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.

Understanding your sales funnel and being able to draw it out are essential skills you need to have if you want to grow a profitable business.

In this blog post, I want to walk you step-by-step through drawing out your business’ sales funnel. (Download this Sales Funnel Quick Reference Guide for more information about sales funnels).

STEP ONE: LIST EVERYTHING YOU DO

In two separate lists, list all of your marketing efforts and all of your products and services. Don’t worry if the lists aren’t exhaustive; just try to get it all down into the two lists.

For example:

Let’s say that your marketing efforts include online articles and press releases, Twitter, and you participate in your local Chamber of Commerce. You have a website and you also have a landing page that specifically sells an ebook.

And let’s say that your products and services include an ebook, telephone coaching, and seminars.

As you do this step, you might think: “Oh, but sometimes I talk to people on the phone. And how what about the money transaction? Don’t worry, we’ll get to that. You can list it in a third – “where the heck does this go?” list, if you want. Just get the two main lists down first.
 

STEP TWO: ARRANGE IN ORDER

Now it’s time to arrange your marketing efforts in order. It is very likely that people see you in one marketing channel before finding you in another.

For example:

Your target market might first spot you in a Twitter ReTweet so they follow you on Twitter and then they later check out your website. Or, they might do a search on Google for something, find an article you wrote, and then click to your website. So put your marketing efforts in order.

In the example we’ve been doing, it might look like this. You can see we’ve just grouped everything into three basic groups — the initial marketing at the top, your website homepage and landing page in the middle (since people will probably get to that site THROUGH one of the marketing channels at the top of your funnel) and your products/services at the bottom. Nothing fancy. We’re making some assumptions here (and we can always move stuff around later).

STEP THREE: FILL IN THE BLANKS

As you look at your sales funnel, you’ll realize that there are blanks that haven’t been covered yet (and maybe you added them to a “where the heck does this go?” list in step one). Some examples include:

• Add interaction
• Add your paygates (the places where the customer pays you)

For example

In the example we’ve been building, let’s imagine that prospective customers contact you (especially from Chamber of Commerce but occasionally through your website) to learn more about your seminars and coaching. After you interact with them a bit, they sign a contract and pay and you deliver the service.

And let’s also imagine that your paygates (which I’ve indicated in green in the example) are as follows: People pay up-front for your ebook and your coaching and they pay after the fact when you deliver a seminar.

In the example we’ve been doing, it might look like this. Again, it’s just a rough diagram and we’ll tweak it as we go.

STEP FOUR: CONNECT THE DOTS

In this step, you start to draw lines from one part of your sales funnel to another.

Not all of your marketing channels will prompt people to move forward in your sales funnel in the same way. Some will drive people to your website, others will get the phone ringing. Some marketing channels will prompt people in more than one way.

And, let’s not forget that sometimes, people will look at one marketing channel and then another before moving forward in your sales funnel, or they will buy one product and then another farther down your sales funnel. So there isn’t just vertical movement down your sales funnel, there is also horizontal movement as well.

For example:

You might find that your article marketing and some of your press releases tend to point people to your landing pages (instead of your website’ s home page) so you draw lines to connect those appropriately. And you might also realize that your Chamber of Commerce activity rarely results in an ebook sale but usually results in coaching and seminar work. So you connect those.

In the example we’ve been doing, it might look like this. You can see that (in our example) the article marketing TENDS to send people directly to a specific landing page in our website and our networking at the Chamber of Commerce TENDS to have people contacting us directly (instead of visiting the website… although some people from the Chamber will visit our website first).

STEP FIVE: GROUP INTO STAGES

At each stage in your sales funnel, the people in that stage have a different mindset. Some barely know you and are skeptical of what you offer. Others feel that they have a pressing problem and are curious if you can help them.

By grouping your different marketing and sales and delivery efforts into stages, you can communicate more effectively with the people in that stage because you know what mindset they have.

In general, I tend to use 5 stages (Audience, Leads, Prospects, Customers, Evangelists) but you might be more comfortable with a different grouping. That’s fine. The important thing is to define the stages and then figure out what mindset your sales funnel contacts have in that stage.

For example:

I’ve used just four stages in this example – Audience, Leads, Prospects, and Customers. Let’s assume that this fictional company doesn’t do very much with its Evangelists.

First we add the Audience stage by grouping together all of the marketing channels that we meet people who have likely never heard of us before.

Then we add the Lead stage by grouping together all of the channels where people might come to us because they’re interested in learning more.

Then we add the Prospect stage by grouping together all of the channels where people might keep digging because they realize that we can solve a problem they have. You’ll note that we made an adjustment with the Landing Page because it does double-duty as both a place where Leads land and a place that convinces Prospects to buy.

Then we add the Customer stage by grouping together all of our deliverables. You’ll notice that the ebook paygate has been moved because as soon as the Propsect clicks the Buy Now button and enters the paygate to pay, they have become customers. And, if they have contacted the business and are ready to receive a contract, they have become customers.

Now it’s your turn! Give it a try for your business. And in the comments below, tell me what you think of this process. I’ve tried to lay it out as simply as possible but I think about this stuff 24/7. Are there aspects of each step that I’m not covering in-depth? Let me know in the comments below and I’ll write a blog post to give more detail.

Long before they buy from you, you are investing time and energy into your leads and prospects to move them through your sales funnel. By the time they convert into customers, you have sunk resources (money/time/effort) into cultivating the relationship.

So companies that struggle with insufficient income or profits might not be moving prospective customers through their sales funnel fast enough. Here are some tips to solve that.

HOW TO SPEED UP YOUR SALES FUNNEL CONTACTS

• Increase the urgency in your sales funnel by highlighting some of the reasons that someone shouldn’t delay in buying from you. Rely on the 7 basic human emotions to help you push, pull, and prod your prospective buyer toward an immediate purchase.
• Offer an incentive for customers to buy now instead of later. Consider something like a reduced rate or an added bonus. Make sure that it’s an attractive offering with a lot of value or it won’t work. (You’ll also need to figure out how to respond to people who don’t buy from you but then ask you later for the free stuff anyway. It will happen!)
• Speed up your points of contact. If you have a sales call scheduled with a prospect every two weeks (14 days) until they become customers, why not try scheduling that sales call every 10 or 11 days. By doing this one simple step, you’re speeding up your funnel by 30%!
• At some point in your sales funnel you’ll have satisfied all of the buying parameters that a prospective buyer has (and if they haven’t bought by this time, they are just waiting until the time is right for them). So ask for the sale… every time you talk to them.
• Figure out the steps in each stage of your sales funnel and see if you can’t combine them together. Address two steps instead of one in a particular interaction.
• Objections are awesome! They tell you why someone isn’t buying. Handle objections as quickly as possible in your sales funnel. Don’t wait for the prospective buyer to ask you.
• Ask: Ask your prospective buyer: What is keeping you from buying today? You’ll get unanswered objections, sticking points, and probably a lot of hedging and feet-shuffling. But you’ll also find out what roadblocks you can address to get people moving through your sales funnel faster.

Your sales funnel is an engine that churns out customers (and revenue). Use these tips to put down the accelerator and get your buyers moving.