Aaron Hoos

In a previous blog post, I showed you how to draw your sales funnel. I showed you the sales funnel for a typical (but made-up) business.

Now, I’m taking that same made-up business and using it as an example case study to show you how to find new opportunities to run a more successful, profitable business.

One way you can optimize your sales funnel is:

Reduce the people who fall out of your sales funnel

There’s a reason that a sales funnel is funnel-shaped. Lots of people come into your funnel from the top but only a few make it to the bottom. Everyone else either drags their heels or finds some other way to solve whatever problem that your product or service solves. So, I guess a sales funnel is actually more like a sales sieve!

It’s okay that SOME people fall out of your sales funnel. You don’t want or need everyone to buy from you. But you should try to keep more people in your funnel than you have been. Some people need a longer-term relationship before they are willing to buy.

So, one of the opportunities we can see in this case study sales funnel is to add some “stickiness”… something that keeps people in the loop if they aren’t ready to buy just yet.

Email newsletters and autoresponders are perfect for this. They offer you an easy way to capture some basic information and then stay in touch.

Here’s what I would do to integrate an autoresponder into this sales funnel:

• Measure to see what my close rate is on people who are getting to the ebook landing page… and instead of offering the ebook for sale on the landing page, I’d offer a free newsletter and see if that captures more people’s information. Then offer the ebook in an email.
• Put the email sign-up form on my home-page and make that my primary offer. Get people signing up to it.
• Create a special email sign-up page just for people from the Chamber… an exclusive list that keeps them up-to-date on my speaking and answers questions about what I do.

By doing these three simple things, the business would capture more leads and prospects and keep them in a holding pattern. The ones who were going to buy would buy anyway but the ones who weren’t going to buy right away would be nurtured until some of them were ready to buy.

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.

In a previous blog post, I showed you how to draw your sales funnel. I led you through an example and we ended up with a fictional sales funnel that looks like this. (Even though it’s fictional, it’s pretty close to many real businesses… but just simplified a bit).

In the next 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 of the first things we can ask as we look at our sales funnel is:

What do we do with someone AFTER they become a Customer?

Our example sales funnel doesn’t do anything with these Customers. But customers have already decided that you can solve their problems and they have seen the value you provide them. So you should follow up with your Customers and offer them new products and services.

New products and services might come in the form of…

• Ancillary products and services that are sold at the time of the sale
• Upselling the Customer into bigger and better versions of the products or services they just bought
• Cross-promoting the products and services of complementary service providers using affiliate marketing
• Selling additional products and services in a follow-up sequence

A great place to start is to use the tool I describe I this blog post: Product development, pricing, and sales funnel strategy made easy. It’s a simple way to find new products and services that fit within your existing offering!

To use the example that we’ve been working on: Perhaps the business can offer basic, intermediate, and advanced ebooks instead of just one ebook; or perhaps the business can sell the coaching and offer the ebook plus a workbook for a slight additional cost; or maybe the business owner can turn the ebook into a print book and sell it at the back of the room during the seminar; or maybe if the business owner presents several different seminars on different topics, they can record them and offer them as a package to ebook buyers.

Another thing you can do in your sales funnel is turn your Customers into Evangelists. For the same reasons that they might buy from you again, they might also tell their friends about your business, too. You can make it easier for them by asking them to tell their friends or even by asking for their friend’s contact information. And you can make it even easier for them by incentivizing your customers with kickbacks if their referred friends buy from you.

Stayed tuned. There are many more ways to find new opportunities in your sales funnel.

If you are a financial advisor or real estate professional, a condition very similar to “the CSI effect” could be hindering your success.

WHAT IS THE CSI EFFECT?

The CSI effect is a problem faced by the justice system when juries place too much faith in fingerprints and DNA evidence. It’s called “the CSI effect” to suggest that forensic shows like CSI (and others) are tainting real-life juries by making them believe that forensic evidence is easy to obtain, can be processed by a lab in hours, and decisive beyond a shadow-of-a-doubt.

Although the CSI effect is just a hypothesis, it does raise the issue that today’s media might be making everyone an expert.

WHAT DOES THE CSI EFFECT HAVE TO DO WITH YOU?

You might not be prosecuting criminals but you might be impacted by the CSI effect anyway… or, at least something similar. Our prospective clients have access to all kinds of information — from us and from others; on TV and the web. There is no shortage to the information that they can access.

Unfortunately, it has made “amateur experts” out of many clients, turning naive homebuyers into superstar DIY real estate agents and untrained investors into the next Jim Cramer.

Let me be clear about something before you read any further: Savvy clients are good. I’m not proposing that financial and real estate professionals would be better off with clients who couldn’t tell their left hand from their right hand. The root of the problem is NOT that they have access to lots of information to make better decisions. Rather, the root of the problem is that they have no filter to help them navigate the complicated world of real estate or investing.

They’ve been empowered and informed but not equipped.

The result is: Real estate professionals are finding lots of people going the list-it-themselves route or are assuming that they are expert househunters. And financial advisors are finding lots of people who leave voicemails on the advisors’ office overnight because of some great stocks they found while browsing online.

WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT

This is tricky. You don’t want to belittle them by telling them that what they know is wrong, nor do you really want to validate that their unsorted knowledge is a replacement for your expertise.

What clients really need is structure. They need decision-making systems. They need rules. They need ways to synthesize their information. They need frames. They need order. They need taxonomies. They need context. They need the bigger picture.

Right now, your clients are looking at splotches of paint on canvas; you need to help them step back and see the entire painting.

Here are some ways to work with your clients to counter the CSI effect:

• When writing your blog, make sure you use categories (or some other sorting system) that make sense in the bigger picture.
• In all of your marketing, make sure to highlight that the one piece of information you’re expressing is a single cog in a giant piece of machinery.
• Prepare information, verbal and written responses, and proactive marketing to address the reality that some of your clients will tell you about something they saw on TV or the web that doesn’t mesh with what you do. (For example, a normally conservative investor tells a financial advisor about a speculative stock they just heard about from a friend on Facebook).
• If you’re looking for a great idea for your next downloadable document, consider a “big picture” ebook that your users can use to sort out the huge, unsorted mass of information available to them on the web.

I believe the CSI effect is real… and it’s affecting more than just the justice system. I think many of my financial and real estate clients are facing a similar situation.

But I also think that this is an opportunity for you! Rather than joining the ranks of real estate and financial advisors who ONLY give out unsorted, unfiltered information, why not become the professional who helps prospective clients MAKE SENSE OF IT ALL.

I was talking to a prospective client late last week. He’s a real estate investor and he was asking me about different sales funnels that I thought were particularly effective for real estate investors. Here’s the answer I gave him:

There are two sales funnels that I really like for real estate investors right now. Each one is perfect for a slightly different audience.

SALES FUNNEL #1: THE BLOG SALES FUNNEL

Sales funnel overview:
Drive traffic > Blog > Newsletters > Become client

Driving traffic to your site: In this sales funnel, you drive traffic to your website through some fairly standard online marketing techniques. Right now I really like press releases and social media for driving traffic. I like articles, too, but because of the recent Google Panda update, I’ve become far pickier in recommending articles as a solution. I’ll only recommend them in certain situations.

Once a visitor is on your real estate investing site: On your website, visitors are greeted with a blog. You blog regularly about topics that are of interest to your audience and you build up your credibility and authority on the topic. You can present yourself as a solution but it needs to be a softer sell. You also prominently feature a newsletter subscription.

Once a visitor is subscribed: Here, you provide even deeper content that makes your subscribers feel like they’re part of an inner circle. You also present more clearly your ability to as a solution to their problem or need.

Buy from you: This is the action that your subscriber takes to contact you so you can help them.

SALES FUNNEL #2: THE SALES LETTER SALES FUNNEL

Sales funnel overview:
Drive traffic > Sales letter > (Newsletter) > Become client

Driving traffic to your site: Just like the above sales funnel, you drive traffic to your website through some fairly standard online marketing techniques. But you can also drive traffic to your site through Google AdWords.

Once a visitor is on your real estate investing site: On your website, visitors are presented with a long-form direct response sales letter and a very clear call-to-action. The call to action can be either a subscription to a newsletter or to contact you. (It depends on what you’re selling. I’ll talk more about this in a moment).

(Once a visitor is subscribed): If the call to action (above) was to subscribe to a newsletter, you would send helpful content to them on a regular basis.

Buy from you: This is the action that your site visitor takes at the end of the sales letter OR it’s the action that your subscriber takes at the end of each newsletter you send them.

WHICH SALES FUNNEL IS BEST?

I presented 2 sales funnels that I really like right now because I think they both can work… it just depends on who your audience is and what you are selling. Here are some ideas to help you choose the right sales funnel for you:

• If your audience is highly skeptical, choose the first sales funnel because you can spend time building rapport with them. For example, if you are a real estate investor who wants to find hard money lenders to help you buy properties, a blog might be good.
• If your audience has a very time-sensitive need, choose the second sales funnel and the call to action of contacting you, because a direct response sales letter will help them move forward quickly.
• If you have helpful content that you can divide into “great for everyone” and “great for only a few people”, then the first sales funnel can work because you’ll want compelling content in your blog and in your newsletter. This doesn’t work for everyone, though.
• If you want to measure the success of your marketing and drive traffic more effectively, use the second sales funnel because Google AdWords tools can help you manage the metrics in your sales funnel far better than a blast of online marketing and social media efforts.
• If your audience is already convinced of their problem or need, use the second sales funnel.
• If your audience is facing a problem or need for the first time and needs to be educated before they can choose your services, use the first sales funnel.
• If your message has a certain amount of exclusivity to it (i.e. you do something completely different than everyone else), use the second sales funnel.