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 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.

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.

In every entrepreneur’s head is a well-oiled, highly profitable sales-machine of a business. But in real life, it’s a tricky, weed-filled garden of shifting priorities and juggled problems. (#mixedmetaphoralert)

In this blog post, I want to write about 3 common problems that entrepreneurs face in their sales funnels and how to fix them. These aren’t ALL the problems you’ll face, nor could it ever be a comprehensive list of all the solutions you have. But it’s a good place to start if you want to get your business reality a little closer to the picture in your mind.

SALES FUNNEL ADVERSITY #1: NOT ENOUGH LEADS

Leads are good because some of them eventually turn into customers, with a little relationship nurturing. But you won’t have any sales if you don’t start with the leads. If you don’t have enough leads, try doing the following:

• Look at your value proposition. What problem do you solve? Perhaps it’s not big enough of a problem or maybe it’s not a problem that enough people have or maybe you’re not stating the problem in a way that is resonating with people.
• Look at the people you’ve been trying to market to. Are they feeling the pain of the problem you solve? Do they even realize that they HAVE a problem at all? (Use this helpful blog post to identify your target market an figure out what is important to them.
• If you’re confident that the above two issues are resolved (you solve a clear, compelling problem and you have a tightly defined target market) then try increasing your marketing efforts. Maybe you just haven’t reached the place where your target market is spending their time. Experiment with articles, guest blogs, press releases, social media — find out where people connect with you the most. Then focus your efforts in that space. And if 1 hour a day of marketing isn’t getting enough leads, bump it up to 2 or 3 hours of marketing. It might simply be a numbers game.

SALES FUNNEL ADVERSITY #2: TOO MANY OBJECTIONS

Every salesperson and entrepreneur has encountered objections from their prospects — reasons why the prospect cannot buy right now. Savvy salespeople work with objections while inexperienced salespeople are defeated by them. If you encounter objections, remember that “yes” and “no” don’t always mean “yes” and “no”, and adopt the mindset that objections are awesome.

SALES FUNNEL ADVERSITY #3: NOT ENOUGH PROFIT

Cash flow is good. (Actually, it’s absolutely mandatory for a successful business). But cash flow will only ensure business survival if there is a bit of profit at the end of the day.

Where a lot of entrepreneurs fall down is in adequately pricing their product or service. They want to generate cash flow so they price their offering at a very attractive price… but it’s not enough to pay the bills. Learn more about the concept of price and pricing, discover the best price for your product or service, and price your products so you don’t compete with low-cost providers.

Of course pricing is just one part of the profitability issue. Reducing expenses and increasing sales are also key. But if you have a right-priced offering, you just need to get more customers.

Humans are wired to engage with stories. We use stories to share our history and teach future generations. We use stories to sell.

Your sales funnel is also a story… but it’s not the story YOU think it is.

Your sales funnel is not the story of your business.

YOUR SALES FUNNEL IS THE STORY OF YOUR PROSPECTIVE CUSTOMER

To show you what I mean, consider the elements of any good story:

• A fish-out-of-water hero
• A problem or situation of great personal cost to the hero
• The quest/struggle/conflict that the hero faces in trying to resolve that problem or situation
• The climax of the story is the point of the most intense struggle
• The hero resolves the conflict and lives happily ever after

In your sales funnel, your prospective customer is the fish-out-of-water hero experiencing a problem or situation of great personal cost. They’re in a struggle to resolve the problem.

Your business offers a solution but it wouldn’t be a good story if the hero resolved the problem in chapter 1, before it really became a problem, right? Instead, the hero lives with the problem and realizes with increasing clarity just how serious the problem really is. As the problem becomes a greater and greater cost to the hero, they seek a resolution. And this is important: Note that the hero resolves the conflict themselves.

HOW MOST BUSINESSES SCREW IT UP

Most businesses try to be the hero of the story and they view the prospective customer as the sidekick. They try to lead the prospect on a quest… and they end up trying to cram the solution down the prospect’s throat in chapter 1 of the story.

WHAT TO DO RIGHT NOW

Your job as a salesperson or business owner is to help the hero through the story by pointing them the way to the solution. Let your sales funnel hero discover the solution themselves and resolve the problem themselves as their own story unfolds. Review your marketing and sales efforts and make sure that you are helping move the story along by highlighting the problem and showing your sales funnel hero what the solution is.