Aaron Hoos

Long before they buy from you, you are investing time and energy into your leads and prospects to move them through your sales funnel. By the time they convert into customers, you have sunk resources (money/time/effort) into cultivating the relationship.

So companies that struggle with insufficient income or profits might not be moving prospective customers through their sales funnel fast enough. Here are some tips to solve that.

HOW TO SPEED UP YOUR SALES FUNNEL CONTACTS

• Increase the urgency in your sales funnel by highlighting some of the reasons that someone shouldn’t delay in buying from you. Rely on the 7 basic human emotions to help you push, pull, and prod your prospective buyer toward an immediate purchase.
• Offer an incentive for customers to buy now instead of later. Consider something like a reduced rate or an added bonus. Make sure that it’s an attractive offering with a lot of value or it won’t work. (You’ll also need to figure out how to respond to people who don’t buy from you but then ask you later for the free stuff anyway. It will happen!)
• Speed up your points of contact. If you have a sales call scheduled with a prospect every two weeks (14 days) until they become customers, why not try scheduling that sales call every 10 or 11 days. By doing this one simple step, you’re speeding up your funnel by 30%!
• At some point in your sales funnel you’ll have satisfied all of the buying parameters that a prospective buyer has (and if they haven’t bought by this time, they are just waiting until the time is right for them). So ask for the sale… every time you talk to them.
• Figure out the steps in each stage of your sales funnel and see if you can’t combine them together. Address two steps instead of one in a particular interaction.
• Objections are awesome! They tell you why someone isn’t buying. Handle objections as quickly as possible in your sales funnel. Don’t wait for the prospective buyer to ask you.
• Ask: Ask your prospective buyer: What is keeping you from buying today? You’ll get unanswered objections, sticking points, and probably a lot of hedging and feet-shuffling. But you’ll also find out what roadblocks you can address to get people moving through your sales funnel faster.

Your sales funnel is an engine that churns out customers (and revenue). Use these tips to put down the accelerator and get your buyers moving.

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 JOY IN YOUR SALES FUNNEL

Weirdly, joy is the only fully positive emotion of the 7 emotions. (Surprise could be positive but it could also be negative; the rest are negative emotions).

Joy is easily the most popular emotion that sales funnels sell to. Different sales funnels will call it different things (depending on what you’re selling) but it boils down to joy. Some sales funnels will explicitly call it happiness or peace of mind, and some sales funnels will implicitly sell to joy by selling about some of the things people think positively about — success, wealth, health, etc. So if you are a real estate professional and you are selling a couple on why they should hire you to list their home, you are selling the concept of joy… joy in how quickly you’ll sell their home and how much you’ll get for it. If you are selling in the e-business space, you are also selling the concept of joy… joy in how the person will be able to quit their job and enjoy the freedom that wealth brings.

• You cannot overstate joy. Don’t soft-sell it. Focus on the benefits as much as possible. Get people feeling joy while they read your sales copy.
• You don’t have to use the word “joy”. Just make sure you stir up some happiness with every sentence.
• Push your sales funnel prospect to think further: If you are selling something and you only talk about its successful achievement and you don’t focus on the joy they’ll feel afterward, you haven’t gone far enough. So if you’re selling a stock trading software system and you talk about how they’ll trade successfully, you’ve only done half the job. Talk about the joy they’ll feel when they can brag about their success and the money they’ll have when they trade more effectively.
• Use descriptive words. Avoid cliches.

Joy is one of the only “pulling” emotions in your sales funnel. The others are “pushing” emotions because the sales funnel contact buys from you to avoid those other emotions but with joy, they are buying from you to get that emotion.

I love zombies.

(Well, that’s not entire true, I guess. I love movies and TV shows about zombies. And I wrote a free ebook about how zombies can help us be more productive. But in a zombie apocalypse, I’d definitely be anti-zombie).

AMC’s The Walking Dead is a great show about zombies and I confess that I’m addicted.

The show is in the middle of a very riveting second season. (I just saw this episode earlier this evening, which is why it’s on my mind and why I’m writing about it right now).

To be honest, very few shows draw me in like this. And as I thought about why that was, I realized that part of it is the marketing geniuses behind the show. Here are 5 lessons we can learn about marketing from The Walking Dead.

LESSON #1: DEVELOP A STORY WITH DEPTH

In The Walking Dead, each character has a detailed backstory and well-developed personality that clearly influences their decision-making. The main character, Rick Grimes, is a sheriff who carries the weight of the group’s survival on his shoulders and he fights to do the right thing… and often he fights just to figure out what the right thing is. His best friend (and main rival), Shane, is a headstrong character who does what he thinks needs to be done to protect the group… (spoiler alert: and specific members of the group). This depth and backstory is true The characters; they all do things that are consistent with who they are because the story was written with some depth.

The marketing lesson: Too many businesses create low-quality products and paint them with a veneer of value, and then try to pump up that value with hype and exclamation marks. Unfortunately, this is a losing proposition for the business owner: The prospects in their sales funnel will do one of 3 things: They will sniff out BS and avoid making the purchase, they will make the purchase then demand a refund, or they will make the purchase, become jaded at the lack of value, and share their dissatisfaction with the world. Either way, the entrepreneur gets little or no money for the effort put in.

LESSON #2: INVEST IN QUALITY

There are bad zombie movies. You can always tell bad zombie movies because the zombies basically look like a handful of people (probably family of the crew members) were told to show up on the set with uncombed hair and wearing tomorrow-is-laundry-day clothes… and then stumble around on the set with arms outstretched. Not so with The Walking Dead. The sets are interesting (such as a big traffic jam or a farm where a major part of the story takes place, or a nearby small town where key events take place) and the zombies themselves are “realistic” (and by that I mean: They are dripping with gore and intestines and you can almost smell the putrid flesh through the TV). I was recently doing some research about the making of the show (because I’m a nerd that way) and learned that all the zombies had to go through a special zombie college designed to make them act like the undead rather than a B-movie version of the undead.

The marketing lesson: Marketing seems expensive and entrepreneurs (especially start-ups) struggle with lots of money going out but not a lot of money coming in. While there are some places to cut corners, marketing and sales is not one of them. A lot of online marketing is somewhat permanent on the web and you want it to continue working for you for years to come. Paying a non-English-speaking writer to keyword stuff an autospun article is potentially going to do you more harm than good.

True story: One company called me up because their business had been hurt by exactly this situation. And now whenever someone types their name into the search engine, they see the business website in the first spot and the rest of the 9 search results are totally nonsensical articles “about” the company. We’ve been working together for a while to chip away at that situation. Unfortunately, they initially traded value for volume and we have a lot of work to do.

Hey, I’m not saying that you should spend a fortune on marketing. Heck, my YouTube videos aren’t going to win Academy Awards for production excellence. (I made a few different types to test and see what kinds of video I’m interested in doing and whether the effort to create a video is viable). You need to pick a few marketing channels that work for you and do them well.

LESSON #3: DON’T BE AFRAID OF CONFLICT. JUST MAKE SURE IT’S THE RIGHT CONFLICT

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In The Walking Dead, there is a lot of conflict. But if the conflict was ONLY between the group of survivors and the undead, the show wouldn’t last that long. It would be better off as a movie about survivors who stand off against zombies. But that’s already been done… most frequently by George Romero. Instead, the show sustains its entertainment value by showing the conflict between different people.

In your business, it’s okay to embrace and highlight conflict but make sure that you are an advocate on the side of your prospects… and highlight the conflict or pain that your prospects feel because they don’t own the product or service you sell. (Check out related blog post: Why you should annoy your prospects to grow your sales funnel).

LESSON #4: SURPRISE

In a lot of movies, you never really feel the tension that the director wants you to feel because you know that the main characters are going to turn out okay. They only SEEM to have skin in the game but you know they will come out relatively unscathed. In The Walking Dead, key characters are killed off fairly frequently, which disrupts the viewer’s complacency and helps them feel the level of anxiety and disruption that the director really wants to achieve.

The marketing lesson: Please don’t kill anyone.

Just joking, there’s a better lesson than that: Surprise your sales funnel contacts. Surprise your target market to capture attention and turn people into leads. Surprise leads with bold headlines that promise big, true benefits but also shock them a little. Surprise leads to turn into prospects with an avalanche of value. Surprise prospects with bonuses, freebies, benefits, and value. Surprise customers with fast delivery, great service, and even more value than you promised. Surprise your ongoing customers with additional benefits that they never would dream of getting from any competitor.

LESSON #5: TELL A STORY AND KEEP PEOPLE HANGING ON SO THEY COME BACK FOR MORE

There are really two kinds of TV shows out there: series and serials. A series is basically a show where each episode is a standalone episode. (Law and Order is all about this). You could theoretically watch a series in almost any order and it would barely matter. But a serial, which is what The Walking Dead is, is a story told in order. And at the end of each episode there is usually some kind of cliffhanger. It’s not always a cheezy cliffhanger (like the ones where Batman and Robin were tied up in the Riddler’s lair and you had to tune in to the same bat-time and same bat-channel to find out if they escaped). In this serial, you sometimes are left with an action cliffhanger (will Rick and Herschel get out from being pinned down by gunfire?) but sometimes it’s an emotional cliffhanger (what will happen to the group now that this key character died?)

The marketing lesson: All marketing should have cliffhangers to compel the sales funnel contact to keep moving further and further into your sales funnel. Your marketing efforts should never fully be resolved on their own; they should have an explicit or implicit call to action that pushes the reader to move forward for further resolution.

I love zombies and I love The Walking Dead. Even if you’re not a fan of the undead or AMC’s take on the undead story, there are still some valuable lessons we can learn from all that shuffling and moaning and stumbling around.

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 CONTEMPT IN YOUR SALES FUNNEL

Yes, it is possible to use contempt in your sales funnel. It’s a powerful emotion and it’s one of the more difficult emotions to use, in my opinion.

Leveraging contempt works when you can align yourself with your audience against a third party. The purchase motivated by contempt becomes a purchase that is made to feel like you are taking revenge. It’s cathartic. In that way, it’s similar to using anger in your sales funnel or disgust in your sales funnel but there’s a feeling of superiority that comes with contempt, which isn’t shared with the feelings of anger or disgust.

I wonder if a lot of fundraising, particularly in the political sphere is motivated by contempt of the party, group, or organization you are fundraising against!

Here are some ways to use contempt in your sales funnel:

• Focus your content on why your “opponent” (for lack of a better word) is wrong. Obviously you need to avoid libel so make sure you back up everything you say with fact. (Factual statements sell better anyway).
• The main benefit of the contempt-driven sale is catharsis. There might be other benefits but those are a bonus compared to the feeling that your buyers have against the third party.
• Before setting up your sales funnel, carefully consider how you’ll communicate your message and how much time you want to spend dealing with controversy. A blog, for example, might end up taking a lot of your time dealing with comments from supporters of people who are opposed to your cause. This might not be a bad thing (controversy can equal traffic and attention!) but it also be time consuming. If you don’t want to get drawn into a debate, use a sales funnel that doesn’t require a lot of interaction — such as AdWords driving people to a sales page.
• Cultivate your language. Your audience might hate the thing they feel contempt about but they might not express it as hatred. They might articulate their hatred in different ways — righteous indignation, balanced debate, stunned silence. In other they might feel contempt but would never call it contempt.

Business owners need to get more and more people buying from them.

That is partly achieved by ramping up your marketing efforts to get more people into your sales funnel, but it is also partly achieved by getting more of the people in your sales funnel to buy from you.

See the difference? The first one (more people in your sales funnel) is a straight numerical increase, the second one (more people in your sales funnel to buy from you) is a proportional increase.

Although putting more people in your sales funnel is good because it increases revenue, getting proportionally more people buying from you is good because it increase revenue AND profitability. (Hint: Once you optimize your sales funnel to get of the people in your sales funnel to buy from you, you can always add more leads into your sales funnel later. I call this “the double whammy”, although that’s not a technical term).

To get more people who are already in your sales funnel to buy from you, you first need to…

DISCOVER YOUR SALES FUNNEL RATIOS

Your sales funnel ratios are a way to state the proportion of people who advance from one stage in your sales funnel to the next.

Here’s a simple example: Let’s say you have 1,000 leads. And of those leads, 100 turn into prospects. And of those prospects, 10 turn into customers. (The rest either stall out or disappear or are kidnapped by aliens).

We can express this number like this:

1,000:100:10

Since it’s a ratio, math wizards will remind us that you can simplify a ratio even further (since these numbers are all divisible by 10), so your ratio is:

100:10:1

That means, for every 100 leads, 10 will turn into prospects and one will become a customer.

Knowing this number will give you an unbelievable edge because there are all kinds of things you can do with this number!

Ultimately, you can create a more profitable business when you…

OPTIMIZE YOUR SALES FUNNEL RATIOS

Once you know what your sales funnel ratios are, you can then optimize them to grow your business.

Here’s an example: Let’s say you make some changes to your sales technique and instead of turning 1 in 10 prospects into a customer, you turn 2 in ten prospects. The ratio now looks like this:

100:10:2

… which means for every 100 leads, you get 10 prospects, and from those 10 prospects you get 2 customers (instead of one).

Once you’ve got this new 100:10:2 ratio, you might want to start working on how well you turn leads into prospects. Let’s say that you change some of your marketing efforts and suddenly you start getting 15 people to turn from leads into prospects instead of 10.

Guess that that does. It trickles down your sales funnel so your sales funnel ratio now looks like this:

100:15:3

(Yes, 3 because you had a 10:2 ratio before. So by adding 5 more people to your prospects, you close one more customer).

In an upcoming blog, I’ll give you some ways to discover your sales funnel ratios… and later, I’ll show you how you can optimize them. Also, you can subscribe to my Sales Funnel Turbocharger newsletter which is focused on optimizing your sales funnel (and sales funnel ratios).