Ep. 079: Using Frameworks to Sell

Business frameworks aren't a new concept, but they are an important one. Now this doesn't mean you won't have success without one, but it can be easier to explain your work and what someone can expect when they work with you if you've distilled it to a framework. Not sure what yours is or how many parts it needs to be in? No worries! I break it all down for you in this episode and explain a simple way to figure out yours.

LINKS & RESOURCES MENTIONED TODAY:

• Your Next Big Thing Intensive: http://bit.ly/nbt-intensive

• Want to read a transcript of this episode? Click here!

  Bro marketing culture and sketchy MLMs have given modern business a bad reputation. It feels harder than ever to succeed as an entrepreneur, even though we've got an abundance of info and tech, right at our fingertips. If you feel frustrated, running your business, stress over your sales schools or are baffled by marketing strategies, you've come to the right place.

  You deserve to run a successful sustainable business without spamming all of your friends or wasting time and money on marketing gimmicks. This is the sell it sister podcast, and you're going to learn how to make more money without complex systems or sleazy sales tactics. I'm Erica and I teach highly motivated.

  Female and gender expansive entrepreneurs that selling doesn't have to suck. I've been running successful businesses and teaching others how to sell smarter, earn more and create raving fans for over 15 years. And I'm excited to share what I've learned with you. If you want success without truly serving your clients profits without any passion or the next get rich quick scheme, I'm not your gal, but if you're all in as an entrepreneur, Want to make a difference with your work and are ready to run a business.

  You're proud of. Thank get ready to sell it, sister. I know you want to grow your business because let's be real who doesn't. But the reality is is that if you don't know your business persona and you don't fully know the stage of business growth that you're in, you might accidentally waste a lot of time, money and energy focusing on the wrong things in order to get your business from where it is to where you want to be.

  And if you know anything about me, you know, I am obsessed with the show, parks and rec, which is why I created a really fun and free quiz to help you figure out your part persona will help show you exactly what you should focus is on for your next steps of business growth. So to take the quiz, you can head right on over to bit dot L Y.

  Forward slash biz growth quiz to find out your parks and rec biz persona, and then get custom advice from me based on that with what you should focus on next for your success. Welcome to the silent sister podcast. Today, we are talking frameworks for your business. Now frameworks might sound complicated or confusing or heavy or even boring, but I promise they're not.

  Frameworks are just a really great. Way to succinctly convey information about your business or your offers to your audience and to potential clients. That is really what it is. It's like taking all of the options, sadness of you and what you do, and just distilling it down into something very clear so that people can see right from the get, go like, Oh, okay.

  If I work with her, then this is. What I can expect, this is what I'm going again. This is what it's going to happen. This is what she does, et cetera, et cetera. But creating a framework can feel like, where do I even begin? Like, how do I do this? This feels like too much. This feels like busy work. And I have kind of a, a simple way that I am going to share with you of.

  How you can actually think about frameworks and, and good news is you don't have to figure this out today and it doesn't have to be set in stone. So before you get worried that you're like, Oh my God, there's another thing I have to do in my business. Like I just can't, I don't have, I don't have the brain space for more like, no, no, no.

  This is just something good to tuck away in the back of your mind. And then when it feels like a good time or you have, you know, the inspiration. Great. So this, this won't be super long. But just for me, a logistical standpoint of getting started with frameworks is that I would say there's no right way or wrong way to really do it.

  Right. There's no magic number that you need to have in terms of how many parts go into your framework. So again, I'm not about cookie cutter, I'm not about one size fits all. I feel like you have to do what works for you, but from a practical standpoint, I would say you probably want at least like three parts to your framework and no more than nine parts of your framework.

  Cause then it just, it gets to be too much. Right. And like, you're not even going to remember them all. So it's going to be hard for you to convey. So three to nine, I feel like is the sweet spot in there. And then what can be really hard when people are teaching frameworks is for people who are newer to business, who haven't been doing their work for very long or where, you know, it feels very like murky is that it can feel, this can feel very forced.

  I actually think that you need a bit of time doing the thing you do in the special way that you do it in order for it. Some semblance of a framework to be revealed to you. So if you've only been doing this thing you do for three months, and you've only worked with two people in that time, because we are so close to our own work, it can be very hard to figure out like, what is my framework?

  What the hell is it that I'm actually doing with people like you, you may actually already know, but if you don't. Do not beat yourself up. This will become more clear to you over time as you keep doing your work and you keep doing it with more and more people, but if you've been in business for awhile and you're regularly working with people, that should be a lot more simple.

  And I would say too, that you can have frameworks for. Like the whole of your business, like the whole mission of your business and like the work that you do that can have a framework. And I think that you can also have, or I know that you can also have frameworks for each of your offers, right.

  Especially if you have, um, You know, courses or programs or anything like that. You're taking people through a process, those individual things, they can have frameworks as well. And I will say that this was something so three years ago, I remember my first mastermind. We were talking about frameworks and I had a really, really, really hard time because.

  Although I wasn't new to business. I was new to this business and I was like, Oh my God, what the hell is my framework? And at some point I had figured it out and I had a graphic on my website and I, I don't even remember it now. Like that's how that's. How far removed from that version of my business that I am now is that I can vaguely remember what it looked like in my mind, but I don't even remember the exact components.

  I remember it was like in three parts. That's really all I remember. And I talked about raving fans, but see, like, it, it doesn't matter. It's not my framework anymore. Right. But when I was, um, thinking about the work that I do with my clients, it was funny because I was actually driving around in my car one day.

  I can remember it. So clearly it was driving around in my car and I wasn't even trying to force it. Right. I wasn't even like, okay, well, you know, while we're running errands, like we got to think we've got to brainstorm. What is the framework that you use? It was that all of a sudden out of nowhere, I was like, Oh my God, these three words just popped into my head.

  And it was at first it was stabilize strategize scale. And my like one of my longest term clients, my client, Amanda, I, I boxed heard her. And I was like, Amanda. Oh, my God, I just had this like download from the universe. I have to run this by you. Does this seem like what we worked on together? And then like, as I was saying it, I realized I was like, wait a minute.

  That last one isn't scale. That last one is sell. This whole framework is my personal scaling framework. So the way that I work with people and, and she confirmed this to me, like back through Voxer, she was like, yes. Oh my gosh. That's totally it. I realized that through working with all of these different entrepreneurs who were scaling, that I was doing three things with each of them.

  So I was figuring out how do we stabilize the income that is art or the revenue that's already coming in? So how do we get that all stabilized? And then now do we strategize the next. Offer the next, you know, iteration their business, um, the like set up of their business, all of that. How do we strategize what their next level of business is going to look like once they have scaled, right?

  And then we figure out how to sell that new thing. So those are the three parts that I take all of my claims through who have a successful business, but are now looking to scale. And it only came to me because I was, I had been doing the work. Right. I could see looking back in hindsight, Oh my gosh, this is the trend.

  This is the pattern. This is what it is that I'm actually doing with people. And it became super clear and then it was easy. And then I could put it on sales pages and I could talk about it. And it. Became more simplistic and an easy your way for me to talk to people in my audience and to talk to potential clients about what my like secret sauce is and how I work with people and what they do can expect in the process of working together.

  And then later I have done this for other things, right? So in my next big thing framework, I realized that. What I really help people with is finding an offer that is perfect in perfect alignment with, um, their strengths and their schedule. And their scope, right? The scope of the work they want to do and who they want to work with their personal capacity right now, and also how they like to work most of all right.

  So again, that was just, I had this epiphany that when it came to like, if the, at the macro level we have a stabilized, strategize and sell. In that strategize bucket. I also had a framework for what I was doing, but again, it only came to me through looking back and looking at the commonalities of, with my clients and then in that actual intensive.

  So in my next big thing intensive, where we plan out a new offer and all of its components and the low key launch and all of that, I actually realized in working with my friend, Natalie Taylor, that. That part of like, what I do there has, it's also three parts. Like apparently for me, three is the magic number for you.

  It might be five or seven or nine or eight or whatever, but for me, my brain just works in threes. So in that two hour intensive, we frame out all of the details of the offer. We create a flexible. Launch plan to get it sold. And I helped them with a simple workflow plan in order to get it all done.

  Without adding just a bunch more crap to their, to do list. Right? So that also had, it was frame, flex and flow is my three part framework for that particular offer. So my suggestion to you is okay. If you're like, okay, I, I I'm ready. Like I want to create a framework. I want to figure out what it is I'm actually doing with people before you get married to any particular number of things.

  I just want you to brain dump, like let's say all of your clients, right. All of your clients. And just start to bring down like what you did with them. Right. Do this for everyone. Get every, like chunk of. Thought of, of what you did out of your brain and onto paper, don't prejudge it because again, we're super close to our own stuff.

  So there might be like really juicy bits in there that you didn't even realize that you were doing. Cause they just come so natural to you naturally to you. They're like second nature, but just like everything, every problem you help them with the way that you did it. Just all of it. And then. Get that 30,000 foot view and look for commonalities.

  And if you have like a really good friend in the world of business as well, maybe you can do this with them so you can bounce it off of somebody else, but have them look at it as well. If you're really stuck. And once you start to see those common. Trends bubble up, then you can distill it down into a framework.

  Yeah. And I will say too, like, this is not set in stone. You do not have to have this. Like tomorrow in order to succeed and to sell more. But this is just something to like mull over, look for themes, look for trends. You can even reach out to past clients. If you want to like send them a survey or just casually ask them, you can also look at your testimonials.

  Like, what are the common things that people are saying? And then you can adjust. I asked it over time, maybe you. Start with three parts and then you eventually realize it's actually yeah, more like five that's. Okay. You can okay. Just change it later, but just you utilize this as a way, not as like a crutch, not as more busy work, not as something else that you have to do, but the way to more clearly articulate to them, potential clients, what they can expect from you because when people feel like.

  There's clarity. Like they can really see the big picture. Like there's some intentional framework that you're gonna walk them through. It creates a level of trust and confidence that is often really crucial before somebody wants to speak money with you. Right. It's just, if you can more clearly articulate to them, this is like the safe, proven process.

  I'm going to take you through that. I've taken other people through, this is how I'm going to get you the results that you want. People are more likely to competently say yes, if you already have a framework, I would love to know. Tell me about it. If you are pondering and maybe you want to like bounce your framework idea off of me or share it or whatever the case, if you are new around here, you might not know, but I hang out.

  Almost entirely on Instagram. I love being over there. It's Eric consulting come and find me if you're not new to the party cast, you already knew that. Uh, and you would know that I love to connect with my listeners. So if you're listening to this on your cell phone right now, I would love it. If you snapped a picture post in your stories, tag me over there and, or just come say hi.

  Semi DM. Tell me that you're listening to this episode. Tell me your aha as your takeaways, your framework, whatever. Cause I really do love hearing from you. I super appreciate each and every one of you and I hope you got a ton of value from this episode. And as always happy selling, thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of the, sell it sister podcast, if you loved it and you want more, be sure to subscribe so that, you know, never miss an episode and then head on over to sell it.

  sisterhood.com to join my free Facebook community group. And as your mama said, sharing is caring. So if you got a lot of value out of this episode, be sure to share it with your biz besties too. Okay. Now, get out there and sell it, sister.