The Female Fusion Podcast!

Show transcription

[INTRO] Hi there. I'm Jen Blandos, the founder of Female Fusion Network. I've been an entrepreneur for over 20 years with experience in building seven figure businesses and working around the world. Originally, I'm from Canada, but I've been living in Dubai for the past 14 years. I've created this podcast to share my insights and expertise as a global entrepreneur and help other women start, build, grow, and scale their businesses. You'll also hear from some of the world's top experts and female entrepreneurs who will inspire and motivate you to achieve your business goals. So join me as we explore all that the world has to offer and build the business of your dreams. Let's get started. 

MAIN EPISODE
Hello and welcome to the women on the rise podcast. And today I have actually changed what I was going to talk about in the podcast. And the reason for that is that I have had. So many businesses come to me and say, Jen, I'm so frustrated. I have this business and I am still not making any money. And.

I hear this a lot. And what's the point of being in business. If we're not going to make money. The purpose of having a business is that we want a different life for ourself. We want to be able to have that freedom to work. When we want to maybe spend more time with family to spend more time with activities we want to do.

And most importantly, for me to be your own boss, uh, I remember, my dad always said to me, that me being an entrepreneur was perfect because I never listened to anybody. It's still true to this day. Um, And so I think I was probably always, um, intended to be an entrepreneur, but what. What I find when I hear from businesses, that things aren't working, that they're not making the money that they want to. It comes down to usually one.

Simple thing. And the reason why I wanted to cover this today is I'm talking mainly to women who have businesses either. You've just set it up or you've had your business for awhile. And your business is not making money. And I think what the, one of the reasons, why is that it comes down to research and I think a lot, I speak with business owners and they say, yeah, but Jen, I did research. I've, I've done the research in my business. I, you know, I understand the market size. I know who the competitors are. I know what, you know, what the.

The products are that I'm going to introduce to the market or the services that I'm going to introduce to the market. But often times what has been missed and you know what? I hold my hand up, especially in my first business, I didn't do it. I just jumped in. Didn't know what I was doing and muddled my way around having a business. But.

What it comes down to is it comes down to the research and it comes down to really having a clear idea in the beginning about what it is that you're going to be selling. And who you're going to be selling it to and verifying that actually there's going to be a demand for that idea, the product or the service, or even the company in the market that you want to launch it in.

Cause that's really important as well that it could work great. In one market, maybe you have a business. In the UK and it's super successful. And you're like, you know what? I would like to take my business and go to the UAE because I don't want to pay tax. I don't want to live in the sunshine. So I'm going to take this business from the UK.

And transplant it to the UAE and it's going to be great. And what I've seen happen. And I've seen this from people actually with that very situation recently, is that what works in one market doesn't work in another market, which is why we really, really need to spend that time doing the research. Now, I'm not saying take a month out of your business and go back and do the research. I'm saying tick a couple of days.

A week maximum and go back and do some of your research. They had the thing as well is some of it might've changed. Right? So maybe even you did your research initially. And maybe the market has changed and what people are looking for or need has changed as well. So, What works really great is you want to be able to do.

Uh, some research and a survey. Now, um, the, the thing that we need to know is we need to know who our ideal pink customer is because when we know who our ideal paying customer is, It's going to be so much easier for us to target them for us to market, to them, to sell to them, to know what they're interested in, to know what features they want of our product or our service.

And this helps when we are really clear on who they are. So who is our ideal paying customer? And we want to be really specific now it's not just saying I want my target market to be moms who have kids. That's not specific enough because there are so many different, um, age ranges and needs and requirements for kids of different ages as well. So you want to be really specific. You want to know.

Um, at the age of your ideal paying customer, maybe where they live and it could be, they live in this country or this city, or it could be very specific about what neighborhood they live in because some people's businesses only target specific areas of a city. So you want to make sure that you're really targeting them and you know, where they are.

Um, You know, are they married? Are they single? Do they have kids? If they do have kids, what's the age of their kids. What's the education level. Are they working? Are they not working? What sort of average income are you targeting? Um, and even as well, sometimes you might want to know specific nationalities or, um, interests as well. What they like, what they don't like.

Because when we know that it's going to be easier for us to find them. So let's say for example, that we are targeting. People who are into fitness. Now, there is all sorts of different types of fitness. It could be from people who like hiking or scuba diving to CrossFit people to, um, to people who love running or playing puddle.

There are so many different types of sports, but maybe you have realized that actually, you know, it's the people who are super active. They're working out like five times a week. And so maybe you want to really target the people who are into CrossFit and doing the happier activity sort of sports for your product or your service. So that's why we want to be really specific on that because then.

When we know that. It's going to help us understand. What is going to be motivating them to buy and how often they're buying your product to the surface? How are they doing it online? Did they like to try it first? Do they want to touch and feel the. The product. How long does it take them to make a decision? Sometimes it's one of those things that we decide instantly.

Where other times it might take quite a while to do that. Um, also things like where do they get their information from? Do they do research themselves or are they looking at online groups or Facebook groups or are they talking to friends and family or. Did they like what they see on TV or the radio or in a newspaper and magazine article, all of those sorts of things really help us to decide.

How we are going to find our ideal paying customer to get them to buy our product or service from us. Other things as well, like knowing things like how far are they going to travel? Um, do they buy similar products or services? Do they have specific values that they care about? Now, this is really important for things like eco-friendly products or services as well.

Uh, sustainable ones that a lot of times those people who go and buy those products are really concerned about that as well. Um, And I'll give you an example. So let's say it comes to eco-friendly. Okay. Um, And I'm one person who I really care about the environment and also not wanting to have lots of chemicals and have everything healthy. I'm also vegan as well. And so all of those things are really important to me in my buying decisions. So let's say for example, that you have some clothes that you want to sell, but the unique thing about your clothes, let's say their dresses.

Are made out of organic cotton. And they're more expensive than other dresses that are on the market, but you reckon. That the people who are going to be spending the money on these are going to be people like me. Who care more about the environment and we'll spend more on that dress because I know that it's going to be organic cotton. Maybe it's sustainable, it's fair trade, all of these sorts of things. And so you would want to be able to find those individuals, but there could be lots of different individuals.

It's not just going to be vegans. It could be mums. It could be. Um, A number of different people that you want to find and see what, what they would spend and if they would be interested in that. And so you'll find that you're going to have lots of target audiences and you want to see where the commonality is among them. So you're going to be able to reach them.

And most likely you will have done what we call desk research. So that is going to be. That you will have done research on the market, on your product or service also on your computer, on your competitors as well. And you'll have done that research by looking online on Google, maybe looking at reports, reading some media articles.

But most likely. You didn't talk to the people who hopefully are going to be buying from you. And that is what if things aren't working out in your business. This is probably one of the most important things that you could do is talk to people who are going to buy from you. Not your mom. Not your brother or sister or your friends or your partner. It needs to be people who actually are really going to go and buy from you.

So, where do you find those people? Where do you find the research subjects to go and talk to. Well, um, I hope that you're clear on what your product or your services first. Um, if you're not, I have some other information on how you can get clear on that. And that is we've done a quiz called the profitability quiz. It's female Fisher network.com.

Forward slash quiz. And there you can go and answer. I think it's 10 or 12 short questions. And then it will give you some results and most likely it will tell you that you need to do research and it breaks down all of the different research. You've got about a 16 page PDF that you can get and a video that talks about it.

And I go into a lot more detail about how you can get clear on your business idea or the product or the service that you're selling, because that's really important too, to have that, but where else can you go and find people who you can interview or who can do a survey for you? Well, Facebook groups in most countries around the world are pretty popular. And that is where people congregate by specific interests. So it could be an interest about a hobby or about, you know, around kids or around fitness or lifestyle.

Um, environment food, any of these sorts of things that people are interested in entrepreneurship, um, neighborhood where you live as well. A lot of communities and neighborhoods have local Facebook groups around that as well, but what you want to do. Is he want to find those people and you want to ask them.

Specifically about your product or your surface now, the quickest. Dirtiest easiest way to do it. It's not dirty actually, but the quickest way for you to do it is to create an on line survey and with an online survey. Super cheap free. There's a couple of platforms that are completely free. I often recommend, um, Google. So Google has a free survey platform, um, also as well, Microsoft forms as well. So you could look at Google forms or Microsoft forms.

My favorite is Typeform. And the reason is that if you have a more complex survey and you need to ask more detailed questions, That type form is quite good because it has something called branching logic. And that means that if somebody answers a question, one way you can direct them to another question. So it means that people are only answering questions.

That are specifically relevant for them. But it depends upon how complex your survey is going to be. If you want to make it as cheap and cheerful as possible, I would suggest going with Google forms or Microsoft forms, those are the quickest things to do. But what you want to do is think about questions that you want to ask people who are going to buy or use your product or service.

And what you want to do. Is put together at least 10 questions. I wouldn't suggest making it too long. A good, a good number of people or a good number of questions is about 10. I could go up to, but 12 or 14, depending upon how many questions you have and how complicated they are. And I would suggest that you want to have a mixture of questions. You want to have some that are kind of, yes, no questions.

Multiple choice questions as well are great and easy to do. You could also have something like a ranking of importance, so you know how you move, um, you move. List. Or you rank it by number, according to your number of importance. So that could be, you know, what. Is the most important feature. For this product or for this service. And so then you can get a bit of a sense about what is a priority for people, what they're looking for, what they're not looking for.

Because oftentimes what we think. People want is not necessarily what people are looking for. So it's really important to ask those people who might buy from you. What they're looking for. You could also have some, which is some free text, and you could have either a short answer where you limit the response to maybe a sentence or a couple of sentences or a longer answer, which could be open-ended where people could write.

In a bit more detail. I sometimes use that. I use that more though, when I'm talking, for example, in female fusion, when we're thinking about introducing a new service or a new product to our members, that sometimes they'll use that to get more detailed feedback, to really hear what people are looking for, but don't, um, don't make all of your questions free text where people can write what they want, because he wants to be able to have.

Once that you can compare against other people's answers. And you want to also respect people's time. I don't know about you, but when I get asked to do a survey. If I'm asked to do one that is going to take me 15 minutes. I'm not even going to bother. If it's going to take me two minutes or three minutes, and it's mainly multiple choice and I just need to click.

I am more likely to go and do that. So remember that, that if you were looking for. The information that you need to, to either not your business or to make some changes, to really get those sales. That you want to make it as easy as possible for people to do. Don't make it too long or complicated as well. If you struggle, if what you're doing is quite technical or jargony, I would suggest running those questions through something like chat GPT and getting chat GPT to help you simplify those questions because you want to make it. So it's something that a 12 year old could read and understand.

And so that's why you want to keep it free of jargon and you want to make it, so it's going. Gonna be easy, make it easy. Um, make it easy for people to answer and have a mix of your questions. Now, there are two different types of questions in surveys. You have the quantitative, which are the close ended ones. The multiple choice, the yes, the no.

The ranking that slide here to show what you like to choose, choose something. All of those. Close ended one super easy to answer. But then you also have what are called qualitative and those are the open ended questions that are going to give you the more detailed information. So it's more difficult to analyze, but do you maybe have space for one qualitative question for people to give you extra feedback?

And I really liked that because it sometimes does give you ideas for that. Now. When you do your survey, you can either have it, that people can leave their details or not leave their details. I always suggest that at the end, not the beginning, but at the end of your survey. To go and leave an optional question that people can go and answer with their name.

You know, would you like more information or would you like to, um, to spend 10 minutes with me? Over zoom answering a few more questions. If you would please leave your name, your phone number, your email address. Emma. Reach out to you. And I find those are really valuable that if you get a few people that are willing to do that,

Who will give you information in more detail about your product or your service. Those people are amazing. That will take the time to do that. But don't make that mandatory. What I would say you can set your questions that answering certain questions are mandatory and people can't move forward. And what I do when I do research is all of my questions are mandatory, except for the last one about, would you be willing to spend 10 or 15 minutes with me?

Answering some questions over zoom. Now I was speaking with someone the other day who had done a survey and one of the. Uh, questions was, can I buy you coffee and sit down and talk more about my business? Don't do that because one, you're not going to have time to sit down with 10 or 15 people over coffee, especially because we want to do this quickly, do it. So it's online. Um, don't go and schedule lots of time like that. And I think also as well,

Not many people are going to be willing to do that and they won't have the time. And you're not going to have the time either because you're going to be busy, fixing your business. So you can start making more money. So when you're asking questions as well, think about questions that are going to help you.

Really refine your product or your service. So there are so many different ones that you could ask. So it could be things like, you know, do you use this, or what are the benefits to using this? What problems do you encounter? What is the price that you would be willing to pay? What changes would you like to see?

Um, what would make you satisfied with the product or the service? You could also go and gather more information just about it as well about, you know, things like. Uh, would it benefit you? What features do you want to see? Um, what are must have features? What isn't important to you, what would you pay more to more for? And I really liked this as well, knowing.

What people would pay more for, and maybe they wouldn't pay more for anything maybe they would. And sometimes it might give you ideas for other things that you could do, or you could add on in the future that would help you increase the price or get more money within your business. Um, but having that really good understanding about what your customer is looking for would really help, um, think about, think about what their.

What they're looking for. Um, think about what you need to have answered for your survey and be smart about this questions, because remember that you only are going to have 10 or 12 questions to be able to do, but what you want to do is to have a survey that will be easy to fill in. You want to, um, if you can use skip logic, if they're going to be questions because you might have very different target audiences.

So, for example, I was speaking with somebody the other day who has a really beautiful business. And she has two very different, um, very different audiences who would buy from her. One would be, um, it's a kids focused business. And one would be people who would buy her product because they want to get gifts for people who have kids.

And then another would be people who are the parents of the kids. So what a parent is looking for is very different from what somebody who's buying a gift is looking for. So those are two very different audiences. So when you are asking. Questions that the questions that you asked to parents. Would be very different from somebody who doesn't have kids who is just looking for a gift to gone by for a friend who's had a kid or a colleague or something like that.

So do think about that as well, that when you're putting together the survey, because then you might want to have something like skip logic that you're going to use. And skip logic means that. Somebody answers a question with answer a and then they go to question number 12 and then it goes through a flow that way. And it can be quite, um, quite complex depending upon the information you want on your survey.

I really enjoy doing that. But if it's your first survey, if you've never done any of this before, try and keep your survey as simple as possible to be able to do, because you want people to fill it in to give you the information that you need. Now, when you go and get this survey done. Um, you want to, well, you want to be able to get people to fill it in. So where are you going to do that? Well, you could ask Facebook groups and Facebook groups are great. I think I know a lot of people who kind of fill up their survey just from sending or posting their survey in Facebook groups, but it needs to be the right Facebook group.

Right. Um, I've seen, oftentimes there's been people who have posted surveys in groups and it's just been really irrelevant to, to the group. So think carefully about that, depending upon the group, you might also need to check with the admin to ask their permission. If you could go and post it. Do ask their permission because it's just, it's good manners. And then, uh, hopefully as well that they'll give you permission to go and do that. You could also post it on your own social media, like.

Near the LinkedIn on your Instagram, on your Facebook, you could ask, depending upon how complex your product or your services that you could go to other places where your target audience is. So you could go and ask those questions. But what you want to do is find out as much information you can about your target audience and about what they're looking for in your product and service.

Why is that? Because then it's going to help us get so much better at how we're going to communicate with our target audience. So if you're not making sales, if your marketing super sucks, A lot of times, you're just, you're speaking to the wrong people. You have the wrong message, you're sharing information that isn't relevant to them. So the survey is going to really help you refine that and also identify as well, how you can reach these people afterwards. So if you want to reach, um,

Let's say you want to reach people who are really fit and healthy lifestyle is really important that when you do this survey, you could understand it a lot more detail, where you could find these people and what's important to them, what groups they're part of how they take information. And so then that will help you get better at how you communicate because having a beautiful grid on Instagram.

With beautiful photos is not going to do you any good. If you have a hundred followers on your account, and it's not engaging with the people who are going to buy from you and it could be as well that you could be spending your time on a social media platform. That you're talking about hands doesn't take in use. And so that is why the research is going to really help you. And then it will also help you determine how you were going to communicate and what sorts of information you are going to deliver to each target audience, each ideal paying customer that you have, because you're going to have lots and you're going to want to really be able to map that out afterwards as well.

So if your business is struggling to make sales, If you feel that it's not working. My biggest suggestion is to go back to basics, go back to your research, go back to looking at what people would be interested in for your product or your service. When you do that, I think you're going to find it so much easier to do your selling, your marketing, all of the communications around that product or the service.

So I would love to hear from you. If you have gone and done that, please go and dam us on social media. Let us know how your survey has gone, how your extra research has gone. If you have a survey, do share it with us on social media as well. We'd love to see it and love to see what you have done. Because I think that if you really nailed this and you'd get very clear on your ideal paying customer and gather that information.

Everything else is going to become easier in business. And we want business to be easy, right? We set up our businesses to have a different life and to, to live the life that we want to lead. And of course the first couple of years are hard. It is, you are going to work your butt off and you're going to be building this business, but we also want to cut out some of the pain.

In the beginning, and this is where you can cut out a lot of the pain. You can also go onto our um our profitability quiz and you can get lots of extra resources there as well i'll include the details in the show notes for you so you can grab the profitability quiz as well so do share with us your surveys we would love to hear how they go and hopefully with those small adjustments it's going to lead to you getting more sales in your business