Aaron Hoos

I’m looking forward to two movies this summer — The Hangover Part II and Pirates of the Caribbean – On Stranger Tides. (Feel free to draw your own conclusions about me based on that confession). Although I PVR everything and tend to fast forward through the commercials, I’ll usually stop fast forwarding and play previews for these movies.

These two movies (and movies like them), my wife and I call them “theater movies” because we’ll happily go and pay to watch them in the theater (as opposed to “renters” that we’ll watch on Netflix).

Hollywood, of course, wants lots of theater-goers and so, as summer approaches, we are all being drawn in to Hollywood’s sales funnels.

Yes, Hollywood has sales funnels. Every business has a sales funnel and the studios that make movies each have their own sales funnels.

This “Hollywood sales funnel” works well (hey, many of them make a ton of money) and it can teach business owners a thing or two about how to create a successful sales funnel.

THE HOLLYWOOD SALES FUNNEL

The Hollywood sales funnel goes something like this:

The Audience stage: You and I are sitting there, on the couch, eating Doritos and watching the latest episode of The Chicago Code or Grey’s Anatomy. We’re drawn into the story. Clearly, we want to be entertained (or, at the very least, we have nothing better to do), which makes us the perfect candidate for… commercials! Including a movie trailer.

A movie trailer is a teaser. A movie trailer tends to follow a classic format and its ultimate purpose is to capture our attention and make us want more! It’s meant to win over audiences that aren’t paying attention or even thinking about the summer right now. It’s meant to force us to ask questions and wonder how the hero/heroine got themselves into this predicament and how they’ll get out of it.

What’s noticeable is that it isn’t meant to tell the whole story. Only just enough to capture our interest. For people who don’t like movies about hangovers or pirates, then trailers for The Hangover Part II and Pirates of the Caribbean – On Stranger Tides aren’t going to capture their attention. But for people who can relate (because they’ve had hangovers) or for people who aspire (to be pirates or at least to a life of vicarious adventure), these trailers will capture their attention. (Note: Just in case it’s not obvious, this is the case for every trailer. People might relate to an underdog and want to watch a movie where an unlikely hero is drawn into threatening circumstances; or people might aspire to true love and want to watch a movie where a boy meets a girl then loses the girl then woos her and they live happily ever after).

Movie trailers act as a “sorting mechanism”, enticing Audience members who are likely to become customers while being ignored by those who won’t likely become customers.

The Lead stage: We’ve just seen a trailer for a movie that seemed interesting. We pause to think about it. We ask the questions (“how did the hero get in that situation?”). We think ahead to the summer. That’s all that Hollywood wants us to do at this stage in the sales funnel. Just think a little further about the movie. Not much, just a bit. We turn to the person sitting on the couch and we say something like “that might be interesting to watch” or “I’d love to see Ian McShane as Blackbeard”.

From time to time, we see branded messages that triggers the same feelings of relation or aspiration: Maybe it’s a billboard of the movie or a newspaper ad that says “in theaters soon” or we see the trailer again or we visit the website or we hear a review or we spot the movie poster. Whatever.

Although the message is very similar to the message presented in the Audience stage, it allows us to go deeper. We see new trailers or we think about the old trailers a little more. We catch nuances we missed the first time. We ask new questions. We’re presented with the message over and over. That message is: “I want to see this movie because [whatever].”

Then…

The Prospect stage:It’s a summer weekend. It’s humid. We’ve worked all week and deserve a break. We’re wondering what to do on a Friday night. One person says “how about dinner and a movie?”

Dinner’s the easy part. Someone suggests a favorite restaurant and no one disagrees. But a movie — you check the listings and, what do you know, YOUR movie is playing! The one you’ve been thinking about. The one that looked really good. It’s settled then.

The Customer stage: You drive to the theater. You buy tickets and popcorn and soda and licorice… and you love the movie.

The Evangelist stage: The movie is awesome. So awesome, in fact, that you want to immediately tell your friends. After all, they love hangovers and pirates just as much as you do, so the thinking is: If you liked it, they will love it. You call, text, blog, tweet, or somehow share your excitement about the movie to your friends and they go to the theater the next week and watch.

And THAT is the Hollywood sales funnel.

WHAT THE HOLLYWOOD SALES FUNNEL CAN TEACH YOU

This sales funnel works. Studios and actors make billions of dollars a year because of this sales funnel. Here’s what your business can learn from the Hollywood sales funnel.

The Audience stage is about finding the right audience — a target market who is in a receptive state — and tease them. Give them something to think about/talk about/question. It could be a headline or a compelling AdWords ad. It could be a strange graphic or a controversial tweet. Something that captures your Audience’s attention and makes them want more.

The Lead stage is about presenting a consistent branded message again and again that helps your Lead go deeper. It’s still enticing them (like the Audience stage did), but it gives some answers and raises more questions. Ultimately, the Lead should be left wondering “this sounds interesting… I want to know more.”

The Prospect stage is about finding the intersection between the contact’s need (“I want to watch that movie” or “I want to warm my food” or “I need a reliable car”) and the opportunity to buy (“It’s Friday and the movie is in the theater!” or “here’s a microwave and it happens to be on sale!” or “with financing, I can buy a red one!”).

That’s when they become a Customer.

The Customer stage is fulfilling on the promise. Some businesses stop there but smart businesses fulfill on the promise made in such a way that the Customer feels they received value and it compels them to move on to…

The Evangelist stage. This is where the Evangelist is so excited about your product or service that they call, text, blog, tweet, or somehow share their excitement about your product or service with their friends… and then those friends buy the same thing.

Hollywood’s movies are great moments of excitement and entertainment and escape. But their sales funnels are based on years of successful strategy and measurement and they work. As you develop your sales funnel, ask yourself this: “If my business were a movie, would this part of my sales funnel entice the sales funnel contact to want to come to the theater and pay to watch?“

Researching a company before accepting them as clients is an important lesson I wish I knew earlier in my business. Only the past 5 years or so have I really started to investigate a potential Customer first to make sure that they’re the right fit.

Researching businesses for this kind of information isn’t always easy — they’re busy promoting themselves to their Prospects, which means you have to dig deeper to find what your potential Customer is all about.

Mike Michalowicz offers a clever way to do some preliminary research for Prospects. The answer is in the title but you should really read the whole article.

How to Hook a Prospect? Check Its Job Ads – WSJ.com.

After you’ve read the article, take a look at your list of Prospects then go hunting for their job ads. Check out sites like Monster.com and don’t forget about freelance sites, too.

Once you’ve found some info, integrate it into your sales presentations. (Michalowicz tells you how to do that). And you can even go beyond your Prospect list and do the same task for all of the stages in your sales funnel.

The same information in job ads can help you move sales funnel contacts at each stage: Your Audience member job ads can help you refine your message to capture their attention more effectively and turn them into Leads. Your Leads’ job ads can help you position yourself as the solution to their problem or need so you can turn them into Prospects. Your Prospects’ job ads can help you overcome objections and drive home key sales-making points to convert them into Customers. Your Customers’ job ads can help you identify new opportunities to provide service so they can become Evangelists.

When business owners create their own sales funnel, the temptation is to think of each stage as a single event. But this can actually repel people from buying.

Here’s what happens:

Entrepreneurs see the 5 stages of the sales funnel (Audience, Leads, Prospects, Customers, Evangelists) as 5 separate, distinct events. They create one action-step for each stage, expecting contacts at each stage to take just one action to “leap” from one stage to the next.

EXAMPLE #1: DON’T CREATE A SALES FUNNEL LIKE THIS
Let’s say you have a contact at the Audience stage.

You decide that following you on Twitter is the “trigger” that will transition them from an Audience contact into a Lead contact. And you decide that clicking on your sales page is the “trigger” that will turn them from a Lead contact into a Prospect contact.

Most entrepreneurs would make the following action-steps in their sales funnel:

1. Get your Audience contact to become a Lead by following you on Twitter.
2. Get your Lead contact to become a Prospect by clicking a link to the sales page (via Twitter).

It seems nice and clean and simple. But this can be too big of a leap for a lot of contacts. They simply won’t take that next action because it’s not an easy, obvious step.

This is a problem. This “one-action-step-per-stage” sales funnel might work some of the time, but more often than not, contacts resist this kind of sales funnel because the steps from one stage to the next stage seem too big and scary for them to take.

It can be too much of a leap for someone to follow you on Twitter and then click on your sales funnel.

HERE’S THE SOLUTION FOR A BETTER SALES FUNNEL
Business owners need to see their sales funnels as having 5 stages, but with each stage consisting of several steps or customer actions. Just because there are 5 stages, doesn’t mean there are only going to be 5 steps or actions the contact will take. Each stage can have several steps..

Contacts might be reluctant to take a big leap to the next sales funnel stage but they might be willing to take several very small steps.

EXAMPLE #2: CREATE A SALES FUNNEL LIKE THIS
Create a series of smaller “baby steps” in each stage of your sales funnel. Let’s use the example above but build it out with baby steps through the Lead stage so the contact doesn’t have to make such a big leap from one stage to the next.

1. Get your Audience contact to become a Lead by following you on Twitter.
2. Encourage your Lead contact to retweet you by sharing something relevant specifically to them.
3. Encourage your Lead contact to reply to you by interacting with them. (Maybe do this more than once!).
4. Share a link to a relevant blog post or article you’ve written and solicit feedback.
5. Engage your Lead contact in a Twitter-based conversation.
6. Share a link to a relevant blog post and invite them to comment on it.
7. Engage your Lead contact in a Twitter-based conversation.
8. Share a link to your sales page via Twitter.

See what we did here? We started our new Lead contact with a little engagement. Nothing that required a lot of commitment or even trust. Then we slowly built a relationship. We didn’t ask too much of the contact (although we did ask for a bit of participation — just a little more with each interaction). In a sense, we raised the temperature until the next obvious step was for the contact to click the sales page.

Yes, there are more steps in this example than in the previous one, and yes, this method does require some additional work on your part. But here’s why its an advantage: You’re not asking your contact to leap from one stage to the next. Rather, you are helping them take baby steps by engaging them, and building credibility and trust. By the time they get to the sales page link step, it’s just a small step for them to take.

Now, I’ve just used the Lead stage contact as an example, but this is true of any stage in your sales funnel: Rather than requiring your contacts to make the leap from one stage to another, break that stage up into smaller steps to help your contact through your sales funnel. If your steps are well-planned and intuitive, you’ll find that more contacts will move through your sales funnel faster even though it looks like there is more for them to do at each stage.

Testimonials are great tools to have for your sales funnel. You should collect them like a kid collects baseball cards (… do kids still collect baseball cards?). But are you using your testimonials effectively in your sales funnel? Or are they merely collecting dust and contributing nothing to your sales funnel?

Not all of your contacts in every stage are ready to hear a testimonial from a customer. Here’s why…

TWO STAGES IN YOUR SALES FUNNEL WHERE YOU SHOULDN’T USE TESTIMONIALS
A testimonial is basically an indication that someone has bought something from you and they were happy with it. While the “happy with it” part of the testimonial is good, implicit in that testimonial is the reality that they handed over their cash to receive the product or service. Unfortunately, that’s not something that your contacts in the Audience stage or Leads stage are ready to hear yet.

Contacts in your Audience stage or Leads stage are not making buying decisions. In the audience stage, they are only becoming aware of the problem or need. In the Leads stage they are only starting to realizing the severity of their problem or need and that you might have a solution to help them. Most of the time, Audience and Lead contacts don’t want to think about buying… and they ESPECIALLY don’t want to think about parting with their cash.

THE STAGE IN YOUR SALES FUNNEL WHERE YOU SHOULD USE TESTIMONIALS
It’s the people at the Prospect stage who need to hear or read your testimonials… and as many testimonials as you can give them without pissing them off! The people at the Prospect stage are starting to make a buying decision because they’re coming to terms with the fact that they have an acute problem and you have the solution for them. And although buyers want to believe that they are unique and special, they also find comfort in knowing that other people have the same problems as them and have found you to be the solution.

TWO MORE STAGES IN YOUR SALES FUNNEL WHERE YOU SHOULDN’T USE TESTIMONIALS
Once your contacts reach the Customer stage or the Evangelist stage, there is really no need to use testimonials anymore. After all, the positive experience that your Customer has with your product or service should be so good that you don’t need additional proof from other happy customers. Besides, your testimonials could actually harm you at the Customer or Evangelist level if they contain specific ROI numbers that your Customers and Evangelists compare their own results to. (“This testimonial says they received a 40% return on investment but I only received a 25% return… what gives?).

HOW TO USE TESTIMONIALS IN YOUR SALES FUNNEL
So, where should you put your testimonials in your sales funnel? Put them in the Prospect stage and pepper them liberally throughout that stage in your sales funnel. Make sure to include one or two testimonials in every printed communication, make them readily visible on your website or blog, add them to reports and whitepapers, include them in the footer of emails, and even construct content around them for blog posts and ezine articles. Don’t be afraid to send lots of testimonials to your contacts: For example, if you send a bonus report, include at least 1-2 pages of testimonials.

Here’s a bonus tip: Keep all of your sales funnels in one place and sort them. Content management systems might work for you; Evernote could be a good solution; or just use a spreadsheet with sorting functions that will allow you to find the most relevant ones quickly.

Here’s an extra bonus tip: When you convert a customer and they use a product or service from you, collect a testimonial. Make it a habit. Write yourself a reminder email or add it to a checklist as one of the last things you do before you cash their check and thank them for their business.

Testimonials are great… but only if they are making your sales funnel more successful.

Building a sales funnel is fun and easy. Yes, there’s some work involved but most entrepreneurs like working in their business (and working on your sales funnel isn’t as tedious as some of the other things you could be doing!).

So the very first step depends on whether your business has sold something before or whether it hasn’t. Below, I’ve written answers for both:

IF YOUR BUSINESS HAS SOLD SOMETHING BEFORE
If your business has sold something before, and you are just wanting to articulate and improve your existing sales funnel, then your very first step should be to look at your customer(s) and trace them backwards as far as you can:

• What was the final action that made them become Customers? (A “buy now” button? A phone call? etc.)
• What were they thinking about and asking you about before they bought? (How did you interact with them? Where did you interact with them?)
• What did they do to reach the point where you could present to them? (Did they click to a sales page? Did they telephone you? Did you meet them at their office?)
• How did they find you in the first place?
• What are your customers like, demographically? (What was similar about them?)

If you have sold something to other people before, your goal here is to figure out who those people were, why thy bought from you, and how they progressed through your sales funnel. That doesn’t mean you can’t create a new sales funnel; rather, it means that you have a sales funnel starting point… but a sales funnel starting point you have not articulated before.

IF YOUR BUSINESS HAS NOT SOLD SOMETHING BEFORE
If you haven’t sold something (in this business) before, then your very first step should be to list your potential sales funnel (Audience, Leads, Prospects, Customers, Evangelists), and decide on at least one form of media to go in each stage. For example, your Audience might be collected through Twitter; your Leads might read your blog; your Prospects might read your newsletter; etc.).

The goal here is to create a starting point. You will build off it and improve it as time goes on, but you need a foundation and this is a fast way to build a sales funnel and focus your sales funnel strategy.