Speaker 1This is The Road to One Million, and I'm Ryan Daniel Moran. Oftentimes in the early phase of your business, you know too many things and you do too few things. This is especially true if you're really smart. You're studying all these things, you're learning all these ways that people are growing, but your sales aren't moving. That's the case in this coaching call today with Sean. Sean shares how he is selling a product and is getting about a sale and he just can't break through. And I tell him that he needs to adjust his process because he's optimizing for the wrong thing. In fact, I tell him that he should not be optimizing for sales, that he needs to be optimizing for something else. And by doing that, his sales are going to go up. If you're in the early phases of your business, you're really going to resonate with this. And I bet that if you put your attention on optimizing for what I tell Sean, and optimize for, you will get more sales as well. If you want personalized advice like this, you can hang out with us on our Thursday coaching calls inside the 1%. And if you want to join them, go to capitalism.com slash one and fill out an application. We'll see if we can get you on your road to a million dollars. Let's go hang out with Sean. Good morning, Sean. How are you? Good. How are you? I'm doing good, man. You've got the best hair in the one cent. Great. Thank you. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2I've been hiding it a lot of my time.
Speaker 1Tell me about your business and how you can help.
Speaker 2Yeah, I just want to say first off, I don't know if the gold mamas are still here, but that was like a really great inspirational story. And I liked that it started off with that. It was just like, oh, my God, that was wonderful. Yeah, so I've been kind of stuck for a while in like a sale a week. And I think it's and I had a kind of epiphany like a month ago. A month or two ago about it's because I'm not really behind my brand and my product, I believe, although that I'm working really hard on it. I had a I had a Facebook campaign and I got like forty nine add to carts, but then I didn't get any sales from it. And I was like, OK, this is so close. And then I was thinking about the page, I was thinking about optimizing the page better. And then I kind of realized that I need to just completely change the brand. And my idea was I was going to change. I was going to have a podcast. I sell tea and and but I've decided to rename the brand after the name of the podcast. And so I'm just going to sell you the idea right now. And I just kind of want to get your kind of feedback and have another I have a question, but so the podcast name is going to be the tea tapes. And so now that the brand is going to be called the Tea Tapes and the Tea Tapes is kind of like an experiment in journalism and product. So we're a media company that sells a product tea. And our vision is to waken the planet through tea, both literally with the tea products and metaphorically through the media we produce. You can kind of think of the company as what something would look like if a journalist were to open an e-commerce brand. You can think of the company as what something would look like if a journalist were to open an e-commerce brand. And the customer I'm reaching out to with this first product who I know how to talk to, it's like they're kind of like a personality within the tea tapes. And so the first product is it's like the people's tea. And this avatar is like the everyday working man or woman that cares about current events, world affairs, and social justice. So I used to be a journalist. This is why I have a passion behind this. And in a simplistic way, so it's just this one personality. And I talked to Greg once about this a little bit. I just don't want to offend anybody. But like, simply, it could be described like this.
Speaker 1So, Sean, I'm enjoying this. I'm enjoying where you're going with all of this. I can tell you put a lot of thought into this. And part of my job is going to help you simplify this into something that is a little bit clearer, because it's a little complicated at the moment. So before we go there, tell me about the sale a day, how you're getting it, where the customers are coming from. Like, tell me about what is right now.
Speaker 2They're mainly coming from an email list that's like a. It's like 120 people. And then I have like Instagram, it's like 100 followers. And it's coming from people that. So I was. When I started, I sold tea at like pop-ups. And so some of those sales are coming from in-person transactions that I had done at one point. Okay. And where are people buying from you online right now?
Speaker 1When you go online, where do they come from? When you're doing that sale a day, where is that coming from?
Speaker 2Oh, not a sale a day. A sale a week, if that's worse.
Speaker 1Okay. So the traffic that. Like, where would somebody buy your tea right now? They'd buy it at my website. Okay. So they'd buy it on your website. Are you on Amazon right now? I'm not on Amazon. Okay. Is there a reason why you're doing it all on your website and not on Amazon? It's fine whichever way you want to go. But tell me your rationale.
Speaker 2Amazon was confusing to me at first. And I was trying to control it all. I don't have. I don't care. If you tell me, "Hey, Sean, you need to go on Amazon," I'm going to figure out how to do it tomorrow. And that's one of my questions, actually. Should I be on Amazon? Yes. After I just heard Gold Mamas, they were like, "We just put it on Amazon." And then a month later, we didn't have any product. I was like, "Shit."
Speaker 1Yes, you should be on Amazon. Right? Right. Now, here's the thing. I'm fine with someone taking sales off of Amazon if they have an audience, marketing experience, an agency that they're working with to build up funnels. But if you don't have any of that, you need to make it as simple AF for people to buy from you. Okay. And that's Amazon.com. It's still the best option for people to be able to find you. Buy from you and have the product in their home. An acquaintance of mine, his name's Brian Lee. Brian was the founder of The Honest Company with Jessica Alba. He was also the founder of LegalZoom. He was the founder of Art of Sport with the late Kobe Bryant. He was the founder of Shoe Dazzle with Kim Kardashian. And I heard him say once that a win for their company is when the product shows up in their home. That's the win. The win is how is the product being received at home and displayed somewhere? So we're indifferent as to whether they buy from our website or Etsy or Amazon. We're indifferent to this. But at the beginning, we need to make it as easy as possible for someone to become a customer. And that, especially with something like tea, that's Amazon.com. So step one, yes, you should be on Amazon. Right. Now, before you go and rebrand and rename the company and go in a completely different direction, could you take the same purpose of what you're trying to do of raising awareness, raising consciousness, awakening the planet? Could you take that same purpose into the brand as it currently is today?
Speaker 2I could. It's also easy for me just to change the flip. To name out.
Speaker 1Okay. I mean, follow your heart on this one, but I would discourage you from making a whole bunch of wholesale business changes this early in the process. Unless you were like, you know what? I never wanted it to be that brand. I wanted it to be this brand. It's early. I'm going to make the decision to go in this direction. That's fine. You have my blessing to do that. But don't make the changes because you're like, this isn't working. Right. I think this. People work different because the truth is, Sean, we haven't tried yet. It's too early to say we gave this a real go. We're not on Amazon. We haven't built a real audience yet. We're not documenting the process yet. You haven't built your traffic triangle yet. You're not communicating in the way that you want to be communicating long term to the audience and to the customers. So we haven't made a real go at that brand yet. So are you changing because you genuinely desire this other direction more? Or is it because, ah, this isn't working. I need to throw it out and start all over?
Speaker 2I think it's sort of a mix.
Speaker 1All right. This is a decision you'll have to make for yourself and your business. I just want you to know that I don't think you've failed on this brand yet.
Speaker 2I don't feel like I've failed.
Speaker 1Right. I don't think the branding is wrong. I don't think that's the problem.
Speaker 2Right. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I feel like it's just because I don't have passion about who I'm trying to talk to and how I'm trying to tell this story. So you can change that at any moment, right? I can do what you're saying.
Speaker 1You can change that without changing anything else in the business. Right. Step two, communicate to that person regardless of what the brand is called. I have someone I worked with very closely for years that was doing $7 million a year and then had to completely rebrand everything because of a miscommunication in the marketplace with a brand that looked a lot like theirs. And it was fine. New logo, new packaging, new name, new color scheme, new ads, same business. So it's not as hard of a pivot as we perceive it to be. And I mean, Sean, I've changed the name of my podcast like four times. And people are still here. So you can always make that change. I just want you to know you can start communicating to that person and get started. It's sales, even if the brand doesn't change.
Speaker 2So if I put my product on Amazon and I send out an email with a link to where the product's going, is that going to the Amazon site or should it go into my site? Or is my site being able to buy through Amazon?
Speaker 1So you can look up YouTube videos or training is inside the 1% for getting set up on Amazon. But until you're doing a consistent 25%, sales a day, you should send all the traffic to Amazon.
Speaker 2I'll send it there.
Speaker 1You should, and if you've got traffic coming from Instagram or an ad, you should be sending it to a place where you collect an email and then you send them to Amazon. Have you watched the training about the traffic triangle, Sean?
Speaker 2I have my traffic triangle set up.
Speaker 1Okay, tell me about your traffic triangle.
Speaker 2So my traffic triangle is going to be the podcast and it's kind of like a newsy kind of thing. Um, and that's one question. I have, so I'm, I'm passionate about what I want to do with the, uh, the, uh, podcast, but I'm kind of not selling tea anymore. You know, I mean, I'm doing what you're saying though. It's like a brand rather than the product, but it's kind of, I think you referenced this once to somebody else that has a tea thing. And you were telling them, look at creatures of habit. And, uh, and I look at that, that guy is, but he's very focused on what he's selling. He's selling this, uh, uh, the oats or whatever. So, yeah, and, um, yeah, I haven't really listened to his podcast, but, um, he's, he's like, you got to get habits and one, the, the one habit is eating oatmeal.
Speaker 1That's right. That's right. So tell me about your traffic triangle.
Speaker 2Yeah. So that's the, that's like the hopper, uh, slash, uh, traffic and then Instagram and then my email.
Speaker 1Okay. Very good. Very good. So let me clean this up. For you a little bit. Instagram is going to be your traffic. Okay. Podcast is your hopper and your email list is your conversion source. That's your traffic triangle. So how does all of this flow when there's a news item that you want to talk about? You do a podcast about it, right? You do a daily show, a three times a week show, however you do it. That's your podcast. You're going to clip that up. And that's going to be your Instagram exposure with your opinions on what's going on from the context of awakening the planet. Right, right. You're going to talk about every podcast is sponsored by your tea where you can get 20% off. If you're a new customer, if you go over to awaken the planet.com slash T and now we just need to run this process for long enough until we have a little bit of an audience. Okay. And over after about 90 days, something's going to happen.
Speaker 2Hmm. Okay. And if I'm, I want to like, once I'm, I've just, uh, optimized my landing page. I haven't, I haven't changed it yet, but it's in the backend and I've optimized it toward this person that I'm talking about. And so it speaks, it's like what, what those girls just said. They were like, they optimize it toward the person that what you always suggest. Um, I want to run ads right away and like, kind of like prime the pump, you know, while I'm building the brand with the podcast and utilizing the traffic triangle and everything, is there like an average order value that I should be aiming for in order to like, I think that's
Speaker 1the wrong question for where you're at in the business right now, instead of focusing on average order value, I want you to focus on cost per email. Because here's, here's what you're going to do as your, like your job right now, Sean, is to be building your audience. So what I would do if I were you is I would take the clips that got the most views and shares on social media. I would run those as ads with calls to action about what you're trying to do. So you do, you do a news clip about. The current election and your take on it and how the world needs to awaken more than ever. Right. One of the ways that we're doing that is by putting out content and selling tea.
Speaker 2So not, not ads for sales, not ads for conversion. You're trying to just not the metric.
Speaker 1I want you to measure right now. The metric I want you to measure is how you're getting email addresses on your conversion
Speaker 2list. So you're going to go to your conversion list and you're going to go to your conversion list. And you're going to go to your conversion list.
Speaker 1and get into your audience, a much cleaner, easier way for you to drum up those initial sales. If you need help with your business on your road to 100 sales a day, that's what we specialize in, the 1%. We help entrepreneurs get to 100 sales a day because 100 sales a day is just four products at 25 sales a day at a $30 price point, which is a million dollar business. That's what we do inside the 1%. And if you'd like to hang out with us and be a part of these Thursday coaching calls, you can apply for a spot over at capitalism.com slash one. I'm Ryan Moran with capitalism.com. Thank you for being here and I'll see you on the next episode. If you found value in this podcast and you're ready to go deeper, here are three resources where we can help you. One, you can grab my book, 12 Months to 1 Million on Audible or Amazon. It has over a thousand reviews and it's the playbook to building a seven figure business. Second, you can join our community of entrepreneurs who are following a plan to build a 1% net worth by building businesses and investing the profits. You can get plugged in at capitalism.com slash one. And third, if you're looking to go deeper and build a seven figure business that you can sell, you can work closely with us inside the Capitalism Incubator and you can get on the waiting list and find out what we do over at capitalism.com slash inc. That's capitalism.com slash inc.
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