How To Stay In Control Of Sales During Slow Seasons

If you’ve ever stared at a quiet inbox and wondered whether you should quit and go back to a 9 to 5, this conversation is for you. I’m Shelby McFarland, the marketing broker, and I’m laying out the mindset shift that keeps entrepreneurs, salespeople, and marketers moving when doubt gets loud: you are in control of your business success, but only if you act like it.

I walk through a real story from my own business where I set an aggressive goal to make $8,000 in sales in seven days and ended up doubling it before leaving for a big trip. The point isn’t hustle for hustle’s sake, it’s focus. I leaned on past proposals, reactivated networking connections, and asked for referrals directly. That simple follow-up strategy is one of the most underrated tools in small business marketing because people’s budgets, priorities, and needs change over time.

We also get honest about slow seasons and the mental spiral they can trigger. I connect the dots between consistent marketing, networking, and sales outreach and how those positive actions compound over six months to a year. When you stop because you’re “busy,” you often pay for it later with a dry pipeline. Whether your goal is building a million-dollar company or keeping a part-time business that feels sane, you get to decide what success looks like and what you’ll do to create it.

If this helped you reset your focus, subscribe, share it with a business owner who needs the push, and leave a quick review. What’s one follow-up or referral ask you’re going to make today?

Transcript

Welcome And Core Premise

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Hey guys, what's up? Welcome to your favorite podcast. I'm your host, Shelby McFarland, the marketing broker. Today we are talking about how you are in control of the success of your business. We have to stop letting all these people on the outside, people that we're sending proposals to, our friends, our family, everybody tell us how successful our business is going to be. If you're the business owner, if you are a salesperson, if you are a marketer, you are in full control of the success of your business. If you're going to reach your goals

Stop Letting Others Define Success

SPEAKER_00 0:49

or you're not. This topic comes from me having a bunch of conversations with people lately. They, some of them are clients, some of them are just really friends, some of them are potential clients. And then also me myself, I have this conversation with myself a lot whenever I'm feeling kind of down. We all have the slow seasons. We all have seasons of doubt. We think that we're gonna not make it, or I don't know why I even started this. I'm gonna try to find a nine to five job. If I could count on my hands how many times I could do that, I would have to have literally 20 hands. That's how many times I've thought I should just quit and get a nine to five. And that's not even, that's not even acceptable for someone as an entrepreneur because I don't really truly believe that I would ever thrive in a position that is nine to five. I'm pausing because I'm pretty sure my phone just made a um noise and I want to make sure it didn't stop. So no, no, no, don't come watch it. Just like, just like make sure it didn't stop. Oh, okay, great. Okay, sorry. No, you're good. I'm like, I just don't want it to stop and then we keep going. A couple of weeks ago, before a really big trip, I made

The 8K Sales Goal Story

SPEAKER_00 1:57

a sales goal for myself. I was like, I need to make $8,000 in sales before I leave. Yes, that's crazy, right? Seven days, $8,000. Y'all, I freaking blew it out of the park. I doubled that goal and I made the sales before I even left. And you're like, well, I mean, you've been in business for 14 years. So of course you can do that. No, it's not because I've been in business for 14 years. It's literally because I took my energy and I focused it on my goals, my sell goal, and I reached out to people with past proposals. I had made really great connections in networking over the last couple of months, and those finally came through with coffees and like seeing them again in other networking events, you know. Those things all started adding up, and I went back to my resources. In fact, I have some branding shoots coming up in a couple of weeks, and I have reached out to people going, hey, do you mind asking all of your friends or your business

Asking For Referrals Without Shame

SPEAKER_00 2:50

people? Like, do they need these headshots done? Because I would love to provide that service for them. It is okay to ask your referral partners or your friends or your colleagues for referrals. That is our goal here, right? We want to ask for referrals because those are the connections that we have in networking. Those are the connections that we have outside of just our normal office every single day. So ultimately, as a salesperson, as a marketer, as a business owner, you have full control over how successful your business is. I could sit back and, you know, get all sad and depressed about like, oh, I'm in a slow season. The beginning of 2026 was the slowest my business has been in almost five years since COVID.

Surviving A Brutal Slow Season

SPEAKER_00 3:34

COVID was a little slow. So I would say since then, that was the slowest my business has ever been. And I was adamant about not staying at home. Y'all, I wanted to give up. I wanted to go to a nine to five. I was like, I'm just kidding, all the people I hired, like everyone's fired. I can't handle this. This is a lot of pressure. The new um studio that I was opening, I was like, this is a really stupid idea. I can't believe I did all that. I had all these negative thoughts in my head because I allowed that season of my business to really get to me. But what I found was that I dug a little bit deeper inside of me. I got back into that hustle mode that I had back in the day when I first started my business, and I really have hit it out of the park. It finally snowballed, and now we're in July of 2026, and it's like things are getting faster and faster and busier and busier, and it's like that energy is just compounding on itself. I was listening to Ed Milette on my drive today, and it was interesting what he had said. He had said that our positive um actions, so things

Why Positive Actions Compound

SPEAKER_00 4:35

that we do in a positive manner, will actually add up and compound, but it takes like six months to a year to truly see it. So he's more of a personal development coach, and he was really talking about like our health and things that we want to do with our bodies and stuff. And so he was like, Okay, well, if you're starting to work out today, you've got to do it consistently and you'll see the positive results six months to a year down the road. He was like, but if you stop that, so if you get in your head, if you're negative, then your body's gonna react faster to negativity and you're gonna lose the momentum that you had whenever you were actually positive. So let's put that in terms of marketing and as a business owner and sales and how we can be successful in that. So I know that the energy that I was putting into this business for four to five months this year, now it's compounded. I'm starting to see it. It's six months down the road, and then a year down the road, I'm excited to see what it's gonna be like a year down the road. But I've seen this happen in the past too, where I stopped marketing myself, I've stopped networking, and I refuse to do any of that because I was like, oh, I'm busy right now. Oh, I have enough clients, oh, I don't need anything else, I don't need any more sales right now. I've got everything under control. And then I got all those projects done and was like,

The Trap Of Pausing Marketing

SPEAKER_00 5:52

well, shit, well, what am I supposed to do now? And so that's where I learned personally, like if I'm not consistent with networking and marketing and being positive and reaching out to people and making those connections, that my business will have these up and up and downs a lot more than if I just stayed consistent. So if you're feeling kind of like in a drag or maybe you're in a slower season, how can you reframe your mindset right now to going to that sales place? How can you reframe your mindset to make those connections again? Reach out to those old people that you used to do work for. I have literally made a list of proposals during slow slow times. I've made a list of people that I've sent out proposals to in the past five years. Do you think someone five years ago probably already hired someone to do marketing? Maybe. I've had people to go, oh hey, yeah, let's talk about that again. Actually, my budget's a lot different now than it was five years ago. What can you do?

Reaching Back Out To Old Leads

SPEAKER_00 6:51

Or if they needed something that I didn't offer five years ago, and now I'm like, hey, listen, our SEO software is freaking amazing. How can we help you? Are you still interested in doing this? I would love to help you, your business grow on the search engines. And some people say yes, some people don't respond, and some people go, no, we actually already have it handled with someone else. Absolutely fantastic. But you know what? The energy I'm putting towards that is then coming back to me in different ways of like, hey, I sent a referral to you. This person was needing some marketing, so I gave them your number. Oh, thank you so much. That person calls and they hire me. So that's what energy is and how we can be in control of the success of our business. And I want you to really think about how you can reframe your mindset, how can you take control of your business, of the success of it? How can you really make it exactly what you want it to be? Some of my clients want to be millionaires. Cool. How can we get to that point? How many years do you think it's gonna be? How

Define Your Goals And Take Control

SPEAKER_00 7:50

many sales do you have to have? Some of my clients are like, listen, I want to do this part-time. I don't really need anything extra. This is really, I kind of want to limit it to this. Okay, great. You don't have to be in hustle mode all the time. You really just want to take on the one or two, three clients at one point. I get that. So you get to be in control. Let's stop letting everything else control you, control your emotions, take ownership of it, and be successful in your business. Okay, guys, I'll catch you on the next one.