Baking it Down with Sugar Cookie Marketing �‪�‬ Heather and Corrie Miracle

🤑 Tags vs Tips - The bottom line is the bottom line.


This week we cover a topic that can get some bakers into trouble - hiding in the bushes of their exes. Kidding - that was our mom, but the concept still applies when it comes to stalkin' our clients.
The issue arises when we feel we're owed more than just the money we made for an order. As someone who loves to peek over the fence of past lovers myself, it can be tempting to sneak a peek at a client's Facebook page or business page to see if they've posted pics of their party... and then to turn a lil' sour when you realize they did and just conveniently happened to forget tagging your and your bakery business. 
😣 "Well, twins - referrals are the lifeblood of my lead sources! I need tags and shoutouts to earn more income. And you said you're business-centric, right?! It's okay if I comment, "So nice baking for this event - I'm the cookie baker, @[tags business passive aggressively]." 
I hate to say it boo-bear, but your "praise" was piles o' cash and anything beyond that just ain't owed to you. While yeah - the tags are awesome, the posts full of praise about you amazing, and the emails fawning over your fantastic flood can make your toes curl... it is not owed to you.
📚 In the book, No More Mr. Nice Guy - a book written for men, but still some great takeaways - 🤫 Robert Glover talks about "covert contracts" - these are contracts made not in writing. And that's what's happening with this whole bein' owed beyond the bread (ahem - casheesh). 
I see this happen in the Marketing Group - 😣 bakers who feel as if they're owed more than just the money they were paid. It's a quick recipe for resentment, and we're here to break up with the bad mojo.

1. Your money is your motivation.
💵 Fall in love with money (within reason). What we mean is: your only job was to bake cookies. In exchange for those amazing cookies, someone gave you the life energy they exchanged with their employer in the form of money - they gave you some of their life - 🤑 and the money was the physical representation of that. That was the contract. Nothing more. 🍰 Anything additional is icing on the cake (that they proverbially paid for so - again - not required). 

2. Stop stalking.
🙈 Blinders are the best way to tune out the torture of wondering if you were tagged. You can't know what you can't see, right? Stop stalking your clients (and while we're at it, your exes... right mom?). If you can't stop from looking or party pics are showing up in your feed, Facebook has a "mute friend" option - use it. 


3. Create review-generating assets.
😩 "But twins! I need tags to get leads!" Sure - leads do come from tags, but they also come from good reviews - so instead of stalkin' your client, send a follow-up email asking them if they wouldn't mind leaving you a review on your Facebook Page or your Google Business Profile. 📑 If you think you should be allowed to market to their party attendees, use a Munbyn thermal printer to throw a cheap printed sticker on the back of each cookie (adding the ingredients can help it look less like "PLEASE HIRE ME" and more like "hey - allergies include, but also... hire me, maybe?"


4. Incentives for reviews.
🎁 Not my favorite approach - but when it works, and if you work it right, it produces great results. The thing about thinking you're owed tags is likely because you're too dependent on word-of-mouth for your lead gen. By building up other lead sources, you can grow... well... other lead sources. 


5. Learn to let it gooo.

🤝 Mmmmmm - A meeting framework (that works).
About two years ago, Corrie and I started meeting (well, 😭 she was kicking and screaming) each Monday for what later became known as the 📅 Monday Morning Marketing Meeting with the Miracles. The MMMMM for short. 
😕 Meetings can feel pointless unless they, well, have a point. And that's where meeting frameworks come in clutch. A framework is a meeting structure - and there are so many you can choose from. The MMMMM is built from the EOS Level 10 Meeting Agenda (not mine, just what we use), 📌 and it's been really solid in helping us get a grip on where we're goin' and how we plan to get there.
🔑 Now the key to this meeting is consistency - same time, same day, each week - take notes. 
 Meeting Details:
🤝 Duration: Not to exceed 90 minutes🤝 Time / Date: Exact same each week🤝 Frequency: Once per week🤝 Meeting Notes: Required (I just keep a running Google Doc each week for notes)I recommend finding a study buddy (aka accountability partner) who is a baker that is similar to you. Meaning if you bake cakes, find a cake bakin' buddy. If you're doing this only part-time, find a like-minded part-time hustler. Introverted? You can do this on your own! Just make sure you are holdin' yourself a-c-c-o-u-n-t-a-b-l-e.
Now here's the framework - we've tweaked this a bit to fit our own needs, so feel free to build from this base yourself. 
🤝 Check-in (5 minutes) - this is where you start off with a positive mindset. We like to do a "one good personal / one good business" check-in from both of us to kick it off. 🧠 Puts everyone in a positive mindset and it's fun to hear good things about each other.🤝 Scorecard Update (5 minutes) - This is simple - only report on the key metrics. Don't assess them - just state them. For example: I made 4 posts this week. 💯 Total Facebook reach was 1,230 users. I brought in 6 leads this week. I converted 2 of those leads. My average sale this week was $78 dollars. My total revenue this week was... you get the point. Find the key metrics for your business and record them here.🤝 Rock Update (5 minutes) - Rocks are quarterly goals. You set up a quarterly "Rock" and then you give an update on it. For example, a Rock can be "teaching cookie classes in Q2." 🪨 Since we're in Q2, this will be a Rock we're working towards. An update would be, "I secured a location to teach classes" or "I signed up for the Cookie Class Kits to use the materials to teach my first class." (shameless plug)🤝 Customer/Employee Headlines (5 minutes) - These are any major company updates or any wins you've received from customers. You can announce you're discontinuing a product, adding a new product, or a 🥂 5-star review your client left ya on Google. 🤝 Action Item Review List (5 minutes) - This is where you review you last week's "to-do" list. What did ya get done, how it went, what it produced, etc. This is not where you add to your to-do list nor where you asses why things didn't get done - that's the next step. ✅ This is just a "what did you do last week" point.🤝 Issues: Identify / Discuss / Resolve (60 minutes) - The meat and potatoes of this meeting (meat-ing?), the IDS portion is where you talk about roadblocks, where they're coming from, and what you can do to work past them. This is a good place to break down bigger, more overwhelming tasks. 🚧 For example, "teach a cookie class" is too big. What do you need to do first before you can teach a class? Secure a venue. Add "reach out to venues to find a free location" to your to-do list for this week. 

💸 Price vs Value Prop - Value is relative(ly easy to manipulate).
I was watching a YouTube video featuring a TedTalk where a salesman asks a member of the audience for their pen. He then asks how much the person bought the pen for. "Five dollars," the guy tells him. The salesman then asks if anyone in the audience wants to buy his newly acquired pen for $5 bucks.
✍️ The salesman then says he's going to take the pen and drive it to a ritzy part of town to an expensive jeweler where he's going to place the pen in a mahogany wooden box lined with velvet and place it in a glass case and point a spotlight at it where you can only view the pen with the assistance of an employee who will unlock it from its secured cabinet. 🎁
The salesman asks, 🤔 "Do you think the pen would still be worth $5?"
The resounding answer was that the very same pen that was worth $5 is now worth more. Why? ✨The value changed✨ - even when the pen didn't. The more value we create, the higher the price point we can set.
💎 Consider the diamond-water paradox when thinking about value vs. price. 💧
Diamonds are far more expensive than water. The price of tap water is negligible and the average price of a 3-carat diamond is $41,395 (according to Google's AI). 
But... ☀️ consider the shift if you were stranded in the desert, starved and dying of thirst. 🥵 Diamonds become worthless when your life is on the line, and the ✨value✨ of water has increased exponentially. While neither water nor diamonds changed - the situation around them did. 
And value, the subjective worth of an object, increased the price of water and decreased the price of diamonds (to the desert dweller at least). 
🤔 So - how do we apply this price/value concept to your bakery? 
Increase ✨value✨ so you don't have to compete on price. This means adding value to everything around your product - your packaging, your photography, your customer experience, your response times, your availability, your product line, your return policy, etc.
Then raise your prices. Why? 🧠 We simple-minded humans associate high value = high prices. 
A good indicator that your "value proposition" needs some polishing up is if you're getting a lot of price objections. The value isn't at the forefront yet, so they focus on price. Once you get your value proposition dialed in, price pushers will become a thing of the past. 
👂 Snag this podcast on any major podcast player (Spotify, Apple Music, Audible, Amazon Music, or your desktop) by clickin' here - Episode 160 - Price vs Value Prop.

🥲 Excuse my Excuses - Don't cry unless you've tried (everything).

This week's podcast is a deep dive into a post I made in the group earlier this week - the post regarding "woe is me" threads saying the cookie industry is done, pack it up kids, you don't gotta go home, but you can stay... in this kitchen.
You see - that defeatist mentality ain't go no business being in a business-centric group. It will limit your sales and, over time, cause you to quit. Quite literally the opposite of marketing and growth mindsets. 
😭 "But I've tried (and cried) everything! It's not working anymore!"

Have you, though? Have you actually tried everything? Because there are now 159 Baking it Down podcast episodes covering 159 marketing tactics. And I'll wager you aint' tried even a third of the stuff we talked about. That's what today's podcast is about.
And even if you did - 🥤 have you ever wondered why Coca-Cola, founded in 1886, ✨still✨ buys ad space at the beginning of every movie? 🎥 They've been at this for 138 years and they still keep hittin' the marketing campaign trail! It's because consistency - over long periods of time - produces results.
Marketing ain't a one-and-done. If it was, I'd be out of a job and 🤑 cookiers would be millionaires. It's repeated effort for a really, really long time.  Let's jump into the post.
--
I often see people complain about their local markets in these groups.
🧈 The price of butter is too high,📉 Competitor prices are too low,👥 The market is saturated,🚫 The market doesn't want cookies,🎟️ Too many people teaching cookie classes,🪑 Too few people taking cookie classes,👎 The competition isn't as good as you,😭 The competition has more tag-happy friends than you.
You get the point.
👀 There are 45,000 people here - so I get the honor of reading many contradicting opinions on why sales aren't where we expected them to be.
Teeechnically... 🙅 you can only write "the cookie game is done" if you attempted every marketing tactic covered in this group. Then, and only then, can you say with certainty that the party is truly over.
🏃 I mean - how can you say you won't win a foot race if you never ran the race in the first place? Same applies to marketing. Can't say you can't sell anything if you didn't try everything in your power to sell it.
You can't say, "No one buys my cookies" if you never told absolutely everyone that you were selling cookies, right?
So allow me to ask... have you:
✅ Attempted to market to commercial businesses by dropping by with a logo cookie.✅ Worked on growing your review profile by getting new reviews and responding to bad reviews in a way that will increase sales.✅ Focused on upping your curb appeal for in-person pickups.✅ Implemented copy formulas to increase conversion rates - AIDA, PAS, 4 C's, 4 U's, Before After Bridge.✅ Implented "customer delight" methods to differentiate yourself from your competitors.✅ Used better adjectives to make your products and pitches sound more appealing in social media posts and emails.✅ Streamlined your branding for easier brand recognition across all print and digital profiles.✅ Run g-i-v-e-a-w-a-y-s to engage your page / group audience frequently.✅ Focused on adding value to local community groups each week.✅ Created your own local community group to better facilitate a value-added hyper-local community group.✅ Consistently posted to your social media every week for an entire year.✅ Created an email list on a newsletter sender (Mailchimp, Flodesk, Constant Contact).

🤦‍♀ Comfy Mistakes - Getting comfortable with uncomfy mistakes.
We had a (very) abbreviated podcast today - thanks to the door guys. 🚪 But in the few minutes we did get to chit-chat, we wanted to touch on "uncomfortable mistakes."
😿 Being bad at something sucks. It's no fun making mistakes. In fact, it feels like bad business acumen to make mistakes, right? I mean - imagine a business built on mistakes. Who would want to hire them!?
But successful businesses were built on the backs of mistakes. It's the "failing forward" that separates the business-ending mistakes from the "oh - I learned another way not to do that, let me try something else" business-building mistakes.
🤦‍♀ Mistakes mean you’re learning.
If you're not failing, you're not learning. There's a clip on Reddit of a guy learning to do a backflip - he actually gets pretty okay, then starts doing worse before finally sticking the landing. *crowd goes wild*
🧠 That's how the brain works (well, not in learning how to back flip - I ain't got the health insurance plan to be trying that). 
You try something new, and in your cluelessness, you have a bit of beginner's luck. As you intentionally refine your process, you get a little worse before finally becoming successful at something. Congrats - you learned something - you failed forward.
🤦‍♀ Growth = failing forward.
There's a difference between "failing" and ➡️ "failing forward." In the prior, you likely quit. This is the wrong type of mistake. The mistake we want is where we know we're going to mess up, but the whole time, we're making mental notes - "Ah yes, don't put the green Jimmy sprinkle in before the cake batter has cooled - that gives E.coli vibes. Noted." 
📝 Then back to the drawing board once more to implement what we now know not to do - ta-da! We just failed forward. Enough failing forwards and you've got yourself a new skill, my friend!
🤦‍♀ Bring clients into the learning phase.
Don't be shy - invite others to cry! Kidding, it rhymed. But Corrie had a good point. When clients ask her to do stuff "out of her wheelhouse," she lets them know! 
🤝 "Hey - this would be my first time trying that technique - I've always wanted to attempt it. Worst case, you got yourself some free red cake pops, best case, you got what you wanted! Let's do this!" 
🤦‍♀ Have a refund fund ready to go.
Mistakes are only hard to stomach if someone loses. But in the event of failing forward, we hedge our bets with our "oopsie budget" - 👮‍♂ the proverbial baker get-outta-jail-free card when it comes to making mistakes. That way mistakes don't hurt so bad (our ego and our wallets). It's easier to take a risk when you know there's a financial net there to break your fall.
👂 Snag this podcast on any major podcast player (Spotify, Apple Music, Audible, Amazon Music, or your desktop) by searching - Baking it Down - Episode 158 - Uncomfy Mistakes.

⭐ Deborah Deborah DeborahWhen you've not been seen, heard, or understood.
Grab your popcorn - 🍿 we covered a buttery topic on today's podcast when a Canadian restaurant went viral for all the wrong review reasons. 🧈 Blaming Deborah in a now globally reaching door sign, Heirloom Restaurant closed its doors this April citing issues with... well, unhappy clients. 👨‍🍳

How did they handle it? 😠 Making unhappy clients even unhappier clients. 😡 Whether it was a staged publicity stunt or a business owner who had just finally had enough of Deborah and her depressing reviews - regardless, they're now shuttered - and here's a small... ahem... heirloom... we can take with us when it comes to replying to reviews.
(if you're as nosey as me and don't mind some colorful language - 🍅 google "heirloom restaurant Canada Reddit" and enjoy the rabbit hole).
🔟 10 Ways to Handle a Bad Review
First things first - how you handle bad reviews isn't a reflection on how well you bake - but rather how well you business. 🤝 Good business owners understand that a bad review can be a tool to secure more business. Lackluster business owners think it's a digital fight - and act accordingly - costing them time and money (even more they don't realize they're losing out on). 
1️⃣ Understand that everyone will eventually get a bad review (or at least an unhappy client).If we could please everyone what kind of person would that make us? See - the thing is, you can't please everyone - so fully come to terms with that, at some point, someone will be leaving you a bad review. It's just gonna happen - and once we accept that, we take away the emotion out of it. 
Repeat after me: "I am a business owner. I will get a bad review. That is okay. How I handle that review makes all the difference." 
2️⃣ Walk away - 🕒 a minimum of 24 hours (the damage is already done. don't make it well done by replying in anger).No one died from not getting a reply to their bad review in time. Thus, take your time in replying. Waiting, thinking, and letting the offended emotions dissipate will clear your mind when writing a reply to a bad review. The last thing we want is to take a page from Heirloom and make the bad, worse. 
3️⃣ Write a rough draft reply - 🤓 then have a third uninvested party read it.Write a rough draft - AND BEFORE YOU POST IT - have the least emotional person you know read it first. Ask them, "Does any part of this response sound emotional or defensive?" If they say yes - change that part. We want zero emotional replies here. If you get defensive at their critique... well, I got news for ya, kiddo.
4️⃣ Lower your defenses. ️🥊I can't stress this enough. Lower. Thy. Defenses. Listen - whether or not they're right - they are upset. Raising your defensiveness escalates every situation. Don't do it. If 24 hours wasn't enough to drop that cortisol level, take another 24-hour break until you calm down. Do not run your business on high alert - you'll make mistakes that'll be much harder to fix.
5️⃣ Acknowledge their experience as valid. 🤝This is a huge sticking point in the Sugar Cookie Marketing group. Validating how someone feels does not mean you agree with what they said. We are all allowed to feel how we feel (even if it's wrong). Validating an emotion looks like: "I know you're upset right now."