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Want to know more about purchase order sales?
Purchase order driven sales might be a way to grow your online business. Let’s listen in and learn from today’s episode.
Our guest today is a good friend of ours, FYL community member and School Counselor.
We have the ever Passionate Action Taker, Misty.
Misty is a school counselor in one of the districts in southeastern Kentucky. She is married and is a mother to 2 lovely girls, aged 4 and 6.
Wanting to spend more time with her family, she tried doing several business ventures, but found it too exhausting to juggle her side hustle, family, and career.
Shifting to online business
After listening to our podcasts, she decided that she wanted her family to experience amazing can’t miss moments too, and invested in herself and joined our online community.
By 2016, she had learned how to use Canva to create content and sold her first digital product on a third party market.
She felt more and more empowered because of her new found sense of creativity.
After creating enough content and proving her credibility, she went on to launch her website where she can showcase her skills and expertise, School Counselor World.
Here, she provides community support and digital resources to fellow school counselors, helping them fulfill the variety of roles you didn’t know school counselors were expected to fill.
She now has a thriving community of 30+ paying members, tons of thoughtfully organized content, and over 4,000 email subscribers.
Her numbers are growing steadily, but how will she 5x or 10x this?
Join us as we dive deep on purchase order sales strategies, your business’ potential growth from conducting more B2B type transactions and why success is just a matter of finding the time to take consistent action.
The weather’s a little crazy, but we’re here to take even bigger, crazier next steps to flip Misty’s business and maybe your online business to the next level.
Don’t miss it!
You Will Learn:
- How to find time to start taking action
- How to grow your B2B (business to business) bigger
- Pitch your offer to the decision maker
- The advantage of having an FAQ page
- Plus so much more!
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show:
- School Counselor World – http://www.schoolcounselorworld.com/
- Teachers Pay Teachers – https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/
- Canva – http://canva.com/
- S&J Success Story: Reaching their 2015 goal – https://flippedlifestyle.com/podcast73/
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air!
Success Story of the Week:
This week’s success story is a special one because Jocelyn and I are going to celebrate a little success that we have had in our brand and we didn’t even really know this had happened, is what’s so funny because we set this goal last year. If you listen to our earlier episodes in 2016, you’ll catch us sharing our goal from 2015, that we wanted to get 1,000 members in the Flip Your Life community.
We wanted 1,000 people or more to be actively flipping their lives, chasing that flipped lifestyle, taking courses, taking action, and doing whatever it took to flip their life and we weren’t even really paying attention. And one of our members posted a forum post in success forums that said, “Congrats, guys, you guys achieved your goal. There’s over 1,000 members of the community!”
It’s just amazing and funny how goals work, we didn’t focus on that goal. We focused on what it would take to get to the goal like creating consistent content, serving our community every day, meeting with our audience as much as possible in real life and online.
And all of those things added up to this amazing community of people from all over the world who are working together to change their lives.
But we’ve set bigger goals now, I want to add a zero to that. I want 10,000 families to flip their life, to get in there and start chasing the Flipped Lifestyle. Maybe you’re one of those families. We’d love to have you in the community, but one way or the other we’re going to get ten thousand people, change 10,000 family trees so that people can create generational wealth for their children and their children’s children.
We would love to help you write the success story for your online business.
At the end of today’s show, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife where you can learn more about building and growing a successful online business with the help of our Flip Your Life community.
Can’t Miss Moment:
Today’s Can’t Miss Moment is recording podcasts where it is nice and warm.
It is currently 17 degrees in Kentucky and it is the middle of the day. We woke up this morning, school got canceled because of all the ice, and it was so cold. We’ve been here for three weeks with our kids.
But we’re really thankful, really blessed and fortunate because we didn’t have to go out and go anywhere to work. We’ve recorded some podcasts here, we did some interviews earlier today, took a few minutes to go play some board games with the kids on this snow day. And you know it was just really awesome to not have to get up and go somewhere else.
Back when we were teachers, we could have had bus duty on a morning like this if it was cold or something like that, or we would had to get out on a snowy day and take a chance of driving out to work. But we’re not, we’re here, we’re warm, we’re toasty, we’re sitting in our chairs, drinking coffee and tea, and it’s just a pretty awesome feeling that we don’t have to be anywhere.
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
Jocelyn: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we help Misty grow her B2B online business.
Shane: Welcome to Flipped Lifestyle podcast where Life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams.
We’re a real family who figured out how to make our entire living online. And now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? Alright, let’s get started.
What’s going on, everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again this week. We are on a cold and snowy snow day here in Kentucky. Our kids are here, we’re here and we’re pumped up because we’re recording another podcast with our Flip Your Life community member.
So… guess what? Even though it’s cold outside, even though it’s snowy outside, it’s hot on Flipped Lifestyle podcast.
And today’s guest is a good friend of ours, a Flip Your Life community member named Misty.
Hey, Misty, how are you doing?
Misty: Hey, thanks for having me, guys.
Jocelyn: Yeah, it’s really exciting to talk to you today. Misty is actually someone who we know in real life, which is kind of exciting. And she’s one of our community members and I was talking to her recently and she was telling me about how her online business has really taken off. I was super impressed by what she’s done so far, so I thought it would be really cool to talk to her on the podcast. It’s awesome to have you today. Let’s start out by telling everyone a little bit about you, your background and your online business.
Misty: Well I am a school counselor in Southeastern Kentucky and I have been a school counsellor for about ten years now that. Prior to that, I taught first grade for five and a half years. Currently, where I work at, I commute about 50 minutes to get to work. I primarily do a lot of school psychology work, where I evaluate students and do IQ testing, Special Education-type things. I also do counselling. I am a school counsellor. Although I do school psychology at work. I do a lot of school counseling, as far as student needs.
I created a website called School Counselor World, and there I have counseling needs and lots of school counseling needs. I also have lesson plans for school counselors like Behavior Intervention Plans, just basically what school counselors need. I know that from my experience, that school counselors all have different type of roles and just about every school expects something different of their school counselor.
I know just from the counties, the surrounding counties that I work in, every county and every school uses their school counselor in different ways. It covers a variety of different roles.
Shane: Which is really interesting because every student is different. Every school is different. Every community is different. Therefore every counselor has to be different, right? It has different needs. That’s called segmenting. You have one avatar: the school counselor and the psychology type role, and you know whatever you’re doing. But then there’s different segments and different products you can create to help different people. You’ve really leveraged that in your online business to create, not only a variety of products, but a variety of ways to deliver that product.
Jocelyn: I know that there are probably a lot of people out there. I know this from experience who say, “Okay, why in the world would school counselors need lesson plans?” Because people ask me the same thing about librarians. Just for the people out there who are listening who are thinking, “Okay, lesson plans for counselors? Like, what does that even mean?” Tell people a little bit about what the lesson plans include.
Shane: You’ve got a lot going on. You’re selling individual things, you’re selling to schools. Tell us how you deliver your products as well.
Misty: Okay, so the lesson plans that I created all have either an interactive PowerPoint, where students can go up to the Smart Board and the questions that move the clip art and content around to answer questions.
Shane: When you say a school counselor, do you mean like a psychologist or do you mean like the person who does schedules? What do you mean when you say that? Because you said you did a lot of one-on-one work like with the kids.
Jocelyn: That’s what she was just saying, is that different ones have different roles in different places. Some counselors, they go into classrooms and teach like Character Ed type lessons, right.
Misty: Yes that’s correct. I know when I was growing up I don’t remember having a school counselor in the elementary setting. I just remembered it from that high school setting where they did the scheduling and everyone is college prepared.
Shane: Right. And that’s what I think of when I hear the word counselor.
Misty: In an elementary setting, some school counselors strictly work in the office and they pull students, they work on you know like folders, and things like that. Or they pull kids and do just counseling. Some school counselors do that, plus go into the classroom and do classroom guidance lessons. A librarian has a rotation where she would take classes throughout the day.
Shane: Sure.
Misty: Some school counselors do that as well.
Shane: This goes back to everybody listening to the podcast right now. And it’s not just in education. It’s not just in business, it’s not just in mom-and-pop stores. There are niches within niches within niches that are so untapped and so under-served. And we all are, like, “I couldn’t sell anything in that space.” Just off the top of our heads, we’re like, “A school counselor? They just help people get into college.” Right?
But that’s not true. That is so not true. There’s such a spectrum in every broad category that you could niche down into and find a way to make money online. And people need to realize that. It doesn’t matter where you are. Like, if you’re a real estate agent. I was just talking to a guy the other day, and he was like, “Well, I go look at these people who are teaching real estate and they’re all teaching about cities and stuff like that. But I’m in the country, I’m in a rural area.”
Shane: I’m like, “Huh, sounds like someone needs to teach rural realtors how to actually sell real estate.” But you don’t have to be the big, “I’m the New York-Manhattan real estate agent.” But we always think that, “If I’m not that, then I can’t do this.” And you found this nice little place that you could kind of find a home within a huge broad industry and everybody needs to think that way. There’s always something to do.
So let me ask you this real quick. Tell us more about the things you are selling. You’re selling memberships, third-party market schools. Tell us about your more mechanical stuff. Where are you selling the stuff that you’re creating?
Misty: Okay. Actually, what has been the biggest seller have been the lesson plans because that is really a need, and that takes up a lot of time for school counselors, the ones that actually go into the classroom and teach lessons. There’s just not a whole lot of lesson plans out there for school counselors.
Shane:And where are you selling those at?
Misty: I sell them on Teachers Pay Teachers.
Shane: So you’re using like a third party market to sell individual lesson plans.
Misty: And I also have a website and it’s schoolcounselorworld.com.
Shane: OK. How do you sell them there, individually or in a membership?
Misty: It’s a membership website.
Shane: That is awesome. There’s that recurring revenue that we always talk about. Do you have members?
Misty: I do. Right now, I have about a little over 30 members.
Shane: Good job!
Jocelyn: That’s amazing! That’s so good.
Shane: That’s amazing. That’s awesome.
Misty: And I have about 4,000 e-mail subscribers.
Shane: Wow! That is awesome. And you pretty much just started from scratch not long ago, right?
Misty: I started actually because of you all. I’ve listened to the things that Jocelyn said she had done with Elementary Librarian. At school one day, I just kind of snooped around your website a little bit.
Jocelyn: We won’t tell anyone.
Shane: It’s made for snooping, if you haven’t figured that out, you know what I mean?
Misty: And then I messaged you and then joined your Flipped Lifestyle website. It’s just history from there.
Shane: There you go.
Misty: I started actually making content from Canva in April of 2016. We just did some YouTube videos, stuff like that on how to actually create content for Teachers Pay Teachers. I opened my Teachers Pay Teachers store in May. The whole month of May, I sold one product. I think it was May the 23rd, 2016 and I sold $2.55, and you would have thought that I had become a millionaire.
Shane: Listen, we call those 11 Cent Moments and I love it when people tell me these stories because– think about this: the first thing we ever made online was 11 cents. Yours was, like, $2.00. So guess what? you were like– what? Twenty times more successful than us out the gate. I mean, that’s what I’m talking about.
Jocelyn: Maybe that’s a good sign, I don’t know.
Misty: I only made $2.55 but it was a big deal because I was, like, “Hey, it actually sold!”
Shane: That’s awesome. You know a lot of people are, like, “I want to do something different,” and we can all have examples of stuff like that. But why did you want to do something to make extra money? Like had you ever tried anything before online business? Why did you want something different and why did you actually go into online business in the first place?
Misty: Well, I have done a few things that have been actual physical products. I sold Thirty-One, which I loved Thirty-One. But it just turned out that, for me, it became very saturated.
Shane: Right. That’s like an MLM right?
Misty: And then I had a little girl shop where we did little manis and pedis for girls.
Shane: This was like a physical location? Like you actually had a place?
Misty: It was a physical location, and it was really a lot of fun. I have two little girls, they’re four and six, which they weren’t four and six then, but they were younger and they totally loved it. Little girls coming and getting pampered, and we had lots of birthday parties and things like that. But what I found out with that is that I depended so much on other people to run my business.
It was a struggle to get someone to run my business while I was working full time. So it was just perks and some issues now, really.
Shane: And there was probably a lot of overhead with a physical location.
Misty: There was a lot of overhead, yes for sure.
Jocelyn: Yeah, we’ve been talking ever since then. I would come into your shop, I’ve brought my little girl there a couple times and you know we would talk about things and what you can maybe do online. So it’s cool to see that you know you kind of followed that. You also tried to do some light clothing stuff for a while, right?
Misty: That was kind of with that.
Shane: Oh, okay.
Misty: Yes, we did sell. It was it was online a little bit, but it was still physical products, but I still had to soak up some money into it.
Shane: It’s really like a lot of people who came to the community, and build businesses, they’re making money online, they’re doing these things. They really don’t have that background of having another thing they’ve tried. Some people have tried the Thirty-One stuff, like makeup or some kind of MLM product or something like that. People have dabbled in it, but you literally had a physical store. How much more awesome is an online business to starting a physical store, or relying on all those other people to do things for you? How much cooler is it now?
Misty: Let me just say I’m addicted to it. I mean, honestly, I love creating a product. It’s so much fun. I love the physical store because it was a fun atmosphere.
Shane: Sure.
Misty: It was totally exhausting and it took away a lot of time for my family, because there was a lot of things where my husband had to keep the kids at home while I went and did this and it was just exhausting, to be honest. And I did work from home, I can work from home in my pj’s and not feel like I have to you know be cleaned up before I get out.
Shane: We’re all actually trapped in a snow storm right now.
Misty: Yes, we are.
Shane: Like, how cool is this? But we’re all back to business.
Jocelyn: Yeah, I’m wearing flannel cat pajamas.
Shane: Jocelyn has on flannel cat pajamas and some big fuzzy shoes and I got the official Flipped Lifestyle work uniform on: my robe.
Misty: That’s so funny because this morning, whenever Jocelyn messaged me, if I was able to do the show, and then she said Skype and I’m like, “Wait a minute, that may be a game changer because I’m not ready for the game face to be on.”
Shane: No, we don’t do video. When we’re recording for the podcast, no video. That’s right. That’s totally down here. That’s really cool. I don’t know if you do notifications or something when you make money. But one of the most surreal things about being an online business is you’ll get sales when you’re doing other stuff. If you have the mani-pedi store, you got to be there. Somebody’s got to be there.
I was sitting one time at half time. We were at the SCC championship, the basketball championship at the tournament and Kentucky was playing Arkansas. We had just slaughtered them in the first half. It was like the best feeling in the world. There was like 20,000 Kentucky fans in there. And we were sitting there at halftime I had my feet propped up. And all of a sudden I got this $500 sale at halftime while we were crushing our archrival. That was like one of the best moments of my life. I was, like, I just made $500 while I’m watching my favorite team crushing the enemy. Do you have any weird stories like that?
Misty: Well, I have the same thing. It happened to me and actually my phone beeps all the time. If it’s on, I have the volume turned up. You can hear that ‘cha-ching! cha-ching!’
Jocelyn: Yes, I love that! We did that for years, and I was telling Shane the other day, I’m like, “We need to turn it back on. It’s just so motivating.”
Shane: There would be a lot more cha-ching sounds into that first year, though.
Misty: But then, only if I had my phone on vibrate, it’s just soft quacking sound like it’s like — a quack.
Shane: You had Aflac duck as your notification, basically for your buddy?
Misty: When I’m on the phone with my dad. It’ll be like quacking. It’ll quack five or ten times. He’s like, “What’s that?” And I’m like, “Oh, I think I just sold a product.” He’s all the time saying, “There goes your quack.”
Shane: So for everybody listening, imagine how awesome it would be if you just made random money throughout the day–
Jocelyn: and your phone quacked.
Shane: — and your phone quacked at you. I’m just saying. That was pretty awesome. Cool. Well, let me ask you a couple more questions. We want to help you get to the next level.
A lot of times we’ll do that. We watch the Flip Your Life community really hard, and we talk to our members and when we see someone who we feel like is about to really make a breakthrough, a lot of times we’ll reach out to that person to get them on the show. Our main mission is always to help everybody take their next step. We don’t want your initial success to be your only success. We want you to take it to the next level.
But let me ask you a couple other questions real quick, and then we’ll get to your question. When you are starting out, what was the biggest mindset struggle or just internal stuff that you were dealing with to take that leap of faith, to take that plunge into this space, and like how did you overcome that? Was there a fear that made you hesitate or hold you back? What was your biggest struggle you had to overcome internally?.
Misty: You know, I’ve never really had a lot of fears with starting this. I just felt very overwhelmed. Knowing how long it would take me to get to the point of having a membership site to where the value of it to a customer is worth $300 or $400 or $500. That was very overwhelming because I would put myself in their shoes and think of how many products that I would expect to be on there before I would want to pay that price for something.
Jocelyn: That’s something that’s really important is learning to think like your customer. I don’t think people do that enough. I think they think, “Well, what do I want to do?” Or, “What do I feel comfortable doing?” But when you start thinking about, “Okay, what would my customer want?” Then the whole conversation changes, and I think that’s a really powerful skill to learn so early.
Shane: But it can be overwhelming and I think that there is an internal struggle there of, not self-doubt but doubt in your products. We think that we have to offer a ton more value than we actually do because people are actually just wanting that one specific issue in their life. But we feel like we have to solve all their issues and it can be really overwhelming to think, “Oh my gosh, I created this much stuff but, man, before I sell this should I create triple or–?”
But that’s not true. You really just have to get something out there and then just build on it going forward. And that’s why we get overwhelmed; we think we’ve got to do it all. We just have to do our part.
Misty: When I first started, I thought, I know the value of the website for a membership. With my website it’s not three or four hundred dollars. But it is in this price, and so, it wouldn’t be $99. As I created more content, I would just up the price of the annual membership or the monthly membership.
I started out like, the monthly membership I think was $19.00, and then annual membership was $99.00. But I just kept creating content, and kept creating content. I kept putting in my mind, “You just do it, two years will be here before you know it and you don’t want two years to pass, and to look back and say, ‘I wish I had started two years ago.'”
Shane: That is great advice. I love how you just started with what you had, and you just built it as you went. Because so many people, they want to build the whole product and then put it for sale. They want to start the whole thing, they want to work for five years before they ever sell anything and then they’d have nothing to sell anyway.
Jocelyn: It reminds me of that quote that says the best time to plant a tree plant a tree was 100 years ago. But the second best day is today. Just do it. Get something started.
Shane: Jocelyn bomb, hashtag. We have a #jocelynbomb in this podcast right now.
Jocelyn: Yeah, we just get really frustrated because we feel like so many people could do amazing things if they would just start.
Shane: We’ve had people come to us with ideas, and we’re like, “Oh my gosh, that’s a great idea!” But they doubt like, “What can I offer? I don’t have anything right now and I’m like, “Well, that’s great. Make it tomorrow, and get it done.” We needed a course for an opt in that we had this idea for an opt in on a podcast.
I was on someone else’s interview. I didn’t have discourse made and I was like, “Hey, this would be a great idea for an opt in. Why don’t I give it to your audience for free?” And he was like, “Oh, that’s amazing.” So we offered this opt in when we were doing an interview and I hung up the phone. I was like, “Oh man. We don’t have anything like that.”
So I just sat down and created it. It took about three hours, but it’s done and now I’ve incorporated that into the Flip Your Life blueprint. I’ve incorporated it into our opt in strategy, and I have this huge asset. But if I had never just said, “Create it, get it over with and move on.” It would have never got done. Yeah, that’s awesome.
I’ll ask you one more question, because this is a big deal for a lot of people. You know a lot of people say, “Gosh, I just wish I had more time,” or “I just wish I could find the time.” But just listening to our conversation, you commute an hour to and from work everyday.
Jocelyn: And in Kentucky that’s a big deal. In New York, that’s totally normal.
Shane: Yeah that’s a big deal.
Jocelyn: But here, most people don’t do that.
Shane: And you’re also driving around mountains and all sorts of stuff. There’s two hours gone.
Misty: I usually stay away for ball games and a lot of times I don’t get home until 8:00 or 9:00.
Shane: Exactly. You’ve got so much time, you’re still working a full time job right now. We’ve talked a little bit more about that. But you’re still working on a full time job, you’re still doing this huge commute. You’ve got kids, you’ve got a family, you’ve got responsibilities. How are you finding the time and how did you find the time to build this online business that’s very successful? It is so impressive what you’ve created. How did you find the time to do this while working full time and raising kids and commuting?
Misty: I’ve listened to a lot of your podcasts. I listened to podcasts on the way to school, to and from school. Sometimes, I catch myself laying in bed with earphones – like earplugs – and listen to podcasts of how I can maximize my time. And so, when I first started, my husband will be here watching TV. And instead of watching TV, I would just sit on the couch and create content. A lot of times, almost every morning that is an off day for me, I’m up by 4:30, sitting up and making content, drinking my coffee.
I do it at night whenever the kids go to bed sometimes. Just really any extra moment that I have that I can squeeze in to make content, and it’s addicting. To be honest with you, I have started and I love it. I feel like it brings out the creative side of me and I really, really enjoy it. I just have tried to use every free moment that I can to start working on content or working on keeping up on my website with my members and that kind of thing.
Jocelyn: All right, Misty, we’re super impressed with what you’ve done so far. It’s awesome. I think that you have a lot of room for growth. So let’s move into our question part. What question do you have for us? How can we help you to move this thing forward even more?
Misty: So, I have been getting purchase orders and things like that from schools which has so far, it’s starting to pick up and starting to get more money from that than the individuals. I’m just wondering how to take them to the next level as far as getting more schools onboard and even getting one district to purchase multiple memberships.
Shane: Yeah.
Misty: One of your podcasts you had sent out and I listened to, you had sent out just flyers to those school districts and I’ve done that before. I’ve had one district talk to me about multiple memberships that at this point they haven’t jumped onboard, but it’s just been in the last few weeks. So, you know maybe some they eventually get to as far as in their budget.
Shane: What you’re asking here is how to go business to business, like bigger how to grow that. A lot of people don’t think about that because we have individual stuff we’re selling. But it’s really important to think about that because one: businesses, schools government entities, they have a lot of money. They’ve got to spend it because they usually get a budget, and it’s gone if they don’t.
So, it’s really good that you’re thinking about bigger things. “How can I get 10 schools all at once?” So this is kind of like growing a business to business type branch of your company.
Jocelyn: So I would say there are a few different things you can do. The first thing is that you need to have a page dedicated to multi-school and district discounts, if you don’t already have that. Okay? And it basically just tells about that you offer the discount in a form to fill out to get them to get a quote, okay? That will be one thing.
Shane: Did you offer that on the sales page? Did you let people know how their school can for this?
Jocelyn: I think I did it on the sales page. My sales page did say that I accepted purchase orders, but I would do it in a lot of different places. So one way is, in my e-mail autoresponder sequence, I would put like: P.S. that said, “Hey, did you know that we accept purchase orders? We also have a multi school and district discount.”
So it’s just another way to let those people on your e-mail list know, “Hey, we have this. Ask your person. Instead of spending your money, ask the person in your district who’s responsible for purchasing things.”
Shane: We didn’t really market to the schools a lot. We did. But your question, when you’re asking business-to-business is not what company can give me money. That might be one of the questions you ask but it’s also, who is the decision maker in that company or in that business or in that entity that can get the money for me?
The librarian is going to find Jocelyn’s thing. The counselor is going to find your stuff and then you have to educate your customer who is the decision maker, “Hey, did you know you could get this for free? You don’t have to pay for this. Did you know that?” You just have to go ask your boss or ask your financial person to give you a purchase order to buy this.
You have to show them, “Hey, look at this amazing benefit that I offer you. Look at this rising opportunity I offer you. Hey, did you know if you go get six of the people who are like you and your school district, you all could band together and you could save your school money? That would be easier to go pitch this to your decision maker, right?” You’ve got to educate them to go do this for you.
And it’s also the same thing as putting a price anchor on a page. Right now, it’s like OK I’m a person who’s buying your individual product. My answer is yes or no, right. But if you say, “Hey, did you know that your company can pay for this?” Now, it’s not yes or no. It’s, “Yes I could pay for it. Yes, my company could pay for it.” It’s not a no anymore, you’ve diluted the No. So, you’re just educating them to go get the money for you.
Misty: And who doesn’t want somebody else to pay for it right?
Jocelyn: Exactly. So you just need to make sure that you’re really getting that message out there. Just because you’ve said it one time doesn’t mean that people understand that you have that discount. Also, if you have an FAQ page, which I recommend. The point of an FAQ page is not exactly to answer questions, it’s more to overcome purchase objections.
All of your questions on the Frequently Asked Questions page should be to overcome some type of purchase objection. One of your frequently asked questions can be, “Do you offer a school or district discount?” and then send them to that page that you’ve created that tells more information about that discount. Those things alone, that got me lots of purchase orders and lots of district orders too, because I didn’t really do much else. I mean I just kind of–
Shane: — Educated the librarians they could do it.
Jocelyn: Continue to educate. During times, where people purchase a lot, typically in the summer and sometimes even like right after Christmas, you might even try to run ads letting people know, “Hey, we have a district discount. We accept purchase orders.” So just staying on the top of their mind and just reminding them, “Hey, remember to spend other people’s money. Yeah it’s good. You don’t have to spend your own.”
Shane: Which one of these sounds like an easier sell? Sending a letter to a school district or a big business, explaining to them why their people need to buy this thing for you, or letting the people who are already finding your stuff know, “Click here to get this for free. Did you know that you could get this for free? You could get this for no money out of your pocket.” And then you explaining that the company could pay for it.
Jocelyn: Usually, the person who discovered you is going to be more likely to be able to talk their superior into purchasing it than you are. So I would highly recommend going that route. Another thing that Jeannette Stein– she does the High School Math Teacher site — that she is doing, she is starting to go to conferences where superintendents and people who work at like, the Board of Education go to.
She’s starting to go to these leadership conferences and just get in front of them. She’s going to her first one here in a few weeks. I don’t know about the results of that yet, but you might consider doing something like that or even like speaking at a conference for school counselors just to even get out in front of them and just let them know, “Hey, I have cool resources for you. Here’s my website.”
Shane: The key business-to-business sales, period, in online stuff, it’s just finding the decision maker. That’s the key in all your online business. We have a lot of people that come into the community and they’ll have a product that helps kids or teenagers or college students or whatever. Maybe college admissions, things like that, but they’re not the decision maker. They usually come in marketing to the kids.
And we’re like, “No, you got to market to the parent because the parent is who’s going to buy your thing.” The cool thing is your websites are already drawing in the decision maker. Not the decision maker to pay for it but the person who decides if they want this thing, right? So, now you just have to tell them, coach them up a little bit how to go ask for the money from people with the purse.
Misty: Yes. I definitely think that that is something that would be a next target for me because and I’m seeing that purchase orders through schools are where I’m getting more money in my accounts, yes.
Shane: I would do this. Go ask the people who have used a purchase order already, just say this, say, “Hey, did you go ask to get this purchase order? Or did your school show you my resources?” And I bet 100 percent of them, they found your stuff and they went and asked for the money.
Misty: And I guess that makes me go back to doing maybe a school counselor association conference or a leadership conference because if the school counselors see it and they fall in love with it and want it, then they’re going to want to go to whoever has the money and say, “I want this really badly.”
Shane: Yes, that’s exactly what you should do. Jocelyn would not go to a principal’s conference. She would have went to an Elementary Librarian conference and that’s where she would have sold her things. I would not have gone at an athletic director conference. I would’ve went to a ball coaches’ conference.
Jocelyn: I’m not saying you have to do that right away. I’m just saying that might be something you consider down the road.
Misty: Well, I’ve actually been researching that in the last two weeks while I’ve been off on these snow days. It’s going to cost a lot of money. I mean, by the time I pay for a flight, and then I pay for the conferences and stuff, they charge quite a bit of money to have a booth or a table.
Shane: Let me ask you this. Let me interrupt you real quick. How much do you charge for a purchase order? How much is the total?
Misty: $ 429.
Shane: It’s $ 429. Let’s say it costs you $ 2,000 to go to one of these conferences and you get in front of 200 people that would buy your product. Let’s say that 5% of them buy. You only have to sell 10, and 10 x 4 is $4000, not $2000. Don’t get caught up with what you’re spending. What is the return on investment and how much can you make? You can double your money going if you were going.
Jocelyn: If it were me going, I would prefer to speak instead of doing a booth. I think that you’ll get more traction that way, and just speak from a place of being helpful. Don’t try to sell anything. Just say, “Hey, I have free resources for school counselors if you visit my website.” Okay, and that’s going to get them more familiar with you and they’re also going to want to learn more about you. Again, I think this is down the road for you.
Shane: Your low hanging fruit right now has just changed all your sales material to guide people to go get other people’s money. “Hey, can’t afford this? Let me show you how your school can pay for it.” That’s your low hanging fruit. That’s what you’re going to be right now. This is all down the road.”
Misty: But I want it to be soon.
Shane: Down the road is like right down the road. You know what I mean?
Jocelyn: You know I want you to just right now concentrate on, do you already have a district discount page on your site?
Misty: No. I do not and that’s something that I need to work on.
Jocelyn: OK. I would definitely do that.
Shane: What we learned when we first started doing school sales, which is the same thing as B2B, is she had to get the process as easy as possible for the librarian to go to the person because like they need an invoice sometimes. Sometimes, they need an estimate. If you can provide all that stuff and where they can walk in and get everything they need, it becomes a lot easier to ask for the money because now you’re just asking somebody to sign something.
Jocelyn: And I would even recommend coming up with maybe like a little one page something. I did a video actually — just explaining what the community is, what they get by purchasing it. If you can make something that’s super short like either a one-page document or maybe like a two-minute video. I mean, it needs to be something super quick so that the school counselor can go into their boss and say, “Look, this is what I want. These are the benefits of doing it. And this is how we purchase it.”
Shane: “Look how this is going to help our school which in turn will make you look better, boss.”
Jocelyn: Yes. And just make it so streamlined and easy for them. Like, don’t make them e-mail you, don’t make them do anything else. Let them fill out a form right there and you can even do this on Google Forms. It doesn’t have to be anything difficult. I use Gravity forms. You can use a Google form. Just make it super simple.
Another super low hanging fruit thing that you need to make sure that you’re doing is on your sales page where people can click on the options of whether they want to purchase monthly or annually, make sure it says, “We accept purchase orders.” And I assume that you do that, right?
Misty: Yes, I have that on the page already, on the member’s page.
Jocelyn: Okay, Good.
Shane: Just make a prominent. Don’t just throw a little link that no one can see down on the terms and conditions line.
Misty: Yes.
Shane: Maybe even do like a little banner that says, “Did you know that your boss or your business or your school can pay for this? Click here to learn more.”
Misty: Yes, that’s a good idea, a banner is a good idea. I have a button right now, right below which membership they want to choose. There’s a button to click for purchase order request. But I really like the idea of the banner because it’s larger.
Shane: Make sure they know they can do it. And just remind them over and over in your marketing.
Misty: Yes. Thank you very much I appreciate that.
Shane: All right, Misty, we are about out of time but what a great discussion. I think a lot of people not only are going to be inspired by your amazing success, and how much you’ve really put into building this amazing online business. I think a lot of people are starting to have the gears going now like, “Man, I’m selling this thing. I wonder what companies or businesses could I get involved in this?” Great tips, great successes and great stuff today. We always close our show by asking our guests what is one thing you’re gonna take action on in the next 24 hours to get your business to move forward, because without action it’s all talk. So what are you going to do in the next 24 hours to get this stuff done?
Misty: Well, I’m definitely going to work on the purchase order, the idea of advertising purchase order more, and I’m going to create a new page that has information out the purchase order, create the banner, really focus on amplifying the idea that somebody else can pay for the membership other than you having to pay for it yourself. So that’s definitely a priority for me now.
Jocelyn: Alright awesome. That sounds great. And I can’t wait to see what happens next. I think that you’re going to blow this thing up to even 100 members releasing.
Misty: Thank you so much for your help, guys.
Shane: Super called today with one of our Flip Your Life community members. We would love for you to be a member of our community as well. If you would like to join our Flip Your Life community, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and we can show you how to join today.
Jocelyn: It’s now time to move into our Can’t Miss Moment segment. These are moments that we were able to experience recently that we might have missed if we were still working at a normal 9-to-5 job. Today’s Can’t Miss Moment is recording podcasts where it is nice and warm, where it is absolutely frigid outside. People, It is currently 17 degrees in Kentucky and it is the middle of the day.
Shane:Yeah. So it is really, really cold outside. We woke up this morning. School got canceled because of all the ice, it was so cold–
Jocelyn: –for the second day in a row.
Shane: Yeah, for the second day in row after Christmas break. We’ve been here for three weeks with our kids. You know how that goes, guys. Please let school start back on Monday. But anyway, it is a cold, snowy day and our pond behind our house is completely frozen. The lake just froze solid. We were trying to throw rocks through it earlier and they were just bouncing across the thing and rolling across this frozen wasteland that we have in our backyard right now.
But we were really thankful and really like blessed and fortunate because we didn’t have to go out and go anywhere to work. We’ve recorded some podcasts here, we did some interviews earlier today, took a few minutes to go play some board games with the kids on this snow day. And you know it was just really awesome to not have to get up and go somewhere else.
Back when we were teachers, we could have had bus duty on a morning like this if it was cold or something like that, or we would had to get out on a snowy day and take a chance of driving out to work. But we’re not, we’re here, we’re warm, we’re toasty, we’re sitting in our chairs, drinking coffee and tea, and it’s just a pretty awesome feeling that we don’t have to be anywhere.
Jocelyn: And we even brought out the warm coats. So the last two winters here in Kentucky have not been particularly cold or snowy so we’ve even had to bring out the warm jackets.
Shane: So right now we’re going to leave the warm jackets in the closet and stick to our robes in our nice, toasty household where we record our podcast today. We love to share our Can’t Miss Moments with you each week on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. But there’s one thing we love to share even more and that is a success story from our Flip Your Life community.
This week’s success story is a special one because Jocelyn and I are going to celebrate a little success that we have had in our brand and we didn’t even really know this had happened, is what’s so funny because we set this goal last year. If you go back and listen to I think like our end of year special in 2016, or maybe one of the first episodes in January of 2017, we set a goal that we wanted to get 1,000 members in the Flip Your Life community.
We wanted 1,000 people or more to be actively flipping their lives, chasing that flipped lifestyle, taking courses, taking action, and doing whatever it took to flip their life and we weren’t even really paying attention. And one of our members posted a forum post in the success forums that said, “Congrats, guys, you guys achieved your goal. There’s over 1000 members of the community!” We weren’t even paying attention.
Jocelyn: “Oh, great!”
Shane: We were like, “Sweet!” Tim Whiteman, thank you, Tim, so much for posting this in the forums. Noticed when he logged in, there were 1,011 members that had joined the Flipped Lifestyle community. So, just super excited. I think the goal happened in January. I went back and looked. It actually happened on January 2nd. We did not get the goal in the calendar year. We crossed the point of no return. One or two days afterwards, but it still counts, it totally counts.
It’s just amazing because it’s funny how goals work. We didn’t focus on that goal. We focused on what it would take to get to the goal like creating consistent content, serving our community every day, meeting with our audience as much as possible in real life and online.
And all of those things added up to this amazing community of people from all over the world who are working together to change their lives. We’re going to steal the spotlight. It’s our show. We get to do whatever we want. And we’re going to celebrate that we hit our goal. We have a thousand families. Over a 1,000 families have join the Flip Your Life community.
But we’ve set bigger goals now. I want to add a zero to that. I want 10,000 families to flip their life, to get in there and start chasing the Flipped Lifestyle. Maybe you’re one of those families. We’d love to have you in the community, but one way or the other we’re going to get ten thousand people, change 10,000 family trees so that people can create generational wealth for their children and their children’s children.
So when one goal hits, we set another one and we blew past one of our goals this year and we’re really proud of that.
Shane: Before we go today, we like to close every show with from a verse from the Bible.
Today’s Bible verse comes from Ecclesiastes 11, and it says, “Farmers who wait for perfect weather never plant. If they watch every cloud, they never harvest.” Plant your seed in the morning and keep busy all afternoon for you do not know if profit will come from one activity or another or maybe both. The Bible here is saying guys, “It ain’t got to be perfect. You’ve just got to take action. If you keep taking action, good things will happen. You can never figure out exactly what is going to work until you do it. So just like it says here in Ecclesiastes, go do it. Plant your seeds, take action, don’t wait for perfect weather. Just go get it done.
That’s all the time we have for this week. As always, guys, thanks for listening to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, and until next time, get out there, take action, do whatever it takes to Flip Your Life. We’ll see you then!
Jocelyn: Bye!
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