been in. Alright, so if this is your first time listening, I am Yal Behan, and I help mom, entrepreneurs build businesses that are profitable and actually sustainable, like real life sustainable, not sustainable. If you don't sleep or eat or talk to your kids ever. If you see your kids for three hours in the weekend. No thank you. So let's dive in. So before we get to the good stuff, I'm gonna tell you about something that I'm running right now that is basically this entire episode, but personalized to you, and I've just come out with it now and I am just announcing it here. It is called The Mom Viable Money Map, and it's exactly what it sounds like. I'm gonna personally look at your specific business, your offer, your messaging, your sales path, and recording a custom loom video telling you exactly what to fix first. So it's not gonna be just like a generic, oh, be more specific. It's gonna be very specific to you, to your offer, to your messaging. Me just looking at your stuff, telling you where your sales leak is. Normally this would go for$97, but for this week only, or for the first 10 people who sign up is going to be 47. So$50 off. So I'm gonna drop the, I'm gonna drop the link in the show notes and let's get started. You can go to el penn.com/money map and I, and you can sign up and grab your spot and and hope you're one of the first 10. Now let's get into it. Here's the thing. I went pretty quiet for a while, as I mentioned in our last episode, like radio silent. And if you noticed, hi, thank you for noticing. I had a bunch of emails in response to my last email saying, oh my gosh. I was like checking Instagram and checking the inbox to see, what was going on with you. And and yeah, it was a combination of things. It wasn't on purpose. We had the war here in Israel. I was pregnant. Kids just. Being kids And life just happened. And really, like I said, it was all I could do to just keep up with my clients and delivering to my clients. And when I came back and started paying attention to my business again, like as far as the marketing went, I could see really clearly what had slipped and why. And here's what I noticed. When I talk to clients or people in my world who are having inconsistent sales, there's almost always a moment where they go, but I've tried everything right. And I wanna be really I wanna be nice here. But also really honest. Sometimes I've, sometimes, like when you say, I've tried everything, it means I've tried everything except figuring out. Which specific thing is actually broken And trying everything could be like looking at all these other strategies and be like what if I do this? What if I do a challenge? What if I do a, I put out a new offer. What if I don't know start a podcast or whatever it is. But there's a big difference between having a sales problem and knowing where your sales problem actually is. And I've learned this the hard way because I've had slow months. I'd have, I've had full panic mode months. I've had incredibly abundant months, and every single time, it came down to one of three things. So that's what today is gonna be about. All right, so I. First I have to say this because I'd be doing you a disservice if I didn't. Sometimes inconsistent sales just means that you have not been showing up consistently. And I say this to someone who literally went quiet for months because of pregnancy and war and chaos, and I get it. Life happens. It happened to me. In fact, this happened to me back in 2020 when I was pregnant with my daughter. And and if 20 19, 20 20. And I went with radio silent, and then I had my lowest month that it ever had, since I started my business basically. And I was like, okay, I need to have a plan. I need to be able to be more consistent and have to do it in a way that works for me. Pregnant with four kids home during a pandemic, right? But if you are not showing up, it's not necessarily a strategy problem. It's gonna be a capacity problem. And there are basically gonna be two ways to handle it. All right? So option one is figuring out how to show up anyway, right? Even if it's imperfect, even if it's, a voice note to your email list, even if it's one Instagram story a day, even if it's one post a week. Or maybe just, I remember when I was at the beginning of the first, the war, which is, which was. Oh my God. This war has basically been ongoing for two and a half years, but after October 7th when I was newly pregnant with my current toddler, and I was feeling terrible, I was feeling exhausted. I was depressed because not only was this terrible war, this terrible massacre had happened and we're in Israel. It's very, it's a very small, it's a very small Jewish world and everyone's connected and you always know someone who knows someone. We personally know someone who works in this restaurant, and two of the people who worked in the restaurant were, were murdered at the, in Nova Festival. It was just really it was just very hard. It was a very hard time. And what I was able to do at the time, I did not have a little toddler, remember that?'cause I had a, I had a three and a half year old daughter, which was very different than the very mischievous toddler that I have now. But I remember at the time I was like, here are the things I can do. I can do my weekly podcast and I can put out my CEO Mom confidential weekly newsletter. I can focus on those two things. And that was what I did for basically three months. That was all I posted. I did not do a lot of social media posts, maybe one here or there, but I knew that was what I had capacity for. So figure out what your capacity is. So maybe you have, again, one big piece of content a week, like a podcast or or a or a YouTube video or even a live video. And you download it. Transcribe it and use AI to help you turn it into multiple pieces of content. Something. So the point is, even if you have a really good content strategy and it's great and it's organized and everything, if you can't keep up with it and you're not gonna do it, then it's not gonna do you any good unless you can actually implement, which is why I'm back to podcasting now. And I realize, like I did have a few, like a few months just now, like a few weeks where I literally couldn't, I couldn't keep up. I just, my bi, my life just took over and I had to be. Very present in my life, and I didn't have the emotional and mental energy and capacity to show up and market. But then don't be surprised if your sales start slowing down, which mine did. I'll be very honest. They did. And, so I am gonna be podcasting again, and I have a new video series coming out soon. It's gonna be really exciting. It's a little scary because it's like a come along with me sort of thing. So I don't know what the result, the end result is going to be. This is me really in a way, not starting from scratch, but like rebuilding kinda rebuilding my consistency, rebuilding my, my audience nurture, rebuilding my audience growth. I submitted a whole bunch of stuff to different audience growth. Collabs, so summits freebie pod swaps and bundles and things like that. And I'm really excited about it. I'm really excited and I'm and I'm ready, like I'm ready to get back into it before I have the baby and really give it my all for the next 10 weeks or so. So that is the first thing, figure out like, is my plan just. Undoable for me right now, and do I need a better plan? Do I need a plan that I can actually implement? And option two is building assets that do the selling for you while you're in survival modes. This would be. Funnels, this could be evergreen content. This is automated sequences. Like right now, at this very moment, I'm using Claude to pull all my Fathom coaching calls from, like my, from my fathom transcripts. Fathom is one of my favorite app softwares, tools, whatever you wanna call it. That just automatically records my, my my Zoom calls. And I'm having it pull some of my best golden nuggets from my Fathom coaching calls with my clients and turning it into Evergreen newsletters that I'm gonna be putting into an Evergreen newsletter sequence. I think I'm gonna be building out at least six months worth of it and just having a really like making it really simple and a really simple sort of templated, process so that when people come onto my list, I know they are going to get at least one email a week for six months and that's a way of showing up. Evergreen content like that is a way of showing up automated sequences funnels that, you're running ads to things that work even when you are horizontal on the couch with, morning sickness or evening sickness or afternoon sickness. And and in that case you will either have. To have some sort of traffic pointing towards it. So that could be SEO based traffic or paid traffic, which you don't need to show up and create constant content for, right? You have like your, you have your basic ads, running towards either your content or towards directly towards your funnel. And then just like staying on top of that, which it could be easier than being creative on demand, right? You could choose one or both of these things. I'm actually doing, I'm doing both of these things at the same time and I'm gonna be sharing this in my video series, what funnels I'm building and how I'm doing it. But. The thing is, if you are not showing up all the offer, tweaking in the world is not gonna help you because no one even knows about your offers and no one even knows you exist. So assuming that you are showing up, you still feel like things are not consistent. Here's what I actually. Look at, alright, number one is your offer. So the first thing I look at is the offer itself, right? And the question is not, is my offer good? Because maybe your offer is I'm sure your offer is great. I'm sure it's a good offer. I'm sure you're giving a lot of value. And the question is it specific enough to your unique selling point? Because here's what I mean. When you build an offer for, any mom who wants to grow a business, you end up with messaging that sounds like it's for everyone and lands with no one, right? It's like putting up a sign that says, food available here, but okay, cool, but is it my kind of food? Am I in the mood for it? Am I, am I the right person for it? Am. Am I allergic to it? Maybe I don't know. So when you build for the specific person who is going to get the best result, right? The woman who's already in her before state, who was already doing the work, who just needs the right next step, your messaging is going to get sharper and your content is gonna get more specific and more people are going to say yes. It's not like a magic thing, it's just super, super duper clarity on. Who is the best person for this offer? So not like ambitious moms who wanna grow, right? Specifically, what is she already doing? What has she already tried? What's the one thing that's still missing for her? If you can't answer that in one clear sentence, that might be your leak, right? So I have an offer right now that I'm sending out to a few people behind the scenes, people who already have a one-to-one service, but they want more qualified leads, so I am gonna help them build a front end funnel to lead towards that one-to-one service.. And and so you have to have some level of expertise here. You have to know what you're selling. You have to know what you're best at, right? And and that is honestly, if you don't have that, then you're not gonna be the right person for this offer. You need to start with my CMA accelerator. We're gonna, that's where we go down to the foundations. That's where we figure that out, right? So that is the first thing your offer. The second part is your messaging. All right, and this is almost always where I find the leak. Here's what has shifted in the last couple of years in this online space.? It's not just enough to educate anymore and just offer these big general programs like that, have everything in them. You, artist just doesn't wanna learn from you. They wanna see what's actually working for you or for your clients, right? So the content that converts right now is not okay, five tips for growing your email list. Okay, cool. I want proof, right? They want, here's what I did, here's what happened, here's what my client tried. Here's the result. It's proof, it's evidence. It's your story, your stories, right? Your story, your client's story functioning as a case study, right? So when you, when I talk about, talk about authority content. Authority comes through education, but it's not gonna just be education dumps. It's built through that proof of concept. So things I definitely recommend to my clients is having, your origin story really nailed down. What is your story? What was that pivot point? What was that point where you decided that you had to offer this thing because of that? Or where, what was the thing that changed things for you that then inspired you to create this offer? You're a client. Case studies. That is proof of concept, your framework. Not just what it is, but how someone's business changed because they used it. How your business changed because they used it. The kind of steps people would take to go through that framework. These things are not just gonna be teaching tools, that is credibility in action. And your authority is also gonna come from your, when I call it your stand for stand against, right? What are the values that those hills you will die on? I know that I'm not gonna work with a coach. He was like, I'm gonna do. Whatever it takes, as long as it takes to make things happen. I can't do whatever it takes. I literally cannot do whatever it takes, because if it takes, again, if it takes my marriage, if it takes my relationship with my children, then it's not for me. I'm not doing it. So I wanna coach who's gonna be like I, my family is the most important thing to me. And so anything I do for my business has to be built around my family. And when I say this to my coach, I wanted to be like, yes, obviously, instead of, okay, but maybe you don't have what it takes. No things are gonna look different at different stages of your life, different stages of your motherhood. But I will do, I will work, I'll work hard, right? I'll work hard if necessary, but I'm not gonna work hard at the expense of. Sacrificing my family. And sacrificing my mental health and physical health. So here's a real example from my own business, right? And I told the story in my Instagram, so it's, it is actually one of my pin posts so you can have a look at it. When I was in my first really big low, right? I'm talking like, I think it was like a 2K month. I was exhausted. I was pregnant with my daughter in 2019. Generally not sure how I was gonna turn things around. I made one big change. I stopped trying to offer everything and I sent one. I started talking about this one, one offer that I had, which was my launch intensives, and the next month was a 15 K month, and the month after that was a 20 K month. And I made more in seven months that year than the entire year before with all, all the months combined, working twice as hard. And I've told that story in probably dozens of pieces of content over the year. Same story, different angles, because. That is how your messaging works. You can align your real experiences for every belief, every objection, every before state that your audience is sitting in, right? So it's the same story, but it's gonna be different facets. So if your content is mostly just tips and frameworks and not enough, here's proof of this works. Here's how this worked for me. Here's what's working for me right now. Here's what didn't work for me. Here's what's worked for my clients. Here's what didn't work for my clients. Here's what she was doing that didn't work for her, and here's how we fixed it. That is gonna be your leak and. The last one is your path to the sale, and this is the last one. And honestly, the sneakiest one because people overlook it all the time. Do people actually know how to take the next step with you?. Are they act, are they consuming your content? Are they enjoying it? Nodding along, and then just going about their day with no idea there's a door that they can walk through to, to take the next step. I've seen so many people with solid offers and really good messaging who still are not making consistent sales because there's no hand raiser moment, right? There's no invitation. There's just content going out into the void and hoping people'll figure out there's something to buy. You don't need a complicated funnel necessarily. Okay? You need a door, a story that ends with, if this is you, here's the next step. A post that invites them to comment or DM you for a specific thing, an email that says, I have three spots. Reply if you want. If one of those are for you, something that moves a lurker into a conversation they need to know, right? What the next step is to actually move towards working with you. What is your sales process? What? What is your sales process, right? What are, what, how does it work? They apply. They get, do you get on a call? Do you DM them? Do they, maybe you have a little webinar or a video sales letter or something like that. You could be, for example, the most incredible baker in the world, right? You can make the best challah, the best cookies. The best cake. I'm thinking about cakes today.'cause I made my daughter a really cute birthday cake for for school. Her birthday's actually in July, but they are doing all the summer birthdays early'cause they're worried there's gonna be an, the war's gonna start again and then school's gonna be out. And then a whole bunch of girls are not gonna have their birthday parties. They're just batching them out now. If you have all this, these amazing baked goods, but you never put up a sign, a virtual sign, a physical sign that says, I sell this and here's how to buy it, then that's not a business, right? Same thing here. You have to put up the sign, make the invitation clear and specific, and actually ask the sale and tell them what the next step is. So if you got nothing else from today, here's what I want you to remember. Inconsistent sales almost always comes down to one of three things. Number one, your office isn't specific enough. Number two, your messaging is not proof forward enough, and it's not like you enough. It doesn't have enough of you in it, or there's no clear path to actually buy from you. And nine times outta 10 you can correctly diagnose which one it is. The fix is gonna be way simpler than you've been making it. You don't need to burn it all down and start over. You don't need a whole new niche or a whole new offer or a whole new course. You just need to look at the right thing. And the hard part very often is figuring out which of the three is for your specific business, because it's hard. As it's hard to read the label from inside the jar, right? It's not always gonna be obvious to you from the inside. You might be like everything is the problem. I don't know which one is the biggest problem. Or maybe it's I don't know, isn't my offer. You might doubt your offer if your messaging is off, but maybe the offer is fine, but the messaging just isn't landing right? So that is exactly why I created the amount viable money map. So I look at your offer, I look at your messaging, I look at your sales path, all three of the things we just talked about, and I send you a personal Loom video and a Google Doc telling you exactly what to fix and in what order. no, like Fluffy again just be like, oh, be more specific here. No, here's, I'm gonna give you examples. I'm gonna give you my clients know I, I will literally sit there on a call with them and then I'd be like, okay here's the exact messaging you want for this. Here's what I would put in the sales page. And in 10 minutes I'll just dump out like, basically all the points that need to hit in order to make sales on their sales page. I have very limited spots. I do between two to four of these a week. And the first 10 people will get$50 off, so it'll be$47 instead of 97. This is not a, i'll just put my link in the bio and you guys can find it. These go fast because they can only do so many in a month while also being like, seven months pregnant and running a business and keeping small and large humans alive. If you are interested, if you want your money map if you wanted my eyes and your business and you're just like, I'm not so ready to invest in long-term coaching yet, which I get, you want to get to know me, you wanna get to know how I can help you this is a great opportunity for you to do that, right? Either way, you're gonna get a huge amount of value out of it. Whether this is all you want or you just wanted to try me out and see how I work or how I think. So grab your money map. The link is in the show notes. And if this episode helped you, screenshot it, share it to your stories, tag me at the han. It genuinely means the world to me. I love love, there's nothing like being tagged in an Instagram story and seeing someone taking value from what you've shared. It's my favorite thing in the world, and I would literally, if you have not left me a review yet, I would love you forever if you did. It takes 45 seconds to a minute and it would help some more moms find the show. So I will talk to you next week. Go do the thing. And as always, you are building something really good here, Sometimes you just need someone else's eyes on your stuff to tell you what to tweak, and sometimes you just need to take a little bit of consistent action and knowing what that takes for you, you know what is going to enable you to be consistent. And I want that for you. So keep going and I'll see you next week.

Speaker 3 21:53

I can't thank you enough for listening to raising your business. I hope this episode has inspired you to take another step towards building a business and life that you love, and growing your income in a way that works for you and your family. If you enjoy this episode, please take a second to rate and review and let's connect that on Instagram screenshot and share it on Instagram Stories so we can get the word out to more mom business owners like you. Tag me at the El Behan and share your biggest breakthrough from today. See you next week.