One A Day - Day 3
I’ve always considered myself an entrepreneur, a business-man, but I’d be loath to consider myself a “salesman”. Is that a problem for a small business, to be operated by a terrible salesman? As I sit here chuckling saying to myself, “Does a bear shit in the woods?”, it’s obvious isn’t it? Things change a little when you have staff, but if it’s just me, then I need to be able to sell my products.
Firstly, there is a HUGE different between putting things on a website that people can buy, and “selling things”. I’m often reminded of something my elder sister, a high ranking Naval Officer and Google Expert, said to me once, “Never assume people know about you.” Sadly it is something I find myself doing, frequently and all to often I’m doing that when seeing posts on social media about what people buy for their tabletop wargames.
“Why are you buying that from those guys, when I sell something similar, that’s better detail AND produced locally.”, or some other such thought would run through my head when I’d see those posts, promptly followed by a whole train of negative thoughts usually culminating in, “Your a shit businessman, a shit person, why are you even doing this.” It’s nasty, I know my mental health is not good, it hasn’t been for the last two years (that’s not surprising really), but I also know that nothing will change if I don’t change anything.
Note – I thought I’d point out here; I think it’s important too, that in these articles there will no doubt be a health dose of mental health related issues. It is a subject that is very close and personal to me, having not only survived a suicide attempt but having struggled with depression and the affects of ADHD for my entire adult life. I do not want these articles to be about mental health, but I do want to “write from the heart” and just pour things out onto the paper, lest I fear if I try to get to ‘corporate’ or to ‘shill’ I’ll just stop writing before the 30 days is done.
So with all this non-sense rattling around in my brain, every time I see a post that inspires negative and self-sabotaging behaviour I’ve been reinforcing the concept that I am actually a shit business person. Why? Because instead of being inspired by these moments to take action on the ideas and concepts I have, I ruminate and lose myself in internal dialogue and discussion and then, predictably, forget all about it 20 minutes later. I’m then back to “I really should move that down the back” sort of activities rather than more valuable activities that would actually increase sales.
This is yet another reason for my ‘One A Day’ project, to help break those formed associations and habits, replacing them with a sense of positivity and satisfaction, formed and reinforced by small, achievable successes every day. Talking about success and achievements, I should probably get to the topic and purpose of this article, Marketing … and my complete lack of it.
When I’m at shows, I absolutely LOVE talking with people, obviously about our products, but about anything table top gaming related. It’s just wonderful to be around, and participate with so many people that love and enjoy our hobby. However when I think about ‘being in the office’ and sending out a newsletter or writing an article, maybe making a short video about xyz product or running a campaign to increase revenues, I’m so overwhelmed with ideas and paralyzed by learned behaviours, that I do nothing.
One of my biggest challenges; let’s use the term perceived challenges as I’m sure I mentally construct many barriers, is that I think too quickly and find it difficult to keep notes or lists. I often have wonderful ideas for intricately linked activities and events forming a complete campaign. The problem with those? There is just too many things for one person to be able to perform in order to make it work. I guess you can say it’s similar to working on a clock with lots of moving parts with only a 10mm spanner.
So we pair things back, we develop better habits and we tackle the challenges presented by my current mental health state and my ADHD by understanding and admitting to myself that “something is better than nothing” and “there is no such thing as perfect”.
A quick five minute video is a better update than nothing , a short article with a few pictures is better than a three hour thesis, a short newsletter (that I pay monthly fees for!) is better than paying fees and sending out nothing.
I’m a hobbyist, I’m never going to be the best salesman for my products outside of making my marketing about my hobby. In that way, I can share my love of tabletop gaming as well as sharing with you the products and processes I use. If I happen to use some of my own products, well that’s no bad thing is it.
There are lots of different ways I can incorporate this One A Day concept into my marketing. More intricate ways of stringing things together to get the maximum number of eye balls and thus dollars, but for me, right now, I’m struggling so much with my mental health that I need to keep things simple … and consistent.
So having said all that (not that I really think I said a lot at all actually, hrmm) and to keeps things moving, tomorrow we’ll have a chat about … dice. Yeah, dice. Perfect.