Today’s episode is about how to pick one thing to sell this Black Friday. And if you don’t pick one thing, everything else you pick is going to cost you money. So keep listening to find out how and why. I’m going to give you the exact strategy you can use to have a very successful Black Friday, even if you’ve never done a Black Friday sale before.

And right now, I know it’s the middle of October. You might be thinking, well, I still have dahlias to dig and turkeys to sell. I haven’t even thought about Thanksgiving. But stay with me. There’s a reason we’re doing this now instead of the week before. Mainly, we’ve got to plan ahead a little bit.

Last December, I sent out a survey to all of you. And one of the answers that stuck with me all year was from a farmer who’d been laid off recently. She and her husband were counting on their farm to make enough money to pay the bills. And she wrote about needing a plan for a holiday sales push. And then she said, I didn’t realize it, but I probably should have been working on this back in October. She was right. And she’s not the only one who said something like that. So this is going to help you no matter where you’re at. Maybe you’ve been laid off, or maybe you just want to have a year-end sales push. Let’s do it.

Here’s what I normally see happen with farmers. Someone decides on Tuesday, maybe, of Thanksgiving week that they want to do a Black Friday sale. So they write an email and they make a social media post Thursday night while the turkey’s in the oven. And then they send it out Friday morning, and then nothing happens. And then they tell me, well, Black Friday sales don’t work for farms. It’s so not true. My clients make tons of money on Black Friday sales, and I’m going to share with you here how, so you can do the same thing. This is not a marketing problem. It was just a calendar problem. Giving yourself a day or two or three to do something that needs about four or five weeks.

So we’re fixing that this year. Consider today your public service announcement to take a moment to plan a Black Friday sale now. Today’s October 15th when this comes out. Black Friday is November 27th. You have six weeks. That’s plenty of time. Every year I have farmers who email me after I publish my Black Friday episodes and say they tried it. And they were so surprised it worked. They didn’t have anything planned. So they got inspired to sell either product, or one farmer last year didn’t have any product left, but she decided, okay, I’m going to try this with $100 gift cards. And she sold 15 of them after listening to this. So this works. And I encourage you to try it.

Today’s episode is all about what you’re going to sell on Black Friday and who you’re going to sell it to. Next week’s episode, I’m going to help you write the actual emails, how many and when you should send them. Okay, so let’s get into it.

Why this works for a farm at all, you might be wondering, because a lot of people say, well, how can this work? Because I’m not Walmart. I can’t do a doorbuster at five in the morning. I don’t have inventory to blow out. Black Friday is just for big box stores. And no, you’re not Walmart. You’re so much better than that. And that is exactly why this will work for you.

Here’s the thing you really need to take in. Your customers are shopping that weekend. Whether you show up in their inbox or not, it is happening. They’re on their phones, on the couch, after the turkey, looking for gifts for people who are hard to buy for. They’re opening email at seven in the morning on Friday because everyone else is asleep, looking for a great deal. The only question is, will they hear from you in their email, or will they end up buying another candle off Amazon or a Target gift card?

So something about your customer you might not quite fully believe yet is she would rather buy from you. She’d rather give her sister a flower subscription from a woman she met at a farmers market rather than another Target gift card. She’d rather fill her adult kid’s freezer with a box of meat from your farm than from a Styrofoam tray or a Home Depot gift card, right? She just needs to be reminded that you exist and then told exactly how to buy from you. If you don’t send that email, you’re not being polite. You’re making her life harder. Marketing is serving, and sending that email is serving your customers by helping her give a unique and very personal gift. She gets to feel good about herself. She got her sister, her parents, her friend, her adult children this really unique thing.

So now the other thing Black Friday does for a farm is it brings in cash flow at a time of year where it can be tight. November through March is where a lot of farms go under, not because nobody wanted to buy, but because the money ran out in December, January, and the seed order was due in February. The chick order needs to be paid by March. I see this happen every year to great farmers with amazing products. And they end up going into debt on a credit card and losing so much money. And they quit because of lack of cash flow. So this is going to help you. A Black Friday sale is you getting some of next spring’s money into your bank account this November. That is such a useful and productive and profitable thing for you to do on your farm. It’s good business planning.

All right. So here’s where a lot of farmers go wrong with this. They often just sit down and think, all right, Black Friday sale, I’ll do 10% off everything or a 20% off coupon. But you don’t want to do that. That’s going to cost you money in two different ways at once. Let me explain both. The first one is obvious. If you do 10 or 20% off or whatever, it means you’re discounting the things that were already selling fine. You just paid people to buy what they were going to buy anyway. The second reason is the expensive one. When you offer a blanket discount across everything, you make your customer do the work of choosing. And a customer who has to think about what to buy doesn’t buy from you. She’ll close the email and think, oh, there’s so much to choose from. I’ll come back later and decide. But nobody ever comes back to that email later. It just disappears.

You’ve got to pick the one thing for them. That’s how you serve your customers, how you help all of us busy women. We need emails that say, hey, here’s a perfect gift, buy it. Not take a discount, choose one thing. We don’t have time to do that. And I’m going to keep telling you this, because I know how hard it can be to believe you will make more money choosing one thing than trying to offer a variety. Maybe you’ve got a flower subscription you can sell, and you’ve got a wreath workshop coming up, and you’ve got dried flowers you can sell, or you’ve got turkeys you can offer for a Black Friday sale for Christmas dinner, and you’ve got pork bundles you can offer, and maybe there’s some farm tours. Every one of these feels like it deserves a spot in your Black Friday sale. I get it, but focus wins.

Focusing on one product is profitable. I know this for a fact. Over a decade, my clients learn very quickly that they make way more money when they focus on selling one thing than they ever do trying to sell all the things. People don’t want variety. They need ease and decisiveness. And your brain might be telling you that you need to offer a variety, like buy our wreath workshop or buy a winter share, but you’ll make far less money trying to sell two or more things.

So here’s how you choose the one thing. I’ve got three questions for you. Question one, what do you have right now that has to move? For instance, if you’re raising meat, look in your freezer. Look at what’s in storage, or look at the dahlia tubers you dug, or a class you want to teach that’s not full yet, or a gift card if you have no product. If you’ve got products sitting there and you’d rather have cash by December, that’s a strong candidate for this. And there’s real urgency built into that that you don’t have to invent.

Question two, if you don’t have product now, what could you pre-sell for next year? Look at this one hard, because this is the cash flow payoff. Next season’s CSA share. Or next spring’s flower subscription. Or vegetable subscription. Or a few pastured chickens to gift to your kids, your neighbor, your house cleaner. Or a deposit on a quarter beef that goes to the processor in April. Again, tulip bulbs. Dahlia tubers that aren’t going to be shipped till spring. Or a spot in a class you’re teaching in February. Or spring farm tours. Somebody paying you in November for something they get in March, April, May is not a trick. It’s a very smart, strategic thing that a seasonal business, like most of us are with our farms, can do.

And then the third question is, which product makes you money? Whether you’re doing number one and selling product you’ve already got, or number two, pre-selling next year, look at which one is going to get you the most cash flow, the most profit. Not the one that has the biggest number on the price tag, but the one that leaves the most in your pocket after the cost. So if you clear $200 on a beef bundle and $10 on a chicken, you already know the answer. If your profit is $200 versus $10, go for the beef bundle. It doesn’t matter how much easier the chickens feel. However, weigh that against if your freezer is full of chickens, but the bundles are not taking up as much space. Maybe you need the freezer space more. So be strategic about which one makes money that you have to move.

And then actually there’s a fourth question. This is so important to consider. Which one of these things are you most excited about? Because you’re going to have to write about this four or five times in a weekend, emails, social media posts. And if you’re bored by it or not excited about it, your customer will hear it in the words you write or the things you say. So if two options are close, just pick the one that makes you want to talk about it more.

You heard recently my clients, Ethan and Natalie Brinegar. They were on the podcast last month, and they’ve been in my program about a year. They learned that focus means profit, even though they doubted it at first. It’s totally normal. If you’re not focused on one thing, if you’re selling all the things, of course you’re going to doubt that focusing on one thing will work. That’s the normal human brain at work, okay?

Ethan and Natalie both work full time off the farm. They have a two-year-old. They go to one farmers market every few weeks. Before we met, they were doing everything. They were trying to sell beef and lamb and chicken and eggs. And you hear this in their episode. They’d tried shipping, they were offering it. Ethan took my Power of One class. It’s the first class I teach as soon as you join. And he learned that he didn’t have to stop all the things. He just needed to choose one to focus on and let the other things coast.

And so the sheep already run with the cattle. Moving them is no extra work for him. So he stopped marketing sheep entirely and just focused on beef. And now he can’t keep either in stock. Eggs are the same way. If they sell, they sell. He doesn’t put any more energy into marketing it. He just decided to focus on one thing. In the spring, that was chicken. And then summer and fall was beef. And then they were able to shut off shipping completely, because they learned how to sell it all locally. It’s a skill. And it saved so many of the very cost-prohibitive shipping expenses. If you’ve done it, you know what I’m talking about. It costs so much to ship. That’s a whole other episode.

Okay. Then what they did is they ran my five-day sales launch for their bulk beef, and they started charging four times their deposit. They went to charging $400 for a deposit on a quarter beef instead of a hundred dollars. So $1,600 a cow just for deposits, six to eight months before that animal ever goes to the processor. They doubled the number of cattle they brought in, and they sold out every share for the season. It used to take them until the week before the last processing day in the fall, trying to sell the shares all summer long, all year long, actually. Now it’s done in February. And their sales are up 75%.

I asked them on the podcast what this feels like. And she said, it is so wonderful to feel secure and certain. It’s so comforting to know things are sold before they ever go to the processor, and it’s totally off our shoulders. That’s what picking one thing does. That is the Power of One. And a Black Friday weekend is the same thing. Just one short push of one thing that gets cash flowing. Now you’re helping your customers, and it’s such a great time of year, when cash flow has slowed way down or stopped.

All right. Now, once you’ve picked the thing you’re going to sell for Black Friday, you’ve got to choose a name for it and package it. And this is where farmers get either shy, or they don’t think they know what to do there. Let me help you. You might think, well, it’s just a tulip share, or it’s just ground beef. It’s never just anything. Because here’s the thing to remember about Black Friday. It’s when people shop for other people. Your customer’s on the couch with her phone, working down a list of names, and half of them are people who are hard to buy for. They already have everything. So the package you name has to answer her question in her mind, not what do I want, but who’s this for?

So listen to these two descriptions side by side. In the past, you might’ve said something like, Black Friday sale, 10% off all beef. Versus: the Sunday Dinner Box, 12 pounds of our grass-fed beef, the recipe card for the pot roast my grandma made, and a handwritten note from the farm, delivered before Christmas to whomever she names. Same farm. Look at those descriptions side by side. One of those is a discount, which cheapens the value of your product and makes people only shop with you when there’s a discount. And one of those is the answer to, what in the world do I get my brother-in-law, the one who has everything and likes to cook? And it sells to the woman who’s doing the buying. She’s like, oh, I want to get one for my brother-in-law, and we need that too. And she buys two. I see this every year for my clients.

So give it a name, and name it for the person who’s going to buy it. Not a Black Friday sale, but the Sunday Dinner Box, the gift of spring blooms in the middle of December, or the Dahlia Lover’s Bundle, 20 tubers in five colors with a planting guide for the gardener who already has everything, or the Christmas Morning Breakfast Bundle, eggs, bacon, sausage, delivered. Okay, tell them what’s in it. So you name it, then you tell them what’s in it, and be specific about it. For instance, 20 dahlia tubers in five varieties beats assorted dahlias, or 12 pounds beats a beef box.

Add something to this description that isn’t expensive. It’s often free for you to create, but feels generous. And on Black Friday, that one thing is usually what turns it into a gift. Like a handwritten note from you, a card she can tuck in the box. Delivery to the other person’s door, not hers. First pick of the colors or meat cuts. It doesn’t have to cost you much. It just has to feel like you thought about her and about the person she’s giving it to. This is what up-levels it, makes it special. And give it a close date. Say orders close Monday night at midnight. Not a limited time. Nobody has ever been moved to buy by a phrase that says limited time. Just say orders close Monday night at midnight.

Then consider who you’re actually talking to next. All right. This is branding. This is the first thing I do with my clients in my marketing program. You’ve got to figure out your brand. And I’m going to give you as much of a lesson as I can here in this episode in the time I have today.

So most farmers, when they plan a sale, they think about themselves. They think, I need to move this meat. I’ve got to empty a freezer. I need to fill these CSA slots. I need cash. We’ve got to sell out. They’re making it about them. And it’s true, but your customers don’t care about you. They’ve got their own problems. They’re thinking about their kids, their parents, their friends. She’s thinking about the things she forgot to do. She’s thinking about what in the world do I get my mother-in-law?

So what you’ve got to do in branding is you stop thinking about you and your product and start thinking how you serve your customer, your dream customer. How does your product solve her problems? Not a type of person, like, well, my dream customer is someone who’s 35 to 60 and values local food. That’s not a person. That’s a data point on a spreadsheet. You can’t write an email to a spreadsheet. It’ll sound so cold and transactional. You’ve got to think of one real customer, someone whose face you can see, like someone who stood in front of you at the market and you had a conversation with them.

When I wrote my farm emails, I always envisioned my customer Virgil and his wife, Karen, and the long conversations we’d have in the farm store, or sometimes when they were sitting in their car when they first drove up and we’d have a chat. I’d think about them, and I asked myself, what would Karen and Virgil be thrilled to buy from me right now that would make them feel amazing and would make their day? That’s how we think about it. So you’re not selling 12 pounds of burger. You’re selling what would fill your customer’s heart and soul to buy, to be able to gift to one of their friends or family.

All right, here’s a little more on what I mean by this. If you’re selling a quarter beef to a woman in her 50s who has celiac and whose husband is sick, you’re not selling beef. You’re selling her the certainty of knowing what’s in her food when she can’t afford to get that wrong because of their health. You’re selling her the security of taking good care of her husband. That’s what you’re selling. Security, certainty, health. You’re not selling a quarter beef.

If you’re selling that same quarter beef to a 35-year-old who has just gotten into weightlifting and is trying to get their parents to stop buying junk food, you’re not selling them beef either. You’re selling clean protein. You’re selling them a PR at the gym. You’re selling them the argument they get to use when they’re talking to their families about buying them gifts or how they go out to eat. We’re talking about the same product, beef. Same price, but they’re two completely different emails. You’re talking about the problem that you solve for people. Like, hey, I’ve got to eat really clean protein because I’m really trying to get in shape. Or the health reasons example I gave first, where the wife has celiac disease and the husband also has poor health. See, you’re selling something other than just a box of meat.

If you’re selling flowers, maybe a flower subscription to a mom with four kids who works part-time so she can be there for them, you’re not selling flowers. You’re selling her something beautiful that brings her calm and peace and fills her heart. She didn’t have to schedule it. She didn’t have to go anywhere. She doesn’t feel guilty about it. It makes her house nicer for everyone. Do you hear how different those descriptions are? The product’s the same. Beef, chicken, flowers. But the reason is completely different. The reason she buys is because it’s solving a problem for her. That’s branding, and you’ve got to go deep. You’ve got to know your brand inside and out, but these questions will get you started.

All right, here’s a little bit of homework, and do it, because next week I’m going to show you how to write emails, and it will be so helpful if you’ve done the homework here today. Get a piece of paper or open up a doc on the computer and answer some questions about your ideal customer. This is your brand right now. We’re diving into branding.

Number one, how old is your ideal customer, your dream customer, that one customer you wish everyone was like? How old is she? What’s going on in her life right now? Does she have kids or no kids, little kids, teenagers, an empty house? Is she post-menopausal? An athlete? Who is she?

Number two, what is she worried about? What does she wake up in the morning worrying about? She’s not worried about your farming practices. She’s worrying about something in her life. Money, health, time, being a good mom, her aging parents, how to calm down her life. What is she worrying about? Again, these questions are going to help guide and inform your marketing.

Number three, what does she actually want? She doesn’t want vegetables. She can get vegetables anywhere. She doesn’t want flowers, chickens. She can get that stuff anywhere. Why is she buying from you? Because underneath that, what she really wants is security. Or, depending on your ideal customer, she might want certainty. She might want balance. She might want better health. She might want to feel fulfilled. She might want control. She might want to feel like she’s doing right by her family. She might want to feel like she’s worthy and good. Like when I have women who love to entertain with farm fresh food and farm fresh flowers, because it makes them feel so full. Their hearts feel so full entertaining their friends. So that’s what she’s wanting. She’s wanting to fill her heart, knowing she’s serving her friends something wonderful and creating a really amazing environment for her friends. This is what they want. They’re not just buying flowers or meat or vegetables, right?

Question four is, ask yourself, why on earth would this ideal customer buy from you instead of the store? Our farms are inconvenient and more expensive than the grocery store, right? They have to drive out or wait for a delivery day or plan ahead, and probably pay more money. And the grocery store is open at 10 at night. So why you? Spend some time on that. We go really deep inside The Profitable Farmer. My clients will have pages on why they buy from you when it’s cheaper and more convenient to go to any other store. And you’ve got to know this deeply.

And then question number five, how does buying from you make her feel about herself? All of these are marketing gold, but especially that last one. She’s buying from you because she’s going to feel something really amazing about herself. What is that? Identify that.

And listen, if you don’t know the answers to these questions, it’s not a failure. It’s just information. You haven’t done this yet. Pick up the phone. Call your favorite customer. Ask her these questions. Say, when you buy our meat or milk or eggs or flowers, how do you feel? How does it make you feel to buy from our farm? That’s just an example. This is the marketing gold. It’s a goldmine. People love talking about themselves, and she’ll be flattered that you asked. And I tell you, 10 minutes on the phone will give you more usable marketing that you can use for months. Months’ worth of marketing from a 10-minute conversation. This is what branding is.

All right. So here’s what you’re doing between now and next Thursday, when part two comes out. Write down three things you could sell. After I’ve given you all this information, what are three things that come up you could sell? Now cross out two of them. The one that’s left is the one thing you’re going to sell. And then, what’s the extra thing you’re adding? Is it a recipe card? Is it a tutorial on how to make your cut flowers last longer or design the perfect holiday centerpiece? Then pick your deadline. I’d make it Monday night at midnight. That gives you Black Friday through Cyber Monday, four days. And answer the five questions about your dream customer. That’s it. This is one to two hours of work. And this is most of the battle, but it’s the work that most people won’t do. And it’s why their marketing keeps falling flat. Do this work. You will get such great results compared to if you don’t.

All right. And one more thing before I let you go. Some of you might be saying, wow, this feels pushy. Your people might be annoyed. You’ll come across as salesy, or someone will unsubscribe. But hear me on this. You’ve got to shift your mindset. That’s you making it all about you. Selling is serving. You are helping your dream customer. When you make it easy for someone to buy something that she wants to buy, because she wants to be unique and different and gift something that people actually use, you have done her the biggest favor. You are serving her. The pushiness you’re afraid of is not because of what you’re doing. It’s because you’ve got the wrong mindset.

This is the Profitable Mindset Podcast for a reason. A profitable mindset means you’re always thinking about serving. Mindset is just a thought you’re thinking. You’ve got to constantly manage your thoughts, or they’re wired to go negative. So if you don’t manage your thoughts, of course you’re going to think, I’m being pushy and salesy, and people unsubscribe, and my product isn’t worth it. So you’ve got to manage your mindset. You’ve got to think, selling is serving. I’m helping my dream customer find something really unique. And it’s going to make her feel good buying our product.

And if you’ve tried this before and it didn’t work, that’s not a statement about you. It’s not proof that it doesn’t work. Some people will say, well, I tried Black Friday and it didn’t work. We didn’t make anything. Well, it’s actually a skill. And it’s a skill you haven’t been taught. If you haven’t done a Black Friday launch that’s worked, there’s a skill gap, and it’s okay. Marketing is a whole separate business from farming, and nobody usually taught you this, and you for sure weren’t born knowing it. None of us were. So don’t beat yourself up. It’s a skill you can learn. It’s what I’m here for. And today is your introduction. It’s going to help.

All right. So let’s recap. Black Friday, November 27th. It’s six weeks away. Pick one thing. Don’t pick a blanket discount off everything. Give it a name. Tell her what’s in it. Add something that makes it feel generous, like a recipe card, a handwritten note, whatever it might be. And orders close Monday at midnight. And write to your dream customer. Write the post or the email to your one real person, not a list.

All right. Next week’s episode, I’m going to give you five emails. I’m going to tell you what to say in each one, when they go out, and the mistakes you might be tempted to make that will make your emails fall flat. And before then, be sure you’ve signed up for the Farm Marketing Fix. It’s November 9th, and I’m going to take real farmers’ websites and emails and show you exactly what to change so they sell. You can even bring the email you’re going to write next week. That’s two and a half weeks before Black Friday, so we can do some work that week. The free Farm Marketing Fix. It’s at charlottemsmith.com/masterclass. Sign up. Would love to see you. All right. I’ll talk to you next week.