There’s a very specific online sales strategy that business coaches are talking about behind the scenes with their clients and students. And almost nobody is talking about it publicly.
It’s not one of those flashy, public conversations. But it’s the one actually happening behind closed doors, and I want to pull it out into the open today.
We’re going to get into how the online space has changed. But real talk: I don’t think it looks all that different today than it did a year ago. A year ago is just when we started to see this dramatic shift. So when I say the online space has changed, I mean that recent shift, not a brand-new one.
Here’s what I’m noticing. The people who have been in business a long time, who are still running successful businesses right now, are all doing one specific thing differently.
That’s what I want to break down today. Let’s get into it.
Table of Contents
We’ve seen a pretty dramatic shift in the last year. Maybe a little longer than that.
I’ve said this on the podcast before, but I want to drive it home: one of the qualities that will make you a better marketer than almost anything else is being observant. Watch everything through a lens of curiosity.
Watch your own consumer behavior. Why are you drawn to what you’re drawn to? Why are you buying what you’re buying? Then watch what other people are doing too. Again, from curiosity, not comparison. If you listen to this podcast, you already know we never get the full story of someone’s business from an Instagram post. It is so easy to lie on Instagram.
Quick tangent: I was in Paris recently, and it was amazing. But while I was there, I figured out why so many of those gorgeous shots are framed above shoulder level. You don’t see in the beautiful TikToks how crowded everything actually is.
Anyway. The point is it’s incredibly easy to make something look a certain way on Instagram or in your camera roll, and have that be nowhere close to the reality. The only way you’d really know is to stand in the person’s shoes.
We’re all putting our best foot forward. And even though I think we’re all being drawn to more authentic, transparent people right now, people are still only showing what they want to show. They’re displaying a very specific version of themselves. That’s okay. It’s not a criticism. It’s just that as consumers, we sometimes forget it and assume we’re seeing the whole picture. We never are.
So to get into what I actually want to talk about today, I want to go all the way back to 2017, when I was a baby business owner.
2017: The ClickFunnels era
I dove right in. This was when ClickFunnels was the thing. The Two Comma Club. (I Googled it. The Two Comma Club technically launched in 2014, but I swear it didn’t really hit until around 2017.)
Keep in mind, I was starting a destination wedding planning business. Not a funnel business. But I was completely consumed by this marketing content anyway.
Everyone was running those self-liquidating offer ads. You buy something for $17, it upsells you to $37, and the backend sells you something for $127. That was the marketing of 2017. This was also the age of the Amy Porterfield webinar. Her first one launched in 2016, and we all know how much it exploded after that.
That’s the era of marketing I entered. And I kept trying these tactics even though they had nothing to do with the industry I was actually in. So consider this your reminder: not every tactic works in every industry. For pretty obvious reasons.
2020–2021: The rule book goes out the window
Then 2020 and 2021 hit, and the rule book went out the window.
Suddenly you could sell from a Google Doc.
You didn’t need a launch event.
Evergreen got way easier.
People were spending a lot more money during COVID, and attention was easier to grab, especially if you got in early. The people who jumped on that wave right away reaped the rewards of being first.
It’s not that funnels disappeared. But the messaging changed. In the ClickFunnels days, it wasn’t sold as easy exactly. It was “come learn from me, do these 87 steps, buy this $2,000 course, run your ads, and you’ll get people into your funnel.” Doable, but you had to put in the work.
By 2021, the message was different: make passive income in five days. Get paid to be yourself. Launch it messy. Sell your course before you build it. That kind of thing.
And what I want to talk about today is that I feel like we’re moving back toward the 2017 landscape, in a totally different way. We’re not going back to the Two Comma Club. We’re not chasing the “millionaire in 30 days” thing or that really gross hustle energy. But we are at a point where we acknowledge you have to work for the business you want. Nothing is just going to be handed to you.
You don’t have to work 160 hours a week. But there is work required to do well in the online space now. You’re competing “with people who are doing the work.” So if you want to be successful, you have to do the work too.
And yes, we do need the funnel.
I’m going to come back to this toward the end, because when you hear me say “you need a funnel,” I do not mean you need a freebie, a welcome sequence, and a sales page. It’s going to look completely different for everyone. But you do need something in place. It doesn’t magically happen as easily as it used to.
Buyers are more sophisticated now (and your online sales strategy needs to match)
Here’s why. We just don’t have the same volume of people who are new to the industry. The unsophisticated buyer who walks in, gets wowed by a promise, and buys on the spot. We still have people. Plenty are new. But a lot of us are burned.
We’ve made the bad purchases. We’ve bought the snake oil, and now we’re on the other side of it. I don’t think anyone really believes in passive income anymore. There are absolutely more scalable ways to make money. But we’re over the whole “this is totally passive, just make an e-book in Canva with AI, sell 300 a day, and become a millionaire” thing.
Which brings me to the sophisticated buyer. What I mean by that is people are coming into the market having seen this song and dance before.
This actually clicked for me in Paris. (I live in a smaller city in Canada, for context.) What I noticed there was that all these TikTok trends and moments and very specific photo angles were everywhere in real life. There’s one where you’re on a riverboat cruise and you turn to look up at the Eiffel Tower at exactly the right moment, with a sound to it. If you haven’t been binging Paris TikTok, you might not know what I mean. But people do the exact same pose at the exact same spot.
When I did a river cruise, there were eight people on my boat all trying to nail that shot. All trying to frame it without getting the other seven people doing the same thing in the background.
The reason I bring it up: there are so many people online right now seeing the same stuff over and over. We are not getting that “wow, this is something new” feeling from people anymore.
Think about it this way. If I were the very first person to ever tell you “hey, start a blog, get a ton of traffic, here’s how I made a bajillion dollars and you can too,” and that was the first time you’d ever heard of making money online, you’d be incredibly drawn to it. If you’d never watched a webinar, never seen an influencer talk about Instagram hacks, and I came right out and said that, you’d be far more likely to hand me your money so I could show you how. Because it’s a brand-new concept to you.
We don’t wow people with new concepts anymore.
And there’s one more thing happening on top of all this. In the age of AI and AI content, people want more you. Because the same-as-everything-else? They can get that anywhere.
Personal connection is paramount in 2026
So personal connection is huge right now. And that’s something we did not see in 2017, and definitely did not see in 2020.
Back then, people weren’t giving one-on-one attention at all. It wasn’t a thing. There were boundaries. You might get a sales call if someone was about to pitch you something four or five figures, but for a $500 offer? You weren’t getting a call. You weren’t even getting a DM conversation. And the bigger the person, the less likely it was to happen. It just wasn’t necessary. People were hitting their launch goals without it.
At least that’s how it looked from where I was sitting. I obviously missed the 2020 wave. I was watching from the sidelines, dealing with the mess of a destination wedding business at that time. But that’s okay. I’ve moved on 😉
The idea, though, that a six- or seven-figure business owner would personally have a DM conversation with you about a $500 purchase? That was bananas back then.
And I think we’re moving away from that. Now I fully believe people expect their questions to be answered. They expect to be able to have a conversation with the person they’re buying from.
Boundaries are softening and adjusting
One of my business coach clients actually told her mastermind at the very beginning of the year: the reality is the market is softening, and you’re going to hear me tell you to get out there and pound the pavement more than ever before. And she’s a fabulous coach.
She’s not saying “stick to your boundaries” or “keep doing what you’re doing and be patient.” She told them straight: the market is different, and yeah, you might need to get out there and pound the pavement more than we ever have before.
2 Examples Of An Online Sales Strategy in 2026
I have two very specific examples of how this is changing, and I don’t think anyone’s talking about it, because it’s not a “sexy tip.” Nobody wants to hear that they’re going to be told to do this if they join a program. But that’s the reality.
Example one: “I saw you lurking”
Someone was launching an offer, low four figures I think, somewhere around $1,000 to $2,000. I was semi-interested, but I didn’t reach out at all. I just clicked the link in the email to get more details. She has something like 15,000 followers. And she DM’d me. “Hey, I saw you lurking. I just want to say I’m here for any questions.” She mentioned she had people in the content writing space in the program.
It wasn’t a hard pitch by any stretch. But it was clear she’d taken a second to actually look at my profile and send a personalized message. It wasn’t a blanket blast. And that’s kind of the opposite of what the Instagram crowd is doing, which is set up a ManyChat automation for every single thing. This was just, “Hey, I saw you click the link, I’m here if you have questions.”
Honestly, I wouldn’t expect someone at that level to be paying attention to who’s clicking their emails. I had mad respect for the whole thing. I told her, “Yeah, I did look, I don’t think it’s right for me for X, Y, Z reasons, no big deal.” But if I had been on the fence? That would have been such a good way to open the conversation.
Example two: the rescheduled sales call
There was a group coaching program I was really interested in that launched at the beginning of November. I was humming and hawing because the timing didn’t feel great. I waited until the last day, but I wanted to book a sales call. Calls were offered, and I had a few specific questions about my niche.
I went to book, and her next availability was the end of November. So I booked it. She told me, “All good. Because you booked during the launch, I’ll honor the same bonuses.” Great, I thought.
Then it got closer to the date. I knew I had a big family trip at the start of December, then Christmas right after. And I thought, I do not want to join this program right now when I know I’ll lose the first month and a half to other priorities. It’s not that you need to wait for the perfect moment to join something. But I know myself. If I don’t dive into a program right away, the chances of me picking it back up “when things slow down” are basically zero.
So I canceled the call. I didn’t reach out, I just canceled it. The cancellation form had a little dropdown: why are you canceling? Busy, wrong time, that kind of thing. I clicked one and moved on.
Then she DM’d me. “Hey, I know you said bad timing. Can you tell me more?” So I explained: family trip, then Christmas, I won’t be able to even think about this until mid-January. And she said, “Well, why don’t we just book a call for mid-January?”
I was like, you would do that?
It genuinely surprised me. So we booked for mid-January. She answered my questions, and I signed up immediately.
And this is the thing. I was interested. But back in 2020 and 2021, when sales were easy, so many people stuck rigidly to their boundaries. If they said doors are closed, doors are closed. There was this whole wave of “don’t say doors are closed if they’re not really closed” discourse. And the upshot was, if you didn’t fit perfectly into the neat little box of the launch window, you didn’t qualify.
So I thought this was a great example of being flexible to someone’s actual situation. I wasn’t expecting special treatment. The idea of getting special treatment honestly gives me goosebumps. I would never have asked for it. But it cost her nothing. The program is evergreen anyway. You can reach out and join anytime. The launch event was just when you got the special bonuses, which she honored because I’d been interested during the launch. Maybe she does that for everyone. I don’t know, and I don’t really care. I knew I wanted the program. I just wanted to join when I could give it my attention.
She has almost 60,000 followers, I think. I’m only mentioning follower count to give some perspective on how busy these people are. And I know it’s not a perfect metric. I have a tiny following and I’m very busy. Someone could have a big following and not be that successful behind the scenes. I don’t think that’s the case for either of these two, but I don’t actually know them. I’m not looking at their P&L.
The point is this. If you assume someone with 60,000 followers is too busy to follow up manually with individual leads, I would have assumed the exact same thing. And clearly I was wrong.
These are the things people are actually doing, and the things coaches are actually advising their clients to do, that we never see in public content. Because if I said, “join my mastermind and I’ll teach you to follow up with your leads manually in the Instagram DMs,” you probably wouldn’t want to join my mastermind.
What This Means For Your Online Sales Strategy in 2026
I know I wouldn’t look forward to it. I might do it if my coach told me to, but it wouldn’t be something I’d be excited about, just because of who I am as a person. Even though we can see it works.
And here’s the honest part. I was planning to join that second person’s program at the next launch. But who knows if I actually would have? Would the timing have been right? Would the Instagram algorithm even have shown me her stuff so I remembered she existed? It could have gone either way. So I love that she secured that sale with what was really not much extra work. She reached out to personally reschedule a call. That’s it.
The return of the webinar (or other launch event)
Something else I’m seeing work well right now: the return of the webinar. The masterclass. Whatever you want to call it.
If you’re launching something, you need some kind of launch event again. Which is wild, because those felt like they went away. They were everywhere in 2017 and 2018. We were all running challenges, five-day challenges, webinars. That was the thing. And I really feel like we’re circling back to it.
Evergreen sales are a lot harder now. If you want to sell something evergreen, you need a strong traffic strategy and a strong conversion strategy.
Traffic and conversion both need to be strong
This next one was actually a launch, not an evergreen example, but it makes the point. I was listening to an episode of Million Dollar Grit where Julie Chenell talked about the Jessie Jean launch. The big creator who sold a challenge and did massive numbers. And the whole takeaway was that her traffic strategy and her sales strategy both had to be incredibly strong for her to pull off what she did. Not one or the other. Both. It was a great episode. I’ll link it in the show notes if you want to listen next.
Because a few years ago, you could get away with one or the other. You could have strong traffic and a low conversion rate, and it wouldn’t matter. Or, remember when “you don’t need more traffic, you just need to convert the people you already have” was everywhere? Both of those could be true at the time. But now that the market is more sophisticated, you really need both to be strong.
Personal invitations and support are being sought after
I also think personal invitations are huge (inside and outside of your program). Personal attention. Some kind of feedback.
I know that makes things less scalable. But there are other ways to scale without cutting all your one-on-one attention entirely. It can be as simple as this: I notice now when I buy from people, they make an effort to follow me on Instagram, maybe like a few things. (I’m not on Instagram anymore, so this isn’t a super recent example, but I noticed it when I was.) Those little extras make a huge difference.
Especially in an era where it’s getting hard to tell people apart online. I could name a million people I could learn Instagram from. Or sales. Or blogging. You have to be able to differentiate yourself in a market where a million people are doing what you do.
Adapting Your Online Sales Strategy for 2026
So here’s how I want to close.
Even though I’m telling you that you need traffic skills, sales skills, and some kind of personal brand, there are a million and one ways to do each of those things. I am not saying freebie, welcome sequence, webinar, sales page. That is not what I’m saying.
You need a traffic channel and a conversion channel. Maybe your traffic comes from SEO and blogging. That’s my favorite. And your conversion happens through your email list. Or maybe you’re using Instagram or TikTok for awareness and Instagram for conversion. Whatever’s working for you. There really are a million ways to do this.
I’m also seeing more people prioritize in-person marketing, which is interesting. We haven’t seen as much of that, or maybe people just haven’t been as vocal about it. It’ll be interesting to see how it shakes out.
So that’s the shift no one’s talking about: more follow-ups, more one-on-one, more personal attention, more flexibility to meet people where they are and get the sale.
That’s all for me this week. I’d love to hear what you think.
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