“You’ve got to give it a fair crack of the whip” – one of my favourite sayings and something my clients hate to hear. I say it when I think someone is getting disheartened and giving up too quickly. But, we have to balance that with “yeah but I need to make money” so we’re walking a line between knowing when something just hasn’t been talked about enough and when it’s time to say “Okay, this isn’t working”. Knowing which is which is a perpetual struggle for a lot of business owners and it’s what I’m going to help you with in this blog.
It’s a struggle for you? It is for me too. I want my clients to make money. I don’t want them to be in financial distress, no-one can be creative when they’re worrying about how to make this month’s rent. But I also know that organic social media does not always offer instant results. It can be a slow burn. Marketing your business on social media is often a painful and thankless job – but this is what we signed up for, so let’s make sure we know how to make it work.
To the person who posts once, gets no sales, and announces “well, no one’s buying it, I’m scrapping it” I say: keep going. One post isn’t a verdict. It’s barely a whisper. You need to say a thing more than a handful of times, especially on organic social media, before you’ve earned the right to call it a failure.
To the person who’s been posting the same offer for three months, doing everything right, and getting nothing back — I say: it might be time to let this one go. You need to make money. You can’t afford to keep feeding something that isn’t feeding you back.
Same advice-giver. Same week, sometimes. Two opposite instructions.
The Sunk Cost Trap in Business: Why Quitting Too Soon (and Too Late) Both Cost You
For a long time this bothered me, because it felt like I didn’t have a consistent answer. Then I realised the discomfort wasn’t a sign I was wrong. After a lot of reflection I figured out that they are two different problems. Two different failures, one uncomfortable feeling. There are two ways a marketing effort dies, and they get confused constantly.
The first is giving up too early. This is a volume problem. You’ve said the thing once, maybe twice, and you’re reading silence as rejection. But one post isn’t a test — it’s a single data point. The market hasn’t had enough exposure to you to respond yet, let alone decide. And people always over estimate how much of their content is being seen.
The second is the sunk cost fallacy. This is a judgement problem. You’ve genuinely put in the consistent effort, reasonable time, a fair test — and the result is still nothing. But you keep going anyway, not because the evidence points that way, but because of what you’ve already put in. You set the date. You told people when it started, when the early bird ended, it’s out there. People know. Stopping feels worse than continuing to lose slowly. Truth is, even if you ditch it — no-one will notice. And if they do, they probably won’t care. If they did, they would’ve bought it.
The thing that makes this hard to figure out at the time is the self-doubt, the imposter, the second guessing. Not to mention the frustration and the tiredness. You can’t tell the difference between “I should push through” (this is a me problem) and “I should stop” (this is an offer problem) by how it feels, because they feel the same.
Which is why so many people get it backwards — quitting when it just needed talking about and grinding through when it needed a pause and a rethink. Feelings aren’t the measure of what’s working. You need something else.
4 Questions to Ask Before You Drop a Package or Offer
- Has it been tested, or just repeated? Saying the same thing, in the same way, to the same people, five times isn’t five data points. It’s one. Real testing means you’ve varied something — the hook, the audience, the price, the format — and measured what changes.
- Is there any signal at all, or just a wall of silence? Comments, saves, a DM asking a question, someone saying “interesting, but not for me right now” — that’s a signal, even if it’s not a sale. It tells you people are seeing it and thinking about it. Total silence tells you something different: either it isn’t reaching anyone, or it’s reaching people who don’t register it at all. Silence and “no, but” are not the same result, and they don’t call for the same response.
- Would you start this today, knowing what you know now? If the honest answer is no — then you know. If the answer is “yes, but I’d change the price, or speak to a different person, or lead with something else,” that’s not a quitting signal. That means the idea might be sound even if the execution isn’t finished.
- What does one more round actually cost, against what you’d learn from it? Sunk cost thinking looks backwards, at what’s already been spent. The useful question looks forwards: given where you are right now, is one more attempt cheap enough, and would it teach you something you don’t already know? If yes, it’s usually worth it. If you’re about to repeat the exact same attempt for the fourth time expecting a different result, it won’t teach you anything new, it’ll just cost you more of what you’ve already spent — whether that’s time, effort, or confidence. Cos it does knock your confidence. You’ve never seen me feel more successful than when my bank balance is bursting. Get me on a skint day and I’m a complete failure. I know I’m not the only person who sometimes gets their self-esteem tangled up with their bank balance.
Real Example: How I Nearly Killed My Own Course (Saying It Simply)
I had to run this test on myself recently, with my own programme, Saying It Simply. I’d tweaked it twice after the first cohort, and on this third round I’d built in feedback properly — a stronger version than it had ever been. I put the price up to reflect the value of the offer. I promoted it. Silence. My first instinct was the familiar one: keep going, you said you would, it’s quiet in the summer holidays, people are off, it worked the first three times, blah blah blah. Then the self-doubt crept in — what if it’s the price? What if I’ve made it too expensive? Which I knew was bollocks.
So I asked myself the questions;
Has it been tested or just repeated? It had been tested. It was a repeat of the previous offer but with additional features.
Is there any signal at all, or just a wall of silence? You could hear a pin drop in the comments section of my posts. Tumbleweeds were rolling through my email inbox.
Would you start this today knowing what you know now? Honestly? No. I didn’t ask any of the previous participants “Would this added feature have made a difference to you?” I didn’t ask the question — would you have bought this in this format at this price? Or “Does this extra feature solve any additional problems for you?”
What does one more round cost against what I’d learn from it? Honestly, the cost is time. I don’t have a lot of it. It’s a resource I have to be quite precious about so keeping going when no-one has even raised an eyebrow in my direction is not an option.
Four questions, and the answers were mixed at best — so I asked a fifth. Do I really want to promote this or am I using it to avoid promoting what I actually want to grow, which is the Word Shed? And the honest answer stopped me. I wasn’t promoting Saying It Simply because the market was asking for it. I was promoting it because it was easier than promoting the thing I actually care about growing. I was not doing the harder, scarier work. Three rounds in, it had been a real offer. The fourth round was just me stalling with a to-do list I could tick off instead of one I was afraid of.
The Real Discipline: Testing Your Offer Without Second-Guessing Yourself
None of this removes the discomfort. Quitting something you’ve poured yourself into still feels like failure, even when it’s the right call. But becoming a better marketer isn’t finding a formula that works every time or a silver bullet so you always have the right offer for the right people at the right time (and the right price). It’s building the habit of asking the questions properly before you decide — instead of letting how tired or how hopeful you feel make the call for you. Keep going often takes more courage than quitting. And quitting, when you feel like you had a great offer, is also courageous. The line between a proper chance and a sunk cost isn’t a fixed rule. It’s a question you have to keep asking, honestly, every time.
If you’re staring at an offer right now trying to work out whether to kill it or push through — email me, or book a call and we’ll run it through the questions together. Book a call with Clair