Are You Building More Than Selling?

Episode 86 transcript: Are You Building More Than Selling?

The six-hour build and the email you can’t bring yourself to send

Hey there, and welcome to episode 86 of Your Fun and Profitable Online Business. This is the podcast that helps you build a business that feels as good as it looks. I’m Wendy Muzzy, and I help women entrepreneurs create fun and profitable businesses by designing them around the way they actually work, not how they think they should work. And today, I want to talk about something I hear from my clients and I personally experience sometimes.

It’s when you get an idea for a new offer, or a template, or an AI skill, or if you’re anything like me, an entire system that absolutely did not exist three days ago, and suddenly you are alive. You’re outlining it, and you’re naming things. You’re building pages, and you’re figuring out the tech. You’re deep in Canva making graphics, and you’re checking things off the list. You might work on it for six hours and realize you forgot to eat lunch because you’re having so much fun. And then it’s done. Now it’s time to sell it. And suddenly you realize you need to reorganize your Google Drive.

All right, let’s talk about this. What happened here? Three days ago, you had enough motivation to build an entire product from scratch. Now sending one email about the product feels utterly exhausting.

Why building and selling feel so different to your brain

It’s because building something can be incredibly rewarding, especially if you’re someone who loves ideas or solving problems or figuring things out or creating something that didn’t exist before. Think about what happens when you’re building. There’s newness to it. There are little problems to solve. There’s visible progress. And you can look at your screen and see what you’ve accomplished. Yesterday, there was no sales page. Today, there is a sales page. Yesterday, you had an idea. Today, you have a thing. And along the way, there are these tiny moments of completion. Done, check. Done, check. Done, check. Your brain gets constant evidence that something is happening.

But selling can be different. It often has delayed rewards. You send an email or make a post and maybe nothing happens. Or you mention your offer on a call and someone has to think about it. Or you follow up with someone and maybe they don’t respond for three days. You don’t have much immediate feedback telling your brain, yes, that worked. And even when you’re doing the right thing, you don’t have any control over the final outcome. You can build a beautiful sales page. You can make a wonderful invitation, but you cannot reach through your computer and make someone buy, which means you can do the work and still not be rewarded immediately.

This is a very different experience from building, and I think this is one of the reasons motivation can seem to disappear right at the finish line. Except, what if selling wasn’t actually the finish line? We’ll talk more about that next week. But for now, I want you to notice how differently your brain experiences these two types of work. Building gives you a lot of immediate wins. Selling asks you to tolerate uncertainty.

And then we add all the emotional stuff on top of it, because selling isn’t just uncertain. It involves people. People who can ignore you or unsubscribe. People who can say no. People who can decide they don’t want the thing you spent the last three days enthusiastically creating.

What “I don’t know how to sell” might really mean

So when you say, I don’t know how to sell, I want you to get curious about what that sentence actually means. Because sometimes it means you need sales skills, like how to write a sales email, or have a sales conversation, or sometimes you need some help figuring out your messaging. Those are all learnable skills.

But sometimes “I don’t know how to sell” is covering up something else. Maybe it means I don’t know which selling action is going to work, or I don’t want someone to reject me, or the really uncomfortable one: I don’t want to discover that people don’t want what I made. While you’re building it, the possibility is still perfect. Your program could sell out. Your template could be the thing that everyone out there recommends. As long as you’re building, none of these possibilities have been challenged. Selling gives the market a chance to respond, and that can feel a whole lot less fun than choosing fonts.

Strategy one: stop making “sell the offer” a task

So what do we do about this? The answer here is not to be more disciplined. If you’ve listened to any of my podcasts, I say that often. You already know how to work hard. I have no doubt about that. I want you to change the way you’re designing the selling part of your business. I’m going to give you some strategies here that are really instrumental.

First, I want you to stop making “sell the offer” a task. Sell the offer, air quotes if you can imagine seeing me, is a terrible, terrible task. You can’t actually complete it because selling isn’t just one action. And whether someone buys isn’t entirely within your control anyway. Compare that with building. Create the checkout page. Done. Upload the workbook. Done. Your brain knows exactly when those things are finished.

So let’s make selling work the same way. Let’s try: send one email about the offer, or follow up with two people today. Post one client result. Invite three people to book a call. Mention the offer at the end of my live training. All of these are tangible actions. You can complete them. You can count them. And most importantly, you can win at them regardless of whether someone responds today or not.

Strategy two: build a selling scorecard you can control

Next, create a selling scorecard you can control. I talk a lot about measuring things in business that actually help you make decisions. And when it comes to selling, I want you to separate activity from outcome. The outcome might be three sales. That’s great. We absolutely want the sales. That’s why we’re building fun and profitable businesses here. But what creates those sales? It’s going to be invitations, conversations, emails, follow-ups, making the offer. Those are really important things that you can control.

So maybe your goal isn’t to sell three spots this week. Maybe your goal is to make 20 invitations this week. Now your brain has something concrete to do. And if you listened to last week’s episode about collecting 20 no’s, you’ll recognize this idea here. We’re taking something emotionally loaded and turning it into a measurable action. Because making the sale is uncertain. Making the invitation is not.

Strategy three: give yourself credit before the sale happens

Third, give yourself credit before the sale happens. If the only time you allow yourself to feel successful at selling is when the payment notifications come through, you’re creating a very long reward loop, especially if you have a longer sales cycle. So shorten it. Sent the email? Count it. Made the invitation? Count it. Followed up even though you wanted to avoid it? Oh, you better count that one. Ask someone if they wanted to hear more? Count it.

You’re training your brain to recognize that this is what selling looks like. Because selling isn’t convincing people. Selling is consistently creating opportunities for people to buy. That’s a very different job.

Strategy four: make selling smaller

Fourth, make selling smaller. Sometimes we make selling feel enormous, like a launch, sales campaign. And suddenly you need 17 emails and 34 social posts and three lives and a webinar and a countdown timer and apparently these days a film crew. No wonder why you’d rather go build another template.

What if selling your offer today meant sending just one email? That’s it. Tomorrow, maybe you do something different. This eliminates the need to create a giant burst of selling energy every time you have something available. You just need a repeatable way to keep putting your work in front of people.

Strategy five: notice when your brain sends you back to building

And last, notice when your brain tries to send you back to building. This one’s really sneaky. You sit down to promote your offer and suddenly you realize maybe the workbook needs another section or you should add a bonus or you need to redo the sales page. Your brain has discovered a very convenient escape hatch: building. And I get it. Building feels productive. And it is productive. But productive doesn’t always mean useful right now. Ask yourself, does this actually need to be changed before I can invite someone to buy? If the answer is no, make the invitation first. You can always improve it later.

Selling as a series of concrete actions

Now, when selling stops being this giant mysterious thing that you have to somehow motivate yourself to do, you don’t need to become a different kind of entrepreneur in that space. You just need to know the next selling action. And that’s a much easier business to run and far more fulfilling.

Look, we’re not trying to turn you into someone who doesn’t get wildly excited about making something new. I certainly don’t want that. I too love building things. But we’re creating a bridge between “I made this” and “here’s how people can buy it.” Because your business needs both. The building creates the thing, and the selling gives the thing a chance to do its job. And when you design your sales process around concrete actions instead of waiting until you magically feel ready and motivated to sell, selling starts to feel a lot less enormous.

Today’s action step

So here’s your action step for today. Choose one selling action you can complete and count. Choose something you can control, like sending an email, mentioning your offer on your story today, inviting three people to take the next step. Just pick one and do it. And mark it complete. Put that check mark next to it. Let your brain get that same dopamine hit that you get when you’re building. Because we’re teaching your brain that selling isn’t one giant uncertain outcome. Selling is a series of concrete actions, just like building.

Now, sometimes we’ve developed an entire cycle that allows us to stay incredibly productive without ever selling a thing. We’re going to get into that next week, because sometimes avoidance doesn’t look like avoidance. Sometimes it looks like improvement, and it can be really, really sneaky. You’re going to want to listen. So wherever you listen to your podcast, go follow so you can get it right away.

All right, that’s it for today. Until next time, happy building your fun and profitable business.