Aaron Hoos

There are 7 basic human emotions: Anger, Fear, Disgust, Contempt, Joy, Sadness, Surprise.

These are root emotions from which all other emotions spring. (Read more about them here). These 7 emotions are at the core of what drives our decision-making.

If you understand these emotions and build your sales funnel around them, you can sell more.

HOW TO USE SURPRISE IN YOUR SALES FUNNEL

I really like that surprise is one of the 7 basic human emotions. It’s so effective when used in the sales funnel. Ironically, it’s not used often enough.

There are two ways that sales funnels can use surprise and both of these ways can have a very positive or very negative result.

Surprise in marketing: When businesses use surprise in marketing, they capture the fleeting, hard-to-get attention of their target audience. Used well, surprise can rivet the attention of an audience member so they stay engaged throughout the entire marketing message.

This truth in marketing was highlighted for me when I got my PVR. I would watch my shows and just fast-forward through the commercials. But sometimes a commercial (even at a high speed) will appear funny and shocking — surprising! — and I’ll stop and watch the commercial.

Unfortunately, surprise is so rare in marketing. Too often, marketing might start out as a great idea but it is pushed through various corporate departments — each with competing agendas — and what comes out on the other side is a mediocre result.

Surprise in sales: This is another area that has huge opportunity for many businesses but they fall short. When selling, businesses barely live up to expectations. They promise all kinds of things when selling and then meet (or almost meet) those expectations. Consumers are left feeling like they got what they paid for… and nothing else. Is it any wonder that businesses can’t figure out why consumers aren’t “extremely satisfied” when polled?

When I bought my furnace/air-conditioner, I was promised all kinds of things. When the company delivered and installed it, the installers told me that what was promised during the sale couldn’t be done because the salesperson wasn’t an installer and wasn’t aware of the peculiarities of my house. We got the issue resolved after A LOT of frustrating negotiation (and after I contacted the consumer affairs ombudsman). And then I pay every year for a 5 minute inspection. Ultimately, I got what I was promised, but nothing more. So, I’ve never recommended their service to anyone else.

On the other hand, they could have surprised me by delivering what they promised… and more. Even with a little extra courteous service and some proactive follow-up.

Consumers who are surprised by the value of their purchase and the company that sold it to them creates a wow factor that people will remember and return to again and again.

If you want to surprise people in your sales funnel, surprise them in your marketing with clever, unexpected, daring, push-the-envelope marketing that they aren’t expecting. And, surprise them in your sales by delivering more than you promised and providing higher value than they were expecting.

In a previous blog post, I showed you how to draw your sales funnel. I showed you the sales funnel for a typical (but made-up) business.

Now, I’m taking that same made-up business and using it as an example case study to show you how to find new opportunities to run a more successful, profitable business.

One way you can optimize your sales funnel is:

Reduce the people who fall out of your sales funnel

There’s a reason that a sales funnel is funnel-shaped. Lots of people come into your funnel from the top but only a few make it to the bottom. Everyone else either drags their heels or finds some other way to solve whatever problem that your product or service solves. So, I guess a sales funnel is actually more like a sales sieve!

It’s okay that SOME people fall out of your sales funnel. You don’t want or need everyone to buy from you. But you should try to keep more people in your funnel than you have been. Some people need a longer-term relationship before they are willing to buy.

So, one of the opportunities we can see in this case study sales funnel is to add some “stickiness”… something that keeps people in the loop if they aren’t ready to buy just yet.

Email newsletters and autoresponders are perfect for this. They offer you an easy way to capture some basic information and then stay in touch.

Here’s what I would do to integrate an autoresponder into this sales funnel:

• Measure to see what my close rate is on people who are getting to the ebook landing page… and instead of offering the ebook for sale on the landing page, I’d offer a free newsletter and see if that captures more people’s information. Then offer the ebook in an email.
• Put the email sign-up form on my home-page and make that my primary offer. Get people signing up to it.
• Create a special email sign-up page just for people from the Chamber… an exclusive list that keeps them up-to-date on my speaking and answers questions about what I do.

By doing these three simple things, the business would capture more leads and prospects and keep them in a holding pattern. The ones who were going to buy would buy anyway but the ones who weren’t going to buy right away would be nurtured until some of them were ready to buy.

There are 7 basic human emotions: Anger, Fear, Disgust, Contempt, Joy, Sadness, Surprise.

These are root emotions from which all other emotions spring. (Read more about them here). These 7 emotions are at the core of what drives our decision-making.

If you understand these emotions and build your sales funnel around them, you can sell more.

HOW TO USE SADNESS IN YOUR SALES FUNNEL

It’s amazing how many of the 7 basic human emotions are negative. And yet, we can still use them in our sales funnels. Sadness is one of those basic emotions and even though you don’t see it a lot in sales funnels, it is present.

I should make a disclaimer here: Selling with sadness seems callous and I don’t mean to come across that way. But there ARE situations when it is necessary to sell in a sad situation. For example, a funeral home or a fundraising campaign for a catastrophe are both selling into sadness. There’s nothing wrong with it as long as it is done ethically and sensitively and responsibly.

So, how do you sell into a sad situation? Well the first thing you need to do is highlight the emotional connection between the buyer and the victim. It might be a family connection or it might be something broader (such as: We’re all humans and are saddened to think that someone else is facing such difficulty).

In situations where it is a widespread problem, the story needs to be humanized to help establish that emotional connection. That’s what those late night World Vision commercials do: They introduce you to one child and that child stands in as a surrogate for all starving children and helps to build that emotional connection much more effectively. (It’s hard to sell into sadness when there is no human connection).

You also need to keep in mind the benefits when selling into sadness: The purchase/contribution is not going to bring happiness or even necessarily peace-of-mind to the buyer. Don’t promise that! Rather, the buyer’s benefit is a sense of relief at having made an appropriate response.

The biggest risk in selling into sadness is using guilt and it is a very fine line between appropriately selling with sadness and laying on a heavy dose of guilt. I think the difference is this: Appropriate selling into sadness says “If you contribute, you’ll help” while inappropriate selling with guilt says “If you DON’T contribute, you’ll hurt.” That’s a hard line to walk and your sales and marketing copy will need to need to be closely reviewed for guilty selling.

There are many occasions when selling into sadness is okay. When done appropriately, it’s an easy sell because people are driven by a human connection to help each other. But it’s an emotionally draining effort and it’s one that is fraught with pitfalls for the seller.

In a previous blog post, I showed you how to draw your sales funnel. I showed you a fictional (but pretty typical) business and drew a sales funnel around it.

Over a few blog posts, I’m going to show you how you can examine the sales funnel you’ve drawn to find new opportunities to run a more successful, profitable business.

One way you can optimize your sales funnel is:

Reduce the number of steps in the sales funnel

Although there is a limit to how fast people will move through your sales funnel, there are ways you can speed up your sales funnel by reducing the number of steps in it.

The sales funnel (above) we’ve drawn for the case study is already pretty minimal (many businesses have much more complicated sales funnels than this!). There aren’t a lot of steps that move people from one stage to another but there ARE things we can do.

One opportunity to streamline this sales funnel is to stop splitting traffic between the homepage and the landing page. Since the landing page is the page that sells the ebook, and (presumably) ebook revenue is a key way for this business to make money, there is a risk that only a portion of potential ebook buyers are actually getting to the landing page. The ones who are sent to the landing page from articles get there (obviously) but other marketing efforts are sending potential ebook customers to the main page where they have to navigate to the landing page.

So two solutions to this problem are:

1. Sending more people to the ebook landing page instead of the homepage
2. Moving the ebook sales letter to the homepage

The other opportunity to reduce the number of steps in the sales funnel is on the right-hand side: Face-to-face marketing at the Chamber of Commerce leads to a contact (email or phone) and then signing a contract. But this can be improved further to save the business owner time and freeing up to allow more marketing and delivery.

A couple of solutions include:

1. Automating the contact stage with a website that answers questions and provides a downloadable contract to sign
2. Outsourcing the contact stage for 24/7 coverage
3. Stop sending people to the website

Neither of these ideas might seem like much but even a slight increase sales funnel speed can increase your business by moving more people through, faster. (Plus, a streamlined sales funnel frees up more of your time to focus on other things).

Stay tuned. There are many more opportunities we can derive from this sales funnel.

Understanding your sales funnel and being able to draw it out are essential skills you need to have if you want to grow a profitable business.

In this blog post, I want to walk you step-by-step through drawing out your business’ sales funnel. (Download this Sales Funnel Quick Reference Guide for more information about sales funnels).

STEP ONE: LIST EVERYTHING YOU DO

In two separate lists, list all of your marketing efforts and all of your products and services. Don’t worry if the lists aren’t exhaustive; just try to get it all down into the two lists.

For example:

Let’s say that your marketing efforts include online articles and press releases, Twitter, and you participate in your local Chamber of Commerce. You have a website and you also have a landing page that specifically sells an ebook.

And let’s say that your products and services include an ebook, telephone coaching, and seminars.

As you do this step, you might think: “Oh, but sometimes I talk to people on the phone. And how what about the money transaction? Don’t worry, we’ll get to that. You can list it in a third – “where the heck does this go?” list, if you want. Just get the two main lists down first.
 

STEP TWO: ARRANGE IN ORDER

Now it’s time to arrange your marketing efforts in order. It is very likely that people see you in one marketing channel before finding you in another.

For example:

Your target market might first spot you in a Twitter ReTweet so they follow you on Twitter and then they later check out your website. Or, they might do a search on Google for something, find an article you wrote, and then click to your website. So put your marketing efforts in order.

In the example we’ve been doing, it might look like this. You can see we’ve just grouped everything into three basic groups — the initial marketing at the top, your website homepage and landing page in the middle (since people will probably get to that site THROUGH one of the marketing channels at the top of your funnel) and your products/services at the bottom. Nothing fancy. We’re making some assumptions here (and we can always move stuff around later).

 

STEP THREE: FILL IN THE BLANKS

As you look at your sales funnel, you’ll realize that there are blanks that haven’t been covered yet (and maybe you added them to a “where the heck does this go?” list in step one). Some examples include:

• Add interaction
• Add your paygates (the places where the customer pays you)

For example

In the example we’ve been building, let’s imagine that prospective customers contact you (especially from Chamber of Commerce but occasionally through your website) to learn more about your seminars and coaching. After you interact with them a bit, they sign a contract and pay and you deliver the service.

And let’s also imagine that your paygates (which I’ve indicated in green in the example) are as follows: People pay up-front for your ebook and your coaching and they pay after the fact when you deliver a seminar.

In the example we’ve been doing, it might look like this. Again, it’s just a rough diagram and we’ll tweak it as we go.

STEP FOUR: CONNECT THE DOTS

In this step, you start to draw lines from one part of your sales funnel to another.

Not all of your marketing channels will prompt people to move forward in your sales funnel in the same way. Some will drive people to your website, others will get the phone ringing. Some marketing channels will prompt people in more than one way.

And, let’s not forget that sometimes, people will look at one marketing channel and then another before moving forward in your sales funnel, or they will buy one product and then another farther down your sales funnel. So there isn’t just vertical movement down your sales funnel, there is also horizontal movement as well.

For example:

You might find that your article marketing and some of your press releases tend to point people to your landing pages (instead of your website’ s home page) so you draw lines to connect those appropriately. And you might also realize that your Chamber of Commerce activity rarely results in an ebook sale but usually results in coaching and seminar work. So you connect those.

In the example we’ve been doing, it might look like this. You can see that (in our example) the article marketing TENDS to send people directly to a specific landing page in our website and our networking at the Chamber of Commerce TENDS to have people contacting us directly (instead of visiting the website… although some people from the Chamber will visit our website first).

 

STEP FIVE: GROUP INTO STAGES

At each stage in your sales funnel, the people in that stage have a different mindset. Some barely know you and are skeptical of what you offer. Others feel that they have a pressing problem and are curious if you can help them.

By grouping your different marketing and sales and delivery efforts into stages, you can communicate more effectively with the people in that stage because you know what mindset they have.

In general, I tend to use 5 stages (Audience, Leads, Prospects, Customers, Evangelists) but you might be more comfortable with a different grouping. That’s fine. The important thing is to define the stages and then figure out what mindset your sales funnel contacts have in that stage.

For example:

I’ve used just four stages in this example – Audience, Leads, Prospects, and Customers. Let’s assume that this fictional company doesn’t do very much with its Evangelists.

First we add the Audience stage by grouping together all of the marketing channels that we meet people who have likely never heard of us before.

Then we add the Lead stage by grouping together all of the channels where people might come to us because they’re interested in learning more.

Then we add the Prospect stage by grouping together all of the channels where people might keep digging because they realize that we can solve a problem they have. You’ll note that we made an adjustment with the Landing Page because it does double-duty as both a place where Leads land and a place that convinces Prospects to buy.

Then we add the Customer stage by grouping together all of our deliverables. You’ll notice that the ebook paygate has been moved because as soon as the Propsect clicks the Buy Now button and enters the paygate to pay, they have become customers. And, if they have contacted the business and are ready to receive a contract, they have become customers.

Now it’s your turn! Give it a try for your business. And in the comments below, tell me what you think of this process. I’ve tried to lay it out as simply as possible but I think about this stuff 24/7. Are there aspects of each step that I’m not covering in-depth? Let me know in the comments below and I’ll write a blog post to give more detail.