Setting up your direct sales environment

Learn how to find your perfect customers, develop a process to help them fall in love with your work, and keep them happy for the long haul.

---

This article discusses the different pieces of your direct sales environment. Before you can start really scaling, you need to understand the base-level concepts discussed in this article. Many of these concepts are quite new so even if you’re rocking and rolling, you will probably find something new in this article.

If you are a paid member, then I recommend my articles on How to fall in love with book marketing, Where to invest your time and money when building an audience for your writing and Spinning a great idea into book marketing gold to build on these concepts.

If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.

---

Direct sales can be an overwhelming monster if you don’t know where to focus your energy. Even though there are only five major components (website sales, landing pages, crowdfunding, subscriptions, events) within those categories are thousands of success paths.

Even just setting up a mailing list comes with hundreds of options from hosting to designing your email sequence. However, there are some major components of every direct sales environment that help foster success.

While I can’t tell you what email platform to use, I can show you the elements you should put in place before you can start scaling your author business.

This stuff is hard and most people run away from it instead of digging in. Just remember, things grow where you exert effort. Additionally, there is evidence to support we find joy where we exert effort.

Aside from the fact that work or effort often gives us meaning, there is very often sheer joy in the process of expending effort towards a particular task. While many of us think of relaxation in terms of indulging in tasks that require no physical or mental effort on our part, several others, like mountaineers, Rubix-cubers, and strategy gamers, actively choose effortful endeavors because they give them a deep sense of joy. -Aditi Subramaniam, Ph.D.

That said, it’s really hard to get started with direct sales. There are all sorts of reasons why this is true, but the main one is that you have created a pump, but what you really need to create is a flywheel.

What is the difference? First, a pump.

All pumps use basic forces of nature to move a liquid. As the moving pump part (impeller, vane, piston diaphragm,etc.) begins to move, air is pushed out of the way. The movement of air creates a partial vacuum (low pressure) which can be filled up by more air, or in the case of water pumps, water.

A pump works by expending force on a level and getting a predictable return from the first pump to the last. It’s a very good encapsulation of Newton’s third law.

The reaction force is always equal in strength to the action force but in the opposite direction

We think that building an audience is a pump, but it’s really a flywheel.

A flywheel is a mechanical device which uses the conservation of angular momentum to store rotational energy; a form of kinetic energy proportional to the product of its moment of inertia and the square of its rotational speed. In particular, assuming the flywheel's moment of inertia is constant (i.e., a flywheel with fixed mass and second moment of area revolving about some fixed axis) then the stored (rotational) energy is directly associated with the square of its rotational speed.

In common language, a flywheel takes a ton of effort to get going, but with each rotation, it gets easier and easier to keep the flywheel going. If you want to see a really good primer on this, I highly suggest watching this video.

When people ask me how I keep doing this work, I tell them it’s actually really easy to keep at it once you get your flywheel going.

Those first pushes are impossible, but eventually, you can keep a flywheel going with a light touch.

When you combine this with a marketing funnel to bring people into your universe, you create a virtuous sales cycle.

A marketing funnel describes your customer’s journey with you. From the initial stages when someone learns about your business, to the purchasing stage, marketing funnels map routes to conversion and beyond. With careful analysis, a marketing funnel lets you know what your company must do to influence consumers at certain stages. By evaluating your funnels, you can potentially drive greater sales, more loyalty and stronger brand awareness.

If you’re creating a business where you funnel people in and then create a flywheel to keep your business going, it becomes easier over time.

So many people who have been doing this for years are still making a pump. You need to get past the days of putting in one unit of effort and getting one unit of engagement back, and start trying to make your flywheel sustainable.

This is the biggest reason I just can’t ever stop doing this work because I know that it will be impossible to start again.

Let’s dive a little deeper into each of these components.

***This is a long post that will be truncated in emails. I highly recommend you go to this page to read the whole 10,000-word post without interruption.***

Photo by Ian Parker on Unsplash

Building your Ideal client avatar

Before we can start building the elements of your environment, we need to know who will “live” in that environment. These are the “ideal clients” who will find your environment a perfect fit.

Think about penguins. If you bring them to the Sahara, the penguins will have a bad time, but if you put them in the chilly Antarctic, they’ll be happy little buddies. The Sahara is the perfect place for camels and scorpions, though. There are no perfect environments. It’s all about matching the customers with the right environment. We do that by creating an ideal client avatar.

While “ideal client avatar” sounds like marketing gibberish, it’s one of the most important principles to understand if you want to build a career in the arts—or any career, frankly.

An ideal client avatar represents the person who most resonates with your message and is thus incredibly likely to buy your product. It is the virtual representation of your perfect customer.

There are two factors that come into play that help determine your ideal client avatar. The first factor is somebody who has a very high customer lifetime value. The second factor is a person with a very low customer acquisition cost. 

Customer lifetime value is the amount somebody will buy from you over the course of their life. Your ideal customer will be the type of person who spends at least a hundred dollars on your products every year. This is a concept made famous by Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired. Kelly wrote a piece on his blog in 2008 called “1,000 True Fans,” which became one of the definitive pieces on building an audience with its claim that if an artist can find one thousand people willing to spend one hundred dollars a year on their work, then they can successfully make a living on their art. Even though I have issues with this theory, I hope we can all agree that generating $100,000 in income would make a very successful year.

Conversely, customer acquisition cost is the amount of money it costs to find a new customer and make a sale. Between tabling at conventions, sending mailing list updates, advertising, and all of the other monetary outlays that come part and parcel with finding a client, the less we spend acquiring a client means we make more money at the end of the day.

Simply put, your ideal client avatar is the person most receptive to your message and the person with whom you most want to speak.

It has to be both.

There will be people you want to speak with who have no interest in your message, and people who want to hear your message that you don’t care about at all. The ideal client avatar is the beautiful merging of these two points.

So…how do we find our ideal client avatar?

First, we must find the type of people who inspire us to create. This will take some deep reflection, but you know there is a person in your life who will love your product more than anybody else. This doesn’t have to be your family. It can be a friend or even somebody you aren’t that close with, though I highly recommend staying inside your close friend circle at first.

Have you thought of somebody? Good. Then, let’s build an avatar. 

To start forming our ideal client, we need to test whether that person will be the right fit to buy what you are trying to sell. Remember, just because you want to make products for somebody doesn’t mean your products will resonate with them.

To find out if somebody is a good fit, we have to look at their social media feeds for a while to see what kinds of stuff they like. We need to make sure they are buying what you are selling. If you want to make death metal pins and they are buying fluffy bunny plushes, you are barking up the wrong tree and need to start over.

Once you are relatively confident that they buy the same type of stuff that you want to make, it’s time to interview them. It doesn’t have to be anything formal, but you want feedback about why they buy what they buy. Do they like bright colors or are they more into texture? Does size matter? What is it that resonates with them when they buy something?

After you have that interview, it’s time to make some different products and show them to your ideal client. This is why using an immediate friend or family member is easiest because they will be open and receptive to looking at your product. This is also why it’s best not to pick your mother or anybody who will automatically love anything that you do. You want real and honest feedback about whether you are doing something that resonates with your ideal client.

This interview isn’t about selling your product, but you need to know if they would buy what you are trying to sell. If you can’t tell whether or not they would buy your product, push harder. This is critical research and if you get it wrong then your business will suffer and you will have to start again. You don’t want to build the wrong customer avatar.

Once you’ve done your research, it’s time to rock and roll into mass production, right? Absolutely and unequivocally not.     

You don’t want to go into mass production just yet. After you have a good idea that your work will resonate with the right person, you need to find other people who will also be perfect fits for your product. This is the beginning of the ideal client avatar.

Create a profile of your ideal client based on your initial research. This profile needs to be as complete as you can make it. Your ideal client avatar should feel like a real person who lives and breathes. Your profile should include their name, age, ethnicity, interests, personality traits, favorite foods, favorite TV shows, favorite movies, favorite bands, favorite websites, and anything else you can think of to make your avatar feel like a real person.

Once you have the profile created, use it to find five to ten other people who fit your ideal client avatar. Replicate the same process you used before. Interview your potential customers and show them your product just as you like did with the original person.

Some of the assumptions you made about your ideal client will be correct and some will be wildly misinformed. That’s okay. That’s how it should be. Use the new data you collected from these interviews to recreate your ideal client avatar and focus it more clearly. Your avatar will now become more complete and fleshed out because you have five to ten times the research data. 

After finding five to ten people who love your product, it’s time to test your ideal client avatar on people you don’t know.

To do this, you need to create a small batch of products. Then, find a craft fair, comic convention, or job fair where your ideal client avatar exists in the real world. Bring your products to this event. Find people who resemble your ideal client and see if they rabidly buy what you are selling.

If they do, use your new data to compile a more complete customer avatar. If they do not, analyze why they are not buying your product, make corrections to your avatar, and try again. The more people you speak with, the more complete and real your customer avatar will become.

The stronger your ideal client avatar, the more you will be able to focus on creating a product for the right kind of person, lowering your customer acquisition cost, and increasing your lifetime customer value. Then, you can use all that data to find more people who fit that profile, which is the key to scaling your creative business.

It’s also a good idea to become a consumer of the things you want to make. I meet creators all the time who don't buy the things that they sell. There is nothing wrong with this on the surface. You are not required to be your own perfect customer.

However, you should go on the journey with the customer, so you can see the world through their eyes. I have run a lot of companies in my life, and the more I used the products I was selling, the more I could understand the pain points of the customer. I understood what the customer wanted because I was the customer.

Surveying your audience is a great way to understand their needs, but there is nothing like the firsthand account of walking around a convention and seeing what catches your eye. There's nothing like reading the most popular books in your field and saying, "I liked when they did that.”

By consuming the books you are writing, you develop a better understanding of what your readers like and what they don’t like by experiencing them yourself.

This kind of research is invaluable to communicating with your customers. It creates an in-depth dialogue. I believe that I sell 10 – 20 percent of my products on passion alone, but it goes deeper than that. People respond to my passion because I'm passionate about the same things they are. They know I have gone on the customer journey with them, seen what was broken, and did my best to fix it.

That last bit is important because no customer journey is perfect. There are wonderful things about every market, but there are also things so glaringly broken it’s frustrating for people. If you understand the joy and the pain of your customer, you can make a product perfect for them, and articulate why it is perfect. That last bit is the most important part of any sale.

Photo by Spencer Backman on Unsplash

Turning a cold prospect into a warm lead

Before we get to your customer’s journey, we have to first talk about why we even need to take them on a journey, and to do that we have to talk about cold prospects and warm leads.

A cold prospect is a person you just met who doesn’t know you from Adam. They don’t know your brand, they don’t know what you offer, and they have no interest in buying what you have to sell…yet.

Cold prospects have no affinity for your product. Until you met, they had no idea who you were as a creative. That doesn’t stop most creatives from seeing this initial meeting as a chance to sell their product. Of course, these efforts are a miserable failure since cold prospects don’t buy products.

This makes complete sense when you think about it in your own life, doesn’t it? I mean, how often do you go from discovering a new product to buying it on the same day? It doesn’t happen very often in my own life.

I usually have to sit on a product for days, if not weeks, before I buy something. I need to groove on the cost and the value. I have to research the company and make sure it aligns with my values. I have to determine that the product won’t turn to dust in my hands after use. My money is precious to me. I worked hard for it and want to make sure I give it to worthy people.

This is how most people see buying products, and it’s why they generally buy from brands they know. When I need a hammer, I go to Home Depot because they are a brand I know. I’m not a cold prospect for them. I’m in their warm lead audience.

Warm audiences are full of people who know and trust your brand; they are the people working their way through the inside of your funnel. They gain value from what you do and are convinced your brand offers quality products. To build the most engaged audience, we need to turn as many people from cold prospects into warm leads as possible.

The system we’re setting up is designed to take a customer from a cold prospect to a warm lead, and eventually into a burning hot ember excited to buy from you.

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

Mapping your customer journey with a sales funnel

Now that we’ve defined your customer, we need to define their customer journey.

Creating a customer journey map is the process of forming a visual representation of customers’ processes, needs, and perceptions throughout their interactions and relationship with an organization. It helps you understand the steps customers take – the ones you see, and don’t – when they interact with your business. -Qualtrics

Very few customers will ever close on a deal the day you meet them. Customers need time to get to know you, like you, and build trust with you before they buy your product or service. What you do today is predictive of your success in six to eight weeks.

That’s right.

Your hard work today won’t pay off for nearly two months. This is what hampers many artists from growing their businesses. They give up before they can ever realistically succeed. We live in a world of instant gratification, and success in business is a long-term payoff. Over time, your hard work compounds through the success of your sales funnel.

A sales funnel is no different than a funnel you would use in your kitchen or to put oil into your car—wide at the top with a narrow bottom. Into the top of the funnel goes potential customers and out the bottom comes clients.  It’s as simple as that.

There are five stages in my sales funnel. The first stage is that people need to know you exist. This is called the Awareness stage.

At this stage of the funnel, you aren’t trying to find the right clients. You are simply looking for as many potential customers as possible. The rest of the funnel will weed out people who are bad matches for your product, and leave you only with perfect fits. You need to cast the widest net possible at this stage, because the wider the top of the funnel becomes, the wider it will be at the bottom.

Let’s assume you need to talk with one hundred people in order to find one client. If you only talk to twenty people a month, you will not find a new client for five months. In this case, by simply talking to five times more people, you can find a client every month. If you increase that to two or three hundred people a month, you can find two to three clients a month. This alone can exponentially increase your revenue.

The second stage of the funnel is getting people to like you. This is called the Consideration stage.

This is when we start narrowing the funnel down. We need to push out content that is attractive to our ideal client, whether that means sharing comic book pages, short stories, or articles about pandas.

Whatever you share, it should be hyper-targeted to your ideal client. If it is, then people who are interested in the things you are sharing will grow to like you. Meanwhile, people who aren’t interested will drop out of your funnel before you invest too much energy in them.

This is the stage where people fall out of your funnel the most. You shouldn’t be nervous when people unfollow you or unsubscribe from your mailing list at this point. My mailing list has a 31 percent unsubscribe rate in the first couple of weeks of somebody joining. I love that number because it means I’m weeding out the people who don’t care about what I do.

This process of showing people what you do, building empathy with your ideal client, and weeding out ones who don’t care about your message is one of the most powerful tools in business. Unfortunately, because of our natural need to be liked, we shy away from offending anybody. As a result, we try to please everybody and thus attract nobody.

Weeding out people who don’t fit your product is a natural part of business. You shouldn’t care about those people anyway, because they won’t buy from you. Heck, they don’t even like you. Your job isn’t to please people who have no interest in what you are doing with your business. Your job is to connect with as many people as possible and let the right ones self-select to be part of your network over the long haul.

The third stage of the funnel is making people trust you. This is called the Decision stage.

This is the trickiest part of the funnel. Everybody left at this stage of the funnel is in your ideal customer pool. Now, you have to convince them to buy your product. Even within your ideal client pool, there will be people who don’t like your specific take and won’t buy.

Take a car for instance. Even among car buyers, some people want the most reliable vehicle for their family, others want a sports car with the fastest engine. Still, others want the most luxurious ride on the road.

That’s why car companies have multiple brands and models. There are many features people might want, and it’s critical to target the right message to the right customer. If we didn’t have different needs, then everybody would be driving around in the same beige Honda Accord, right?

But we aren’t driving around in the same cars. There are more than a hundred different types of cars on the road, all with different features, sold by different companies, under different brands. They all capture a different part of the market. They all speak to a different type of person.

The same is true with your product. If you create high-end geek chic necklaces that cost $100 or more, then you are isolating yourself from people who are looking for cheap charms, and isolating yourself even more from people looking for an art print, or a comic book.

And that’s natural. That’s good. Heck, that’s necessary to create a sustainable business. This is what finding the right client for your product is all about.

The fourth stage of the funnel is making your customer happy. You have proven you are the right person to help them. Hooray! You’ve got a customer. Now we have to keep them happy so they buy again. This is called the Retention stage.

Notice there are three stages in this funnel before buying your product even comes into the equation. There will be people in your funnel who know you but won’t like you, like you but won’t trust you, and trust you but won’t buy from you.

We can see this play out in our own lives. We all have a coworker we hate but can’t get rid of, or a family member we love but wouldn’t trust with a dollar of our money. We all have those people in our lives, but we also have a friend we would gladly give money to because we know they’ll use our money to do something awesome.

The same is true with your business. Most people won’t buy from you. When I go to a convention, I’m lucky if one percent of people sign up for my mailing list and 10 percent of those people ever buy from me. Even at a convention like San Diego Comic-Con, where I make thousands of dollars, I only sell a few hundred books and there are over 160,000 people in attendance.

But that’s okay. In fact, that’s how a funnel is supposed to work. This year we were set up in the small press area of San Diego Comic-Con, which meant people who came down our aisle self-identified as people who liked independent comic books. That already narrowed the field of potential customers down quite a bit.

From there, all I had to do was engage with as many people as possible so that some of them would like me, and some of those people would trust me, and then some of those people would buy from me.

In the end, by knowing how many people would attend the event, I could accurately predict how much I would make, and next year I can make an even more accurate prediction because I have even more data. This is the power of the funnel. If you understand how it works, you can predict the revenue for your entire business months into the future.

The final stage is about building evangelists who will tell other people about your work. The absolute best marketing comes from word of mouth. When other people talk about your work to their friends, it’s much easier to get others to buy than from your own marketing efforts. This is called the Advocacy stage.

This can include providing referral links, building a strong community, offering giveaways to readers, or generally showering them with love. Most importantly, it involves creating mind-blowing products people can’t help but talk about with other people. This is called network effects.

The network effect is a business principle that illustrates the idea that when more people use a product or service, its value increases. The network effect significantly applies to digital platforms, dating all the way back to the internet itself. -Wharton

This is not an effect contained to your buyers, either. One of the best ways to generate network effects is among other creators doing interesting work. You can create a recommendation network through platforms like Substack, Sparkloop, or Beehiiv to cross-promote with other creators.

This cross-promotion feature provides a way for writers to promote and discover each other on their own terms.

Writers cross-promoting each other has been the key to discovery on the internet since its inception, notably in the blogosphere, where writers’ blogrolls helped unearth niche communities and build bonds of trust between writers. -Substack

A quick story about network effects, and how when one creator wins the whole network wins. Laura Kennedy from Peak Notions was interviewed and spotlighted by Substack.

I love Laura’s work, so I was rooting for her really hard when I read it, but throughout the day I noticed that I was getting dozens of free subscribers to my Substack.

I usually get 20-30 a day, so I was very confused to get 60+ in just a couple of hours. It took me a while to think “Wait, doesn’t Laura recommend The Author Stack?”

So, I checked and her publication had sent me 50 recommendations that day. Laura ended up getting 1,500+ subscribers from that article, and I received over 100 because she recommended my publication. You never know where those surges will come from, but they can be very powerful if you set them up properly.

I have over 100 publications recommending mine, and I recommend a bunch, too. Every month I get 300-500 from it and everyone else gets a bit from me I hope. Nobody needs to do the bulk of the work when everyone is working together.

There is one more point I want to make before ending this section. When you start selling your work, a small number of people will buy from you immediately. This is because you have spent decades building up trust with certain people in your life. Those people have already worked their way to the bottom of your funnel and are ready to make a buying decision the moment you launch your storefront. Once those people work their way through the bottom of your funnel, though, there won’t be anybody left to buy your product if you haven’t built out the top of your funnel properly.

I’ve seen far too many creatives tell me that lots of people bought their book in the first month of release, but they haven’t seen another sale for over a year. This happens because they relied on their existing network to buy their product initially, and once those people flushed out of their funnel there was nobody to replace them. Remember, a funnel is only as good as the number of people you put into the top of it. 

Photo by Shengjun Shi on Unsplash

Building a sales funnel into your mailing list