The first customer
My business isn't selling: what do I do?
Find where the sale stalls: no one sees it, they see but don't get it, get it but don't trust you, or trust you but find it pricey. Each has its own fix.
bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published
"My business isn't working" and "my business isn't selling, what do I do" are among the phrases Google autocompletes in Portuguese. The answer is almost never "do more advertising." It's finding out exactly where the sale gets stuck, because each sticking point calls for a different fix.
The practical path
- Map the customer's path. They need to (a) know you exist, (b) understand what you sell, (c) trust you, (d) feel it's worth the price and (e) be able to buy easily. At which of these stages do people stop?
- If no one sees you: the problem is visibility. Create or update your free Google profile (Business Profile, formerly Google My Business), ask current customers for real reviews, show up where your customer already is, partner with neighboring businesses that serve the same audience.
- If they see you but don't understand: rewrite the offer in one sentence: "I help [whom] achieve [result] without [pain]." Show real photos, a clear price and how it works. Confusion scares buyers away.
- If they understand but don't trust you: show proof. Genuine reviews, photos of work done, your company registration, an address, a clear return policy. Never make up testimonials.
- If they trust you but find it expensive: either you didn't show the value, or you're talking to the wrong audience, or the price really is off. Test a smaller version, a bundle, another payment option.
- If they want it but can't buy: make it easy. Pix, a payment link, quick replies on WhatsApp, extended hours. A sale lost to slowness is the easiest to recover.
- Talk to those who didn't buy. Ask, politely, why they didn't go ahead. Ten honest answers are worth more than a month of guesswork.
- Look at the numbers. How many people arrive, how many ask, how many buy. Improve one stage at a time.
Give each fix two to four weeks before judging it. Changing everything at once keeps you from knowing what worked.
If, after all that, no one wants it, the problem may not be sales but the product or the market. Then the question changes: what is this "no" telling you?
How Bairo went through it
Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he has heard "no" from customers, partners and banks. His path shows both possible outcomes for an idea that doesn't sell right away. With artificial intelligence and augmented reality applied to a business, he pulled back, and the technology became a trend years later. With natural-based cosmetics, he heard it wouldn't work and kept adjusting, and the brand worked.
What separated one case from the other wasn't luck. It was reading the kind of no he was getting.
The Method step
This is a classic case for step 2 of the Seventh Attempt Method: ask what is inside the no. "It doesn't sell" can be a market no, a timing no, a person no or an execution no. Classify it before changing everything. Most of the time, it's execution, and execution can be fixed.
Discover the Seventh Attempt Method