[00:00:00] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: ... Welcome, I am Marketing Expert and Business Coach Melissa Kellogg Lueck, and this is the Doing Business Like a Woman podcast, where we are exploring and teaching you how women are reinventing the way business is done and money is made to help you create greater impact and financial freedom, one business at a time.
[00:00:25] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: so I wanna just give some direction of where we're going today and why I really wanted to host this. I'm calling it a mastermind like meeting. So. I really feel strongly about helping us all to launch powerfully into Q3 and getting the support that you need to get into action. What I noticed, so what I noticed, so many women are really great in learning.
[00:00:52] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: We take all the classes, we download all the freebies, we buy all the. You know, we do all the free master classes, all the things, [00:01:00] and we spend a lot of time learning, but not as much time actioning. And so I wanna really offer a shift today for you that there's nothing wrong with learning. We all, you know, the whole entrepreneurial journey is about learning.
[00:01:16] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: But I want you to, to consider that you have everything you need right now. To build the business, achieve the financial goal, the client goal, the impact goal that you have. Right now, you have everything that you need. You don't need to learn one more thing from the outside and to really shift your learning to the inside, the inside of your business.
[00:01:41] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: What is your business telling you? What are your clients telling you? What is your, your community telling you? And what are, what is your internal wisdom telling you? And really think about learning from there. Right? And and the only way we get [00:02:00] clarity in that way is by taking action and then evaluating.
[00:02:07] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: And that's really what we're gonna talk about today. And. My hope is that you leave with at least one action that you can take today that will create for you a 10 x return on the time you spend with me today. 'cause obviously this was a free session, but I know that free doesn't mean free because your time is worth a lot more than any money you could ever spend.
[00:02:33] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: 'cause we can always make more money, but we'll never make more time. Right? So so what you walk away with in this. Time we have together. I want you to have one action that you can take that will make this worth 10 x what you thought it should be worth, right? Or worth your time. And so just to set the stage, okay, here we go.
[00:02:54] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: So, what I really see is holding us back as women entrepreneurs from [00:03:00] the progress and the growth and the revenue that we want is this, you know, lots of overlearning and under actioning. Under marketing and underearning. Okay. We're spending lots of hours and dollars learning, we're spending a lot more hours and dollars learning than we are implementing.
[00:03:19] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: Right? So just think about that for yourself. Like what is the, if you had to do a ratio of learning to actioning what would that be? And you know, what I would love to see it be is like. 10% learning and 90% actioning, or even if it was 80 20. Because it's really in the taking action, you know, learning something and then taking action on it right away, right?
[00:03:46] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: So if you're, you're believing that you have everything you need right now to build the business that you wanna build, to bring in the clients you wanna bring in to do the marketing and sales that you need to be doing. If you believed you have [00:04:00] everything you need right now. What is stopping you from taking the action?
[00:04:03] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: Right. And that's what I want us to really uncover today. And oftentimes, you know, we spend lots of hours, like I said, learning and not implementing. We're buying all these classes and then we, you know, for example, we buy a webinar class. You know, I have a client that's. Learning how to do webinars and she bought this webinar class and you know, has gone through this huge program and about how to do webinars, but she hasn't done any webinars yet.
[00:04:31] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: Or we do one webinar and then we give up. We say, well, it didn't go like I wanted, the people didn't show up, the marketing didn't work, so I'm not doing anymore. Well. You decide you're bad at webinars or we're bad at sales, or we're bad at marketing and we give up and we go search for the next big thing.
[00:04:49] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: Well, you're missing altogether the solution to getting better. You know, the fastest path to cash and, and impact to revenue and impact [00:05:00] is is taking action and then learning from that action right away. Right. And. So, you know, that's why I teach marketing differently. I, I teach marketing. It's not all about the marketing tactics, but it's asking how do you want to meet people and show up and nurture relationships with them.
[00:05:23] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: Right? Because if you just imagine that all marketing works, where do you, where would you love to show up to meet people? And because all marketing works because of your energy, not because of the tactic itself, right? So once you choose how you want to show up and you commit to mastering that marketing skill, or those very few one to three things, then you implement and you're gonna fail because that's part of the process.
[00:05:57] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: You evaluate, you [00:06:00] iterate, and then you go again and you keep going again and again and again. So that's what I teach my clients is the cycle of continuous improvement. So it's not, okay, we're gonna do a couple webinars and then decide they don't, webinars don't work for me. If you love doing webinars, then let's figure out what happened.
[00:06:22] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: You know, where the. Breakdown was and improve those little things. And so building a business is all about incremental improvement, all about the small things, all the way to success, right? So so that's what I want to talk about today. And just as an example, so I was telling you, I. Spent a lot of time this weekend.
[00:06:47] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: I have a sprained ankle, so I can't go out and, you know, go hiking and paddle boarding and all the things I love right now. So I'm stuck at home doing my puzzles, Robin. And [00:07:00] so I did spend some time really going through my numbers and I have a spreadsheet, so I create, I create these trackers. And I have a spreadsheet and love or hate spreadsheet.
[00:07:13] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: Michelle, she's probably like spreadsheets, right? I love spreadsheets. But anyway, so I have my whole marketing plan in a spreadsheet and I'll measure like the percentage of completion. So I have a goal. So like networking is one of my top. Marketing channels, right? So I have a goal to go to 10 networking events each month.
[00:07:37] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: So I'll measure like, how many did I actually go to, right? How many people did I meet? And I have goals for each one of my marketing actions. And then I measure based on the percentage of completion, like, you know, I, I only went to eight instead of 10, so it's only 80% completion, right? So I score myself.
[00:07:58] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: And so I've been key, I've [00:08:00] been doing this for years, but I looked at this year, the first half of the year so far, and what I noticed is my percent completion of my marketing plan is the exact same percentage of where I am in my goal for revenue. So for example, if I completed 50% of all my marketing activities and my revenues at 50% for the year.
[00:08:26] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: So what that tells me is if I wanna get to a hundred percent of my revenue, then I just go and be consistent with my marketing activities, right? And so what that also tells me is that my simple marketing plan that I've developed is dialed in. Like it's not that marketing actions that I need to improve, it's the consistency.
[00:08:48] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: And so that's what evaluation tells me. So what I wanna teach you today is how to evaluate effectively, so you too can do this. And then, you [00:09:00] know, at the end of evaluation exactly what are the improvements that you need to make to get to where you wanna go. And it's just small improvements so. Then you have this, these improvements, you make the improvements, and then you go out again and you go and you implement.
[00:09:18] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: Right? So evaluation is like going to school or taking a master class of what your business is trying to tell you. So that goes back to let's learn from inside our business rather than continually going outside and learning about everybody else's businesses. Right. And this is how you create rapid improvement and rapid growth in your business, right?
[00:09:44] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: Okay. So I'm gonna teach you my process for evaluation, and it's very simple, and you can do this for anything that you want to get better in your business. So whether it's [00:10:00] for, your sales conversations, you know, all the way from that to as simple as, you know, like Rob and I were talking about earlier, like systems, right?
[00:10:08] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: You can evaluate your systems. If something feels off, just take a moment and evaluate what's happening. And this gives you just crystal clarity on what you wanna change rather than throwing everything out. So there's three. Questions that to this evaluation process, and you do them all in the exact order that I'm gonna teach you.
[00:10:32] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: Because when we do it in this order, it opens your mind up to learning rather than criticism and judgment and despair. We've all been in that spiral, right, of like, nothing's working, everything sucks, and I'm not good at business. Whatever we, we wanna stay out of that. Line of thinking because that is not productive.
[00:10:56] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: Right. So our evaluation [00:11:00] process, we always go from the perspective of what we can control. 'cause there's a lot of things a, that we can't control. And so. Tell you when I got really, I'll tell you a little story about when I got really good at this process was early on in my coaching business and I did 12 sales calls in a row and all of them were nos and I was so obviously disappointed.
[00:11:30] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: I felt like a failure. I was feeling all the rejection from having all those nos. And the only thing that kept me going was this process because. When, so every time I would do a sales call, I would do this evaluation process and I would learn from every single one of those of what I need to improve to get better.
[00:11:52] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: And I would make those adjustments and then I'd have another sales call, I screw up some other things, right? But little [00:12:00] by little, you know, even though those 12 nos, you know, equated to tens of thousands of dollars of business that I left on the table. I used it for learning. I learned from every single one of them, and I've gone on to create hundreds of thousands of dollars as a result.
[00:12:18] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: So that's the power of this process. So the first question is thinking about what worked, where you saw your growth in this attempt. So whether it's an email that you sent out, an email campaign, or a webinar or a. Sales conversation, anything. You can even evaluate networking events. So if you go to a networking event and talk to a bunch of people, and then when you get back to your office, evaluate how did it go?
[00:12:48] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: Like, what do I think about, you know, my little 32nd elevator pitch? Or what did I think about how I did with all of these things? And so you ask yourself, what [00:13:00] worked? Where did I see my growth? That's question number one. So we're gonna take a moment and just think about, if you wanna think about June or the Q2 or the first half of the year, maybe just think, what are one, two, or three things that you could just jot down right now that worked for you and growing your business in your marketing or sales.
[00:13:25] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: Whatever you wanna evaluate. I gotta let my dog in.
[00:13:28] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: So I love this 'cause we all have things that worked, right? Even if we might be sitting here at the beginning of Q3, Q3, like. Nothing's working. There are always things that are working. There are always things that are not working. That's just the entrepreneurial experience. All right. So the second question then is what didn't work for you?
[00:13:48] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: Where do you see opportunities for improvement? Like, I didn't get as many clients as I want or wanted, or that [00:14:00] marketing thing, I tried bombed. It didn't work like I wanted, or my close rate was 40% and I want it to be 70% or whatever.
[00:14:11] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: I didn't get as many consultations as I wanted.
[00:14:15] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: And I don't know if I mentioned this, but what's really important when we're thinking about these things of what worked and what didn't work, we always wanna be thinking that from the perspective of what we can control. We can't control everything. We can't control whether people say yes a hundred percent.
[00:14:32] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: We're not gonna force people to say yes, right? We can't control the economy, we can't control the politics. We can't control you know, if, if there's a, you know I don't know. I'm thinking of Frankie with the, the huge weather thing that happened before your event. You know, like those are things we can't control.
[00:14:53] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: What we wanna think about in this evaluation is what are the things we can control, right? Like how [00:15:00] we show up to our marketing, or you know, how do, how we show up at a networking event and have our 32nd pitch or our 32nd introduction ready and dialed, right? We can control how we show up to a sales call and we can sh.
[00:15:16] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: Control how you know the questions we ask to really uncover what that client most needs, right? We can control how we follow up with them.
[00:15:26] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: And when we focus on those things rather than the things we can't control, then we can make meaningful change and meaningful improvement. Okay, so I'm sure we all had plenty of things that didn't work. That we're opportunities where we'd like to see improvement. Right? And then the final thing is, what do you wanna do differently going forward?
[00:15:53] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: Q3, we're here the beginning of Q3. It's a new day, a new month, a new [00:16:00] quarter. This is the second half of the year. What do we wanna do different that's in our control? What are our greatest lessons that we have learned? The first half of this year.
[00:16:14] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: So now what I wanna do is we're gonna take some time for masterminding and hot seat coaching around one of those areas that you want to be different. Right. These are all opportunities for improvement, opportunities to get into action and to make some changes. So we wanna support you in that and I wanna support you in that.
[00:16:44] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: So we're gonna have I'm gonna set a timer for for 10 minutes and we'll each have 10 minutes to. Bring a marketing challenge, a sales challenge, something that is not [00:17:00] working that you'd like to see some improvement on that you wanna get in action around. And I'll offer. Some some input and feedback and then we'll open it up to the rest of the group.
[00:17:12] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: 'cause there's, you know, this is a room full of wise entrepreneurs, right? So let's take advantage of that and support each other and offer input to one another. So I'm gonna just give us a minute to consider what you want to bring to the room and I'm gonna get my. Timer opened up here. What would be the most valuable that if you had some clarity on, would give you that 10 x return on the time that you're here today?
[00:17:51] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: Hey, if you like this podcast, I wanna invite you to become part of my community. The link is in the show notes. Each Friday, I'm gonna [00:18:00] deliver to your inbox my weekly celebration, as well as my thoughts on the latest and business and marketing. I wanna keep you in the know about my upcoming events.
[00:18:09] Melissa Kellogg Lueck: Free trainings, book clubs, all the fun things, even some free gifts. And of course, I'm gonna let you know about these new podcast episodes. I'll see you there.
