Aaron Hoos

Running a business means managing a sales funnel. Sometimes you need to roll up your sleeves and do some serious work in your sales funnel to fix things that are broken or to optimize it for more profit. But other times, you just need to make minor tweaks to get a quick “pop” in you business.

Here are six quick ideas to get more money out of your sales funnel today

1. Draw out your sales funnel

You’ll gain such a clear understanding of how essential your sales funnel is to your business, plus I usually find that just drawing it out reveals some great opportunities.

2. Create just one clear call to action in your site

It’s easy and tempting to put in all kinds of calls to action — “Contact us” or “download this” or “subscribe here” — but if you have one offering, make it the front-and-center action that website visitors should take.

(Disclaimer: I’m not saying that you should take the other stuff off of your site. Just make one of those things the primary action).

3. Offer a dramatic one-day bonus

Create some short-term urgency by releasing a huge bonus product or service with the purchase of a a popular product or service you already have. Keep it short-term (a 24 hour period is good). See what kind of response you get. Find out if more people are being because they want the free bonus or because it’s a great deal.

4. Announce that you are about to raise your prices

Hey, we all need to raise our prices at some point and most business owners silently raise their prices and hope that there isn’t a lot of backlash. Work this to your advantage by announcing — via press releases and social media — that prices are going to rise on a specific date. (If you sell services, make sure you let people know that they can buy now at the lower rate but receive the service after the price increase).

5. Get back in touch with old buyers

Confession: I find it pretty easy and fun to go after new business so it’s really easy for me to finish a project and then not get back in touch with previous clients. I know I’m not alone here. Lots of entrepreneurs let old customers dry up. Spend some time today combing through your past few years of business and getting in touch with your top ten customers from there. Let them know that you have some availability or extra products and would love the chance to serve them again.

6. Double your lead-generation efforts today

The more leads we generate, the more prospects we end up with and the more customers we can convert those prospects into. But sometimes, lead generation becomes a big strategic endeavor when really just a few extra minutes or hours of effort can have a dramatic, positive impact. Don’t think long-term, just go out and try to double the amount of leads TODAY.

In this business, your success is entirely dependent on leads. The more leads you have, the better. So where do you find these leads?

HOW TO FIND LEADS

First, start with you.
List you all the different places in life where you interact with other people. These are called your “spheres of influence“. List as many spheres of influence that you have. (By the way, you probably have more than you realize).

Some common spheres of influence include:

• Immediate family
• Extended family (don’t ignore family who may not live nearby!)
• Close friends
• Friends
• Acquaintances
• Current co-workers
• Previous co-workers (list all of your previous jobs)
• Alumni (college and high school)
• Church (past and present religious affiliations)
• Charity connections
• Other organizations (Toastmasters, etc.)
• Online connections (Twitter followers, Facebook friends, people you frequently talk to in forums)
• People you do business with (accountant, dry cleaner, mechanic, dentist, etc.)
• Current clients
• Past clients (past clients at your current job and past clients at your previous job… Just make sure that you are complying with any non-compete clauses if your are still in the same industry)

Second, list names
List all of the people by name in each sphere. Yes it will take a long time but the more time you spend being thorough right now, the more successful you will be later.

Third, gather contact information
Figure out how to get in touch with the people. If you know their number or email address or postal address, great! Collect it all into one place. I suggest a database of some kind.

Fourth, identify how you can help them
This step is optional but I think it helpful. Figure out how you can help them. If you’re a real estate professional and they are renters, you’ll likely be able to help them buy their first home. If you’re a financial advisor and they are near to retirement, you’ll likely be able to help them transition their portfolio into safer, income-producing investments while minimizing tax consequences.

If you really want to improve your odds, check out this blog post: 6 sales funnel tips for real estate professionals (it applies to financial professionals, too!)

Fifth, get in touch with them
Using whatever method you have identified (face-to-face, phone, email, or postal mail), get in touch with your contact and let them know what you do and make a recommendation about how you’d like to help them.

Chances are, one of the following things will happen:

• They will become your client
• They will hedge a little; they won’t commit, and they’ll tell you that they’ll think about it
• They will tell you no
• You won’t reach them or they won’t respond

If they become your client, that’s great. Congratulations! However, most people will fall into the second category and some people will fall into the third category. In those situations, thank them and let them know that if anything changes, you’d love to help them. Ask them for permission to stay in touch and collect any contact information you don’t have (so you can email or mail them something). Don’t delete the ones who never responded; just keep them on file and from time to time reach out to them.

GET EVEN MORE LEADS

Now that you have this list started, it’s time to generate even more leads. Here are three ways:

• Add another sphere of influence. Join a group, join the gym, get involved in a new organization, volunteer for a charity, etc.
• For each of your leads (yes, that big list you just created earlier in this blog post), do the same exercise and write down THEIR spheres of influence. Sure, you might not know their names but just get down the spheres of influence first. Then create a strategy to approach those people and make a request like: “Can you put up my business card on the bulletin board at your work?” or “can I put on a presentation about insurance in the lunch room at your office?” Make sure to keep the request easy for them to do. Remember: They won’t agree to anything that makes them uncomfortable!
• You probably already have a website that is geared to people who are ready to become clients. (Most real estate and financial professionals have a site like this). Move up your sales funnel and create content that is geared toward lead generation instead of prospect conversion. For example, a real estate professional might want to create content that answers some earlier stage questions like “should I buy a home right now?”. You can do this on your own site, or start another site, or use internet marketing (like articles and press releases and social media) to help you drive traffic to your website.

While writing their marketing content, a request I commonly hear from financial and real estate professionals is to ramp up the “salesmanship” of their content so that they get more committed clients calling them on the telephone.

They want their marketing content to sell their services so that more people go “wow! I want to hire that person to help me find a home” or “wow! I want to hire that person to manage my investment portfolio“.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.

It takes A LOT of marketing content (sometimes over a substantial period of time) to convince someone who hasn’t heard of you before to become your client. (It’s not impossible… but it probably won’t happen in a 500 word article).

Instead, your marketing needs to accomplish just one action… and it’s not “become my client“.

The action needs to be a painless next step that the curious would take (perhaps fill out an online form or pick up the phone and call you) rather than a big step that the committed would take.

See the difference?

People are afraid of commitment and don’t want to get locked in to a bad thing (like working with the wrong professional). So they’ll willingly do non-committal things, such as filling out an online form or picking up the phone to call… and THAT is when you sell to them.

They will eventually make a commitment to become your client but they need far more convincing than marketing content on its own can often perform.

HERE’S AN EXAMPLE

Take my business, for example. My marketing rarely asks people to become my client. Rather, it asks them to get in touch with me. That’s because my over-the-phone close rate is nearly 100% while my written conversion is much less. So my goal is to get people to call.

The concern that some of my prospective clients might have is: Won’t I get more crackpot callers? You might. (And it’s a reason that my close rate isn’t exactly 100%!). But you won’t get that many more because here’s what’s really going on…

When you use marketing content that tries to convert a cold lead into a client, that content has a lot of work to do and the client may come up with objections that the content can’t address. And, the content can’t capture your entire personality and pre-qualify clients. So you get lots of cold leads reading your content and deciding for themselves whether or not they should hire you… and many will not call because they don’t want to make that commitment based solely on the marketing content they’ve seen.

But when you use marketing content that only tries to move a cold lead into a warm prospect, that content has a lot less work to do and can therefore be far more effective… at pre-qualifying these people and at convincing them to take the smaller, easier step of picking up the phone (instead of making a commitment). And, YOU can then share your personality with your client (hint: that will be a huge selling feature for you) and you can handle their objections.

Result: Your marketing will qualify your clients (weeding out most of the crackpots) but it will also get more of the good prospective clients to pick up the phone.

By using this model of focusing your marketing on a painless, no-commitment action, you can get more people calling you and you can convert more of those prospects into clients.

We’ve also seen a similar shift in selling digital download products (like ebooks). It used to be that you could put up a sales page and have a buy now button at the bottom and get clients. And some people still do that (and it still does work sometimes but not as much as it once did). But today, the more effective squeeze page offers a link to something free and valuable (an ecourse or videos, for example… something non-committal!) and then the sales letter comes later. Thus, there’s the first non-committal step followed by the more targeted, harder-hitting commitment.

For more information about getting your leads and prospects to do less, learn how to identify the steps in your sales funnel stages. Or, if you’re still thinking about how you want to market your business, check out this first in a series of sales funnel 101 blog posts.