Today we’d like to introduce you to Cynthia Trevino.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I love being my own boss today, but my entrepreneurial journey didn’t start out this enjoyable. I was enjoying my role as director of marketing for a now-shuttered telecommunications start-up based in Silicon Valley. It became clear that the demand for our once-hot Internet-connectivity technology had peaked.
Competition was increasing in the already crowded space. But despite mounting rumors, I thought the CEO had time to right the ship. Boy, was I wrong. One morning, as I arrived in Palo Alto on my weekly trip from San Diego, the office was hushed. Everyone’s faces instantly told the story. If you’ve ever been caught up in a massive layoff, you know what I mean. When my boss called me into his office, it was the shortest meeting of my corporate life. After all, he had 60 employees to give the bad news to that day—more than half the company.
Instantly I felt like a total failure. Everything I should have done to prepare for becoming jobless flashed through my mind. My resume wasn’t updated. I hadn’t cultivated a broad network of contacts. My interviewing skills were rusty. Self-blame washed over me as I berated myself for not preparing for the harsh reality of job hunting over the age of 40. The next few weeks were devastating because I dwelled deeply on my missteps. I was overweight, out of shape (weekly travel left little time for exercise), and I had no interviewing wardrobe.
My devastation was just beginning. Within a week, I was grateful and thrilled to book two interviews. This was 2001—the telecom industry was in a slump and job openings were scarce. My elation was short lived. In a single week, two male hiring managers gave conflicting reasons for not hiring me. The first one told me I was too technical for his position. The second hiring guy said I wasn’t technical enough for his job opening. Really?
It’s difficult, even today, to put into words how deeply this rejection hurt. I was crushed, defeated, and flooded with insecurity and self-doubt. I replayed the interviews in my head. I should have asked the hiring manager more insightful questions. I should have taken engineering classes at night. I should have done more networking.
Driving home on the beautiful San Diego freeway from the last interview, I made an unexpected decision. I was done putting my livelihood in the hands of executives who didn’t have a clue where the industry was headed. Kaput! It was unlike me to make crucial decisions in an instant, and yet I did. I was done with corporate life. Instead of looking for a new job, I was going to look for clients for my own business.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
For the first two years after becoming an instant entrepreneur my new, small business marketing consulting company went nowhere. I didn’t know how to attract the right clients. I didn’t know which strategies to try as a business owner. I did everything experts said: print brochures, advertise, put up a website, and network everywhere. I was drowning in advice and not making progress.
I had a constant, nagging feeling that I should know how to market my own business. My unhelpful, critical inner voice ran on a loop, “What’s wrong? You led successful corporate marketing campaigns for years. Why can’t you market yourself?” I couldn’t put my finger on the missing link for how to successfully promote my own business. I dreaded networking because my self-introduction was feeble. And still, I persisted. One night after pulling into the parking lot for an event, I felt physically ill. I couldn’t go inside. I was frozen. Sales conversations were a nightmare because prospects said no—or the dreaded, “I’ll think about it.” I’d hit rock bottom. I’d set myself up for stress and frustration by attracting, enrolling, and working with wrong-fit clients.
I had so much at stake. My husband and I had purchased a new home only three years before. If I couldn’t make my business profitable, we risked having to sell our house. Not to mention the humiliation from friends who still held corporate jobs with secure incomes.
I was miserable. My bank account was draining. Things were so bad, I briefly considered getting a job at Barnes & Noble. Then one day, my proverbial “aha” moment arrived. After an excruciatingly painful networking event, I sat down with a glass of pinot noir and replayed the whole few years. All of my misdirected conversations came rushing back to me. The fog in my brain lifted. It was clear. I knew what had been missing all along.
I had wasted time talking about topics my potential clients didn’t relate to or care about: marketing strategies, marketing plans, buyer personas, campaign concepts, website content, and creating white papers. I could suddenly see that I’d been blathering on like the naïve, inexperienced business owner I was. I used industry jargon and missed opportunities to connect with potential clients.
Unlearning Corporate Marketing:
I understand now why my wake-up call didn’t come for nearly two years—why it took me so long to see the light that big company marketing was vastly different from marketing myself. I’d mastered heaps of valuable skills during my corporate career like marketing strategy, content writing, researching buyer behavior, and the ability to explain complex products so non-technical folks understood the day-to-day benefits. However, those skills only applied if you’re a big brand, rolling out the latest widget.
The cold, hard reality was I had learned zero about how to effectively market myself. I was explaining to entrepreneurs the benefits of marketing strategies, plans, and how wonderful business would be after they became a marketing maven. But this was happening before I clearly understood where they were stuck and what they wanted to accomplish. I finally grasped that spouting benefits is like swimming upstream if you don’t first know where your potential clients are stuck.
I had to learn, from scratch, how to market myself. As a marketing entrepreneur, I had to empower myself to be comfortable and authentic about sharing my knowledge and how I helped clients get from where they are stuck, to where they want to be with their businesses.
Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about The Client Conversion Coach – what should we know?
I’m inspired every day by the amazing entrepreneurs I have the honor of working with. In 2015, I began to see a troubling pattern. As a marketing consultant, I would work with entrepreneurs who were starting businesses, launching much-needed products and services, or stepping up their customer outreach. We’d implement a successful campaign, promotion, or launch. I diligently tried to keep the entrepreneur and her team involved as I developed messaging, blogs, articles, campaigns, and content plans—the building blocks of successful marketing. My hope was that they could learn the approaches and techniques. The problem I found was that I was the marketing consultant.
Therefore, everybody else on the team had his or her own job to do and wasn’t able to learn how to put the marketing programs into action. As much as I wished that they could learn from the strategies, tactics, and tools we implemented when I finished a project, there was virtually no follow-through. That was endlessly frustrating for me.
Disturbing facts about the state of women-owned businesses began to gnaw at me. I tracked statistics about the earning power of women entrepreneurs compared to our male counterparts. We could hope the well-documented fact that women earn less than men would be limited to corporate America. Sadly, that’s not the case. There’s an even wider earnings gap between women entrepreneurs and men entrepreneurs.
According to the SBA in 2017, women own 36 percent of all privately held businesses in the US, and yet their sales amount to only 11 percent of total sales! Companies owned by men comprise just over half of all businesses, and their sales are a whopping 79 percent.
Women become entrepreneurs to take charge of our own destiny. To earn incomes appropriate for the value we bring our clients. Don’t we? I was disheartened. I realized I had a bigger contribution to make. My mission now is to educate, prepare, and mentor women entrepreneurs who want to get a firm handle on the best ways to market to their ideal clients. Many women start businesses because they see problems that aren’t being solved the way they know they can be. They said, “There’s got to be a better way!”
For example, women who struggled to find quality tutoring for their children decided to share their hard-earned knowledge and help moms searching for quality tutors and products. Or women who found that largely male financial advisors can be insensitive to the needs of a growing family, and others who saw people, families, and businesses struggling because no one offered the “better mousetrap” that women entrepreneurs knew was possible.
The gap is: while many women have the better mousetrap, they don’t understand that without an effective marketing plan and daily actions focused directly on reaching and educating their ideal clients, not enough clients will discover them. It all came together for me this way: our community and our country have a lengthy list of problems that need to be solved. We need more women leading in all parts of our business, economy, culture, and society. Let’s start with women business owners!
What sets me apart is that I take women entrepreneurs, step by step through a training program so that they become crystal clear about who is the perfect client they serve best and want to work with. Then I give them tools so they can speak their clients’ language, reach more of the clients they want to work with, and grow their businesses.
I’m most proud of creating my 5-step system because I’ve seen how it helps women entrepreneurs who are experts in their field, and now want to master how to market themselves and their businesses. And do so in a non-self promotional way.
Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?
As I’ve said, I’m inspired every day by the entrepreneurs I lucky to work with. They’re standing up for a better way to achieve business and life milestones. My biggest supporter, cheerleader, and advocate is my husband, Jim Butz. I’ve had the honor of learning from top mentors in my industry who helped me shape, mold, refine, and distill the knowledge and experiences that I pour into my signature program, Client Clarity to Cash Flow.
San Diego-based Pamela Hendrickson is an award-winning marketing, content, and business framework genius. From Jeanne Hurlbert, Ph.D., I gained incredible insights about understanding customers. Also from San Diego-based, Lisa Sasevich I gleaned rich lessons about structuring and packaging offers and benefited from a wonderful community of entrepreneurs. Lisa Cherney, a leader in Lisa Sasevich’s community, for valuable knowledge and always sharing the perfect thought when I, or someone else, was stuck.
Contact Info:
- Address: 1069 Goldeneye Vw
- Website: https://clientconversioncoach.com/blog/
- Phone: 760-268-1199
- Email: cytrevino@resonnect.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CynthiaTrevinoMentor/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ConnectUrGenius/
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cynthiatrevino/
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