🎯 Work Smart Wednesday
👋 Hey there!
Here is your weekly dose of Work Smart Wednesday
In these emails I will share with you 3 things to help you work smarter in 3 minutes or less. That leaves you with 10,077 more minutes to conquer your goals this week
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1. 🌓 Your skills exist on a continuum
One of the biggest mistakes I see business owners make is thinking in binary terms. It is very rare that something is black or white, right or wrong, one or the other. Most things exist on a scale, a continuum. This is true for your skills too.
You are not unable to do sales, you just currently have low skill on the sales skill continuum. You are not lazy, you are just finding it difficult to complete x task and are to the left of the motivation or discipline continuums. You are not bad with computers, you are just early on the continuum. You can improve.
This is an important distinction. The language we use to describe ourselves has a major impact on our worldview, and our self esteem, and our ability to succeed. This is well researched and underpins many forms of therapy, like CBT.
Simply describing yourself as unable, or incapable, of doing something damages your cognitive function. It makes it harder to perform or to improve.
Life is often hard enough as it is. Why makes things harder for yourself?
It can be difficult to change at first, but the first step is starting to notice when you are describing things in binary terms. Whether you voice that opinion or just think it internally, try to notice the binary thinking and remind yourself that the situation is not binary. The situation is fluid, on a continuum, a scale, and the situation can change. You can improve.
Changing your thought patterns like this takes time, but it is worth it. It will significantly help you improve your ability to analyse situations, which is critically important for your business. You will find it easier to spot opportunities for improvement and to find the motivation to implement positive changes. If you only do one thing this week, make a conscious effort to spot binary thinking and challenge it.
2. ↩️ Why you should use reverse trials
Reverse trials are a relatively new, and increasingly popular, method to convert your customers. Particularly common in SAAS businesses but useful for all business types. What are reverse trials?
Reverse trials are a hybrid trialing system, a free trial combined with the ‘freemium’ model. You start with access to all features like a free trial and when the trial time elapses you revert to a freemium version. Each outlined:
A free trial gives you all features then ends. No more access.
Good examples of this include Apple Music and Amazon PrimeA freemium trial only gives you limited features, you always pay for premium features. You don’t get to use the premium features until you pay.
Canva and mailchimp are famous examples of freemiumA reverse trial gives you all features THEN reverts to freemium. You have seen the benefits of the paid version, but after your trial you retain freemium level access and can upgrade whenever you want.
Toggl, my time tracker of choice, uses this well. As do Grammarly and Spotify
Free trials actually have a slightly better conversion rate than reverse trials on average, more people opt to buy after a simple free trial, but reverse trials have a much better initiation rate - more people start them in the first place. Freemium tends to suffer from conversion issues, converting free users into paid users at less than half the rate of free trials or reverse trials.
The 1-3% drop in absolute conversion rate vs the reverse trial is worth the significantly higher initial engagement you get from offering a reverse trial. A reverse trial brings signficantly more people into your funnel and converts at a comparable rate to free trials (and MUCH higher than other methods).
There are additional factors that influence the trial type you should select, particularly your industry and target audience. However, broadly speaking, reverse trials are your optimal choice. Give them a try.
3. 💡 Quote I'm pondering
"Every business is bottlenecked by the entrepreneur in one of 3 ways. 1. Skill deficiency. 2. Trait deficiency. 3. Belief deficiency” - Alex Hormozi
Click here to share this quote on Twitter
Both point 1, your skills existing on a continuum, and the above quote on bottlenecks come from this YouTube video. Ignore the cringy title, the video is full of incredible insights. Well worth a watch.
That's it! I can't wait to hear what you think. What did you find most useful? What do you want more or less of? Reply to this email now and let me know
Also, if you have anything interesting to share, I want to know about it😊
Have a great week,
John
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