Sales funnel is such a trendy word right now, especially if you have an online business.
I’ve seen posts and Facebook lives, rants, webinars and more all screaming: Sales Funnels ARE DEAD!
Pshh.. Not by a long mile.
I think this myth gets perpetuated because sales funnels by themselves feel and sound hard. Techy. Like something you’d rather never do.
Here are why sales funnels are not dead and how to make sure you have one that is actually helping your business and bringing in consistent revenue:
Sales Funnels are the pathway for strangers/traffic/leads to get to know and buy from you over a period of time.
Sometimes that’s a really short period of time.
Other times, you’re nurturing this person for months or years.
That pretty much sums it up.
Notice how I didn’t mention automating anything.
I didn’t say anything about tech.
Nothing robotic about it.
It’s simply a tool and process by which to sell better and more efficiently.
7 Steps to Building a Killer Sales Funnel
1. Start backward.
When most people think about their sales funnel, they focus on how do I capture their email address and hope it leads to them buying from me.
They’re looking from the top of their imaginary funnel and peering down into the depths hoping to drop people into it.
This leads to a discombobulated business with little conversions. It’s likely if you suffer from this, you have 5+ optins that people could download on your site, no clear path to the main thing you sell, and very little sales as a result.
Instead, I want you to think about your funnel upside down and strategically design who you want to work with, and in what way – by solving their exact pain points with your offers, lives, content, etc.
2. Figure out what you big offer is
This is the BIG thing that you are driving most people towards. This is the thing you love selling/offering the most, that most people tend to purchase and that gets the fastest result at a reasonable price. Sometimes this will be your high-ticket item.
More often than not, it will be your middle offering.
Figure out:
– What exactly is it? How do you describe it? What’s the name?
– What’s the transformation you offer people who purchase?
– What are the benefits of them using it?
– What is the catalyst for why they must purchase from you right now? What’s driving them there?
– What are the tangible pieces of the offer?
3. How do they get there?
This feels obvious, but it’s a tricky piece that most people overlook. This part is often what I call a tease. It’s the thing that gets people in the door and interested, at a higher level.
Three ideas for what this could look like for your business:
1. A free offer designed to wow and sell them into your main service (from step 2)
2. A taste of your offer at a lower price point and less time investment. Instead of the whole enchilada, can you give them a child’s portion at a fraction of the cost and whet their appetite?
3. A piece of the offer where you solve one part of their problem, instead of looking at everything.
These can be free or paid depending on how you want to strcture them.
4. An upsell
An upsell is one piece of the tease (step 3) that you can pull out for a low-ticket price to give your lead a quick win or big transformation. Not everyone has these built into their funnel, but they are easy money-makers to boost revenue with little effort.
5. Your optin
Finally. The part that feels most familiar. It’s not until step 5 that you design what your optin is. At this point, you’re looking to take another piece of the tease (step 3) to break down the simplest concepts of what it is you do to give them an easily digestible action to take.
These usually work best for conversions:
– checklists
– top 10 list
– guides
– quizzes
– audits
Your optin should feed idrectly into your main offer. If they are downloading this, they are in the research phase of what you do, and can be introduced to how you work and what you do through your nurture sequence.
6. Figure out your content
Now, after outlining each step of your sales funnel, what content ideas are coming to you?
By outlining step by step the path you want to take people on to get the best results with you, you’ve created your own niche for what you want to be an expert in, and suddenly, it gets a whole lot easier to create content when you don’t have to know #allthethings.
All of your content, talking points, Facebook lives, Instastories, webinars, emails, etc. should then all point to the optin if you have it outlined like this.
When you systemically plan for how you want people to work with you, you suddenly get laser-focused on your business and start to see true results.
7. The last step is to: test, test, test!
Most of what you do is a guessing game if you haven’t figured that out right now. Instead of freaking out, I hope you find comfort in that. It takes tweaking, testing, trying new ideas out to figure out what really works.
When you are testing, watch these metrics so you know what’s working and what step in your sales funnel needs help:
1. Track your traffic coming in: where is it coming from, how many people are you getting in front of?
2. The conversion rate for each step in your process. How many people are opting in? How many are taking you up on the upsell? How many are going straight to your tease? How many from your tease are you getting to the main offer?
Knowledge gives you the power to run your business like a CEO. If you’re not tracking anything yet or have any idea where to start, pick one thing to figure out and focus on that.
You don’t have to get it perfect, you just have to get it going. Go take some action!
