What We Learned from our Supper Club Feedback Workshop

Feb 23

Last week, we hosted Supper Club Vol. 2 at our new office space, The Elizabeth, and welcomed female business owners across various industries for some coffee and peer feedback. It was truly a joy to learn about each of their unique journeys, and it even turned out encouraging to piece together threads of struggle common to the whole group. When we’re brave enough to share, don’t we always end up finding out that we’re not alone in the hard things?

Curious about what’s challenging other business owners? Here were the most common questions asked during Friday Forum —

What Instagram content are you most interested in consuming from me?
How do I engage with clients before and after they work with me?
How do I get more traffic to my online and/or physical store(s)?
What’s your biggest hurdle to signing up for my services?
How do I convince clients that they need my services?
How do I present my services and products in a way that is clear and digestible to potential clients/customers?

Everybody generated a LOT of ideas for each other. It was incredibly powerful, and I so enjoyed sitting back and witnessing such a swarm of brilliance.

Here were my three strongest takeaways from everything they said—

Your sales strategy and marketing efforts need to focus on BIG PICTURE human needs and how your products and/or services meet those needs.

A lot of the questions were around how to convince potential clients that they need your products and/or services. The feedback given was about ensuring those potential customers understand the cost of NOT working with you and/or buying your products. I’m reminded of this quote from Donald Miller in his book, Building a Storybrand—

“All great stories are about survival—either physical, emotional, relational, or spiritual. A story about anything else won’t work to captivate an audience. Nobody’s interested. This means that if we position our products and services as anything but an aid in helping people survive, thrive, be accepted, find love, achieve an aspirational identity, or bond with a tribe that will defend them physically and socially, good luck selling anything to anybody. These are the only things people care about.“ - Donald Miller

You need to provide value to customers throughout the entire sale cycle—before working with you, while working with you, and long after working with you.

There are a million ways to provide value to customers. Some of the ideas we considered were online courses, Instagram live interviews, evergreen email sequences, Patreon, Substack, PDFs, blogs…. the list goes on. In order to remain top of mind and to encourage referrals (the most effective kind of leads), you need to be constantly asking yourself, “how can I provide value to my audience today?”

If you don’t have community, create it.

You need people off whom to bounce ideas, people to share life with who ‘get’ the entrepreneurial journey. If you don’t presently have such a community, go ahead and change that! Start a gathering of local business owners and begin facilitating practical conversations that foster creativity and partnership. There will be great return on your time and effort, and it will be incredibly nourishing to your entrepreneurial spirit!