Aaron Hoos

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.

It’s St. Patrick’s Day today — it’s a day where we celebrate the luck of the Irish (even though St. Patrick himself didn’t care that much about luck).

I’m not a big believer in luck. I think chance and circumstance deal us a hand of poker and it’s up to us to play the hand, regardless of what we’re dealt. As in poker, real success comes in playing what you’re dealt rather than relying on luck to help you win. Some people call this “making your own luck”. I think luck is simply the timely use of your skills/abilities/strengths to act on an opportunity, and to receive a significant reward for it.

Here’s a 3-step plan to make your own luck.

STEP 1: BUILD A PLATFORM

To be lucky (successful) you need to have an area to be successful in. (Even lottery winners might be considered “lucky” but they are only lucky in one area — money). Do you want to gain fame in something? You need a personal brand and the infrastructure (i.e. maybe a website) to launch with. For businesses, a sales funnel is key here.

STEP 2: CREATE CRITICAL MASS

Once you have your platform in place, you need to have some substance behind it. I call this “critical mass”. Think of it this way: If you want to be a famous blogger, are you going to do it with only a week’s worth of blogs? Probably not. If you want to be a famous actor, are you going to do it with a portfolio that only lists one local production of “Little House on the Prairie”? No. You need to have a volume of experience backing you up. It doesn’t have to be a huge amount but it needs to demonstrate that you have the chops.

STEP 3: LEVERAGE

Now it’s time to take this stuff and run with it. Create a plan to start promoting yourself and leverage the critical mass you’ve developed on your platform. I think this is the biggest area where people fall short. They are willing to do some of the work but they don’t think of doing enough. You need to be relentless. Take your inspiration from the most successful people — they’ll all tell you about their many failures on their way to success. (How many times did Michael Crichton or John Grisham or J.K. Rowlings get rejected before becoming hugely successful authors?)

When developing your plan to leverage, think big: Think sustained campaigns in some areas and massive, focused blitzes in others. To use an internet marketing example, maintain a consistent social media campaign but also aim to become the most prolific guest blogger ever. Or, maintain a solid press release publishing campaign but dominate a couple of forums in your particular niche.

NOW IT’S YOUR TURN

Luck doesn’t exist. Success comes to those who take the cards that were dealt by chance and plays them to perfection. Now it’s your turn to make your own luck! In the comments below, let us know what area you want to become “lucky” in…

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.

We tend to think of our businesses as having one sales funnel — a single process through which sales funnel contacts progress as they become customers. For simplicity, this “one sales funnel” approach works for many businesses.

But in reality, businesses have more than one sales funnel.

If your business sells ebooks and consulting, you probably have two funnels (but they overlap somewhat). For example, your ebook buyers might start out as blog readers then they click to your ebook sales page then they buy; while your consulting clients start out as blog readers then they call you on the phone they hire you. This is a very simple example but it can get more complicated.

Let’s say you own a car dealership with a range of cars from entry-level to luxury. Your funnel might be similar: The customer sees an advertisement and then comes into the dealership to buy. But the differences are:

• Each advertisement was different. The entry-level car ad showed a young person having fun with friends, the minivan ad showed a family out on a picnic, the luxury car ad showed a successful couple in front of a big house. Each advertisement had a different offer. The entry-level car ad emphasized affordability and easy loan terms. The minivan ad emphasized space and safety. The luxury ad emphasized the envy of neighbors. Effective ads display the right content for the target market.
• Each advertisement was presented to the right audience. The entry-level buyer isn’t going to read the same newspapers or watch the same TV shows as the minivan buyer, and the minivan buyer isn’t going to read the same newspapers or watch the same TV shows as the luxury car buyer. Effective ads are targeted to the right place.
• Once inside the dealership, the buyers might be expected to act differently. They will look for different things in the car they are interested in and they might operate on a different timeline. A young first-time car buyer might want a car quickly to impress friends while a luxury car owner might take their time to decide which car is perfect for them. (I’m generalizing here, just to demonstrate the differences). How these prospective buyers talk to sales people and the length of time in the dealership will all be determined by who the buyer is.

What I’ve just described above is 3 sales funnels — an entry-level sales funnel, a minivan sales funnel, and a luxury car sales funnel. The dealership would have even more sales funnels for SUVs, pickup trucks, midsize sedans, etc.

The more products or services you sell, and the broader your target market is, the more sales funnels you have. However, it’s not really practical to treat each separate product or service or target market with its own sales funnel all the time. (For example, the dealership in the above example doesn’t need to have 3 separate buildings or 3 separate sales staff). The key is to build one sales funnel and segment it appropriately.

Look at your target market and divide them up into demographic groups using lead profiles. Then figure out which marketing channels resonate with that “sub-target market” the most. Also, make note of what parts of your sales funnel would be shared between all contacts in your sales funnel.

Once you’ve done that, construct a segmented sales funnel to address how each particular group wants to buy.

I love press releases. They’re a great way for marketers to bypass a lot of internet marketing effort and get lots of high quality backlinks and even some media attention.

Using press releases effectively requires an understanding of your sales funnel. Specifically: A press release is not going to get you more customers. Yes, the work a press release may help to contribute to converting more prospects into customers but a press release itself won’t get you more customers.

A press release ultimately drives traffic to your business – either to your storefront or your website. It informs people about the new thing you’re doing and, if the press release audience is interested, they’ll click through to your website or they’ll get into their car and drive to your store.

So, when writing your press release, keep this in mind. Don’t try to create a press release that sells your product. The press release is a platform to talk about your new product or service but it won’t replace your marketing collateral. Create an effective press release by getting your press release audience excited about your business and your news (whatever that news might be) then drive them to your website.

Bonus tip: You can accelerate the speed that they advance through your sales funnel by sending them to a specific page or blog post that sells your product or service (just make sure it’s relevant to your press release, of course!).