Joyful Selling for Creative Professionals

Welcome to today's episode, featuring an inspiring interview with Joyful Selling member Susannah Brookes, a talented silver jewellery designer from Nottingham who transforms sentimental pieces like a mother's wedding dress into bespoke pieces.

Susannah shares her journey of transitioning from a part-time side hustle to a full-time business.

We delve into her approach to time management, sharing practical tips on calendaring and organising tasks to boost productivity and creativity.

Moreover, Susannah sheds light on her marketing challenges and how focusing on her dream customer has revolutionised her approach to selling. 

Join us for an engaging conversation that offers valuable insights into balancing creativity with business acumen and the joy of turning a passion into a thriving company-of-one.

Find Susannah: Instagram + website.

After a year long podcast pause I'm ready to speak up again and share my inner thoughts and musings about the world of independent creative business from the angle of generating revenue and having fun with it! Today I simply share getting back on the horse in the simplest way possible. What do you need to get back on track with?

Our success panel of 3 Joyful Selling for Creative Professional program members includes a small batch skincare and soap maker, a designer/maker of vegan accessories and a lino cut artist.

We dive into the specifics of the thought work that has made an incredible difference to all of their businesses with actionable ways they are creating more cash.

I know you feel overwhelmed quite a bit and part of that is because of all the creativity that's bursting through your veins which you want to release to the world. How amazing!

Yet, if you want to run a sustainable business that creates customers and sales then please channel some of this awesome creative energy into the other areas that you might be labelling 'boring'.

Today I remind you of the Joyful Selling basics because anchoring into these 3 stages like a wonderful cycle will support you to build a balanced business that is supported by your unique creative flair.

In today’s episode I offer a 3 step process to audit your Instagram content over the past 7 or 30 days.

The steps:

1, Quantity

2, Quality

3, Expectation

Once audited you will have a series of specific actionable tasks to get on with to work towards creating the revenue you want to create with your social media marketing.

You can utilise these steps as an end of the month evaluation process that helps you decide what to do differently next month.

Pausing to reflect with an effective framework like this will help guide your actions as a creative professional who sells their work.

Enjoy!

Today we focus on selling.

I share with you an overarching mindset shift that will impact the words you write and the visuals you share that will hugely improve your ability to sell your work.

Rather than asking yourself ‘what do I need to do?’ or saying to yourself ‘I don’t know what to do’ you get the opportunity to ask yourself ‘What do THEY need right now?’

The trick is to redirect your brain away from YOU and over to THEM.

THEM being your audience and your customers.

I walk you through 10 mega useful prompts:

1, What do they need to hear today so that making their purchase is obvious?

2, What don’t they know about my best selling product?

3, I wonder if they’re worried about when the product will arrive, I’m going to walk them through exactly what happens after they’ve pressed the buy button.

4, They might not realise how easy it is to style/wear/put up/

5, Do they know this is what I actually sell and that it’s available right now?

6, Some of them might prefer to buy from me in person so I’m going to let them know where I’ll be selling at in-person events.

7, I’m going to let them know how they can customise/personalise their products today.

8, They might be finding it difficult to pick a colour so today I’m going to talk through the colour options and describe the shades and what they work well with.

9, Sizing is a tough one online so I’m going to help them visualise the sizes in the most useful way.

10, I think some of my people are _______-loveres - I’m going to talk directly to them today to show them everything I have that features __________.

Enjoy serving your people to an impeccable standard and see the sales flow in.

In May, Joyful Selling member, artist and dance instructor, Sam Bratby is inviting us Rollers into her Kitchen Dance Club on Instagram to learn a series of micro-movements to boost up with whilst we work.

On today’s episode we decide to record one of our meetings on Zoom as we decide how to approach our social media collaboration, why it’s important to both of us and how to make it logistically work on social media.

If you enjoy a peek behind the scenes of creative business life and collaboration you’ll enjoy being a fly on the wall for this one.

I know what it feels like to wear a lot of hats in creative entrepreneurship and feel like the head that’s wearing the hat has too much in it. Most of my members join us with a flavour of this happening so I help them empty it all out for focus and clarity.

You’ve probably heard of journaling and maybe even Thought Downloading which is the term coined by the coaching school I trained at.

Basically, it’s writing down the thoughts in your head as a way of releasing them from your brain and giving them some space and light to be seen and dealt with on purpose.

As perfectionists and/or people pleasers we can get stuck in our heads about getting the words out of our heads so today’s episode is going to show you there is no perfect way of doing it whilst offering useful guidelines to pick and choose from.

You’ll learn:

1, Thoughts are not facts. They are optional sentences where you are trying to make meaning of your life and keep yourself safe.

2, Writing down thoughts bring them more into your awareness so you can consciously choose or create the ones you want to take direction from.

3, You don’t have to act on every thought in your head.

4, Being in conversation with the thoughts in your head via writing on the page is how you can change your relationship with conditioned beliefs that don’t serve you in the here and now.

What type of relationship do you currently have with the numbers in your business?

The two main groups of numbers are your sales and revenue figures and your social media and selling platform numbers.

What thoughts are you having right now when you think about these sets of numbers in your business and how do this thoughts make you feel?

What I’ve noticed is that so many of us humans have a dysfunctional relationship with the numbers because of how we relate to them.

In this episode I walk through the 3 phases of dysfunction:

1, Head in the sand phase.

2, Disappointed and discouraged phase.

3, Frustrated and confused phase.

Then you will learn how to ask different questions about the data in your business so you can move through these phases and into a more empowered role.

If you sometimes think you don’t know what you’re doing or you think that nothing is working in your marketing and selling then I have a simple business tool for you today.

Now, when I say ‘simple’ it’s because it’s straight-forward with 3 steps to follow yet I’ve found creative professionals don’t do it because it may feel tedious.

Yet it’s this 60 minutes of tedious work once a month that can show you that you DO know what you’re doing and what IS working so you can do more of it.

The business tool is: evaluation.

Doesn’t sound all that fun does it!

So in today’s new episode of the #JoyfulSelling podcast I offer it to you in a jazzier way which is thinking about it like a pizza party.

A monthly pizza party in your creative business where you get to divide up the big pie of 2023 into separate monthly slices to make it more digestible.

Rather than letting each month roll on without really being sure where the money is coming from and letting stories about not having enough time and people not buying right now be the reason you’re not creating the cash you want - you get to take responsibility for it instead.

Taking responsibility for creating the sales is where you want to be, trust me.

It means that changing your current result is within your power which means the actions you take matter.

And all that action can easily be forgotten or misremembered over time so writing it down helps you know what you’re doing so you can make necessary tweaks.