Aaron Hoos

Twitter is a business, which means that it needs to make money to pay its bills and keep the tweets streaming. HOW it makes money is a topic of plenty of conversation (of which I’ve engaged in many).

Promoted tweets and trends is one way we’ve already seen. But there are plenty of opportunities… the most obvious of which is mining the volumes of data that stream in from users.

In this article from Fast Company, they report on some of the ways that Twitter is planning to make money:

Twitter Launches New Programs to Help Goose Revenue | Fast Company.

To summarize: They’re planning to monetize data mining and branded pages.

But are there other ways? Here are some of my thoughts: I think data mining is the biggest, most profound opportunity for them. But I also think that they could move to a premium service that offers additional features (such as an indepth bio and additional links). It might be interesting to use Twitter’s delivery mechanism (short bits of info) in various ways for internal organizations or for businesses to communicate with clients — sort of like chat but more helpful and in an interface that everyone is already familiar with.

A sales funnel is a powerful way to start and grow a profitable business. Building a new business (or retrofitting an existing business) around a sales funnel is a great way to put the focus back on the right things.

If you’re working on your business’ sales funnel, here are 3 tips to remember:

SALES FUNNEL TIP #1: KEEP IT SIMPLE
It’s tempting to want to do everything. There are so many different marketing methods/tools/sites out there, and each of those methods/tools/sites has a multitude of successful “gurus” touting that particular method/tool/site as THE key to success. But taking on too much is part of the problem that a sales funnel solves!

So don’t take on so much at once. Start simply and use a few methods/tools/sites with excellence. When you have developed good habits and a great reputation, slowly expand outward. A sales funnel should not only create opportunities for you, it should also help you to manage your time!

SALES FUNNEL TIP #2.SOLVE PROBLEMS/FULFILL NEEDS
On Twitter, it’s easy to focus on getting followers and retweets. On Facebook, it’s easy to focus on building up a fanbase. On a blog, it’s easy to focus on traffic.

But what are you in business? To sell to people and to earn a profit… and the only way you’re going to do that is if you solve a problem or fulfill a need. A sales funnel is entirely focused on exactly that — moving contacts through your sales funnel to the point where they exchange their money for your solution.

Yes, followers, retweets, fans, and web traffic are important. We need those. But they’re just building blocks toward the most important thing: Helping other people (and earning an income from it). Get back to basics.

SALES FUNNEL TIP #3: MEASURE EVERYTHING
This is the one area where business owners fall short all the time. It’s fun to market, it’s hard to measure. However, when you measure, your marketing becomes exponentially more effective and you’ll earn more money.

A sales funnel helps you to measure by focusing your attention on specific marketing and sales efforts and the results from each of those efforts.

Some people move through your sales funnel quickly. Others move through slowly. That’s okay, as long as they’re moving. Unfortunately, some contacts just get stuck. They don’t go anywhere: They never actually buy from you, they may even continue to use your resources, and they ultimately distract you from buyers.

Here are tips to unstick contacts at each stage in your sales funnel to keep people moving:

DO YOU HAVE AUDIENCE CONTACTS STUCK IN YOUR SALES FUNNEL?
This is going to be the most difficult group to identify someone who is stuck. That’s because your audience is already the slowest moving, most skeptical, and least likely to move forward. However, you will spot them if you have several steps in your Audience stage and people move step-by-step through the stage but never go beyond.

The most important way to move your Audience contacts forward is by engaging them and by building rapport and credibility. This group is not motivated by what you have to offer. Rather, they are only becoming aware of their need or problem. If necessary, reach out to them individually and talk to them about their needs or problems. Listen to them. And DON’T pitch to them.

DO YOU HAVE LEAD CONTACTS STUCK IN YOUR SALES FUNNEL?
This group is easier to identify. For example, it’s the Facebook fan that “Liked” your Facebook page but never contributes to it, or it’s the ezine subscriber who never opens their emails. Move this group forward by highlighting their problem and by giving them a few ideas and tips to solve their problems. Give those ideas for free. Consider reaching out individually to this group.

You might also want to try giving them an ultimatum. This is daring but I’ve seen it work. Basically tell them that you don’t want to waste their time or yours and give them another chance to opt-in to continue being a Lead. (For example tell them you are cleaning your ezine list and only want to keep people who are truly engaged). There are risks to this tactic, of course, but it can be enough to either kickstart them or removing them from using up your bandwidth.

DO YOU HAVE PROSPECT CONTACTS STUCK IN YOUR SALES FUNNEL?
Prospects are much easier to identify as being forward-moving or stuck. At this stage, it’s usually pretty clear if they are interested (moving forward), disinterested (they leave your sales funnel), or completely stalled.

There are a few ways to move contacts in this group forward. One of the most common ways is with a price incentive. Put your product or service on sale and that can move people forward. However, it’s not always advisable because you don’t want to set the precedent and stall other contacts in the future as they wait for your offering to go on sale.

The two best ways to move contacts forward in this stage are: (1) overcome their objections, and (2) make it so insanely easy for them to buy from you. Prospects who are stalled tend to either have objections (stated or unstated) or they tend to feel confused (to the point of inaction) by what to do next.

DO YOU HAVE CUSTOMER CONTACTS STUCK IN YOUR SALES FUNNEL?
Once a buyer buys, you’ll still want to track whether or not they’ve stalled. This one is very easy to identify: First, figure out the average time that a customer buys their second product from you — the “average 2nd purchase date”. Then figure out the longest time that a customer has taken to buy a second product — the “longest 2nd purchase date”. Now you have a window. Your aim is to get people to buy at or before the average 2nd purchase date. Once they enter the window, though, they are in danger of no longer buying. And once they pass the longest 2nd purchase date, you can be pretty confident that they’ve stalled.

There are a few ways to get these contacts unstuck. I’d suggest reaching out to them and offering them something else. I’d suggest a special “repeat buyer” discount. I’d suggest polling them to find out what they thought of your last product and what their current needs are. I’d suggest talking to them about other ways they can benefit from your product or service. You might even want to have a frank discussion with them about whether they are using the competition and how you can get 100% of their business.

DO YOU HAVE EVANGELIST CONTACTS STUCK IN YOUR SALES FUNNEL?
Evangelists are, by definition, fully engaged and actively promoting your business. They don’t need to be kept moving unless something happens and they suddenly stop promoting you. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to find out when someone stops talking about you! So the best thing to do is monitor your brand, continue to treat your Evangelists like gold, incentivize them to tell their peers, and generally ensure that they feel good about promoting your business.

I’d like to hear from you! How have you unstuck your sales funnel? What have you done to get stalled contacts moving!

Grow a profitable business by focusing on the right things… and one of the most important things you can focus on is a well-defined, smooth-flowing sales funnel that takes in audience members and converts more and more of them into customers.

Select one of these 99 ideas, work at it, reap the results, and come back to this list to select another idea. Spend a day, a week, or a month on a single idea. Need to be reminded about the various stages in a sales funnel? Download the Sales Funnel Quick Reference Guide.

(The links in this list are not affiliate links.)

1. Look at businesses who you’ve bought from who share a similar business model. Map out their business plan and see how it compares to yours. Read more in this blog post: Discover and implement effective sales funnel tactics used by other businesses.




2. When a prospect says no, we often leave their office with just a handshake and a half-hearted “we’ll call later”. Instead, leave behind something of value.




3. Enable your Evangelists to explicitly share your business with their peers. Give them specific ideas to help them: Give them extra business cards or a PDF entitled “6 ways to spread the word” that invites them to tweet something about you, Like your Facebook page, or comment on your blog, etc.




4. Increase the number of steps in each stage. This might sound counter-intuitive but it can help to reduce the amount of resistance people feel by helping them take baby steps instead of giant leaps. Read more in this blog post: A counter-intuitive sales funnel tip to increasing sales in your business




5. Collect testimonials from Customers and Evangelists… and even from Prospects! (Find out what your prospects like about your offering and what they expect if they were to buy. Construct some sales messages around these and use them in your sales presentation).




6. Ask for feedback at every stage of your funnel from contacts at every stage in your sales funnel. Refine your message appropriately.




7. Use split testing to experiment with every message and channel in your sales funnel.




8. Each stage of your sales funnel has steps that a contact takes. Look at the steps in your Audience stage and see where there is a backlog of people. Chances are, there is an emotional or logical deterrent keeping them from advancing. Solve it.




9. Do the same thing (as above) with contacts in your Leads stage.




10. Do the same thing (as above) with contacts in your Prospects stage.




11. Divide up your Customers into “most profitable” and “least profitable”. Figure out what traits are common among the most profitable ones. Then increase your marketing to audiences with those traits. Read more in this blog post: A step-by-step way to find your most profitable customers (and transform your business).




12. Read Jeffrey Gitomer’s “The Sales Bible“. Then read it again.




13. Select a non-profit organization related to your industry and become an active supporter and vocal proponent. Support them financially and with volunteer hours and with your talent.




14. Set up your own forum or social network. (Ning or socialsam are my favorites.)




15. Create a YouTube channel for your brand and start posting videos.




16. List all of your Prospects in order of most promising to least promising. Figure out how you defined “most promising” and “least promising” because that is an important measurement but it’s different for every business.




17. Using the above list, identify how you can change your Audience-generation to get more of the most promising Prospects. (In other words, you’re identifying what makes a good Prospect, then shaping your sales funnel in an earlier stage to get contacts who will turn into the most promising Prospects).




18. Using the above list, identify how you can change your Audience-generation to get fewer of the least promising Prospects.




19. Using the above list, identify how you can turn your least promising Prospects into more promising ones.




20. Write a book.




21. Collect Leads by holding a draw for an exciting prize.




22. If you have a lot of Leads or Prospects that aren’t doing anything, create an exclusive opt-in report and inner circle ezine and invite only them to subscribe to it. In that ezine, amp up the value. Discard the Leads and Prospects who don’t subscribe to it.




23. Speed up the points of contact you have with each person. So if you normally talk to a Lead once every 2 weeks, try talking to them every week.




24. Find the Audience channel that engages your contacts the least and focus exclusively on it for a week. Make it the channel that engages them the most and see what happens.




25. List all of your Leads in order of most promising to least promising. Figure out how you decided that.




26. Using the above list, identify how you can change your Audience generation to get more of the most promising Leads.




27. Using the above list, identify how you can change your Audience generation to get fewer of the least promising Leads.




28. Using the above list, identify how you can turn your least promising Leads into more promising ones.




29. Ask to roll up your sleeves and work in your Leads’ or Prospects’ businesses for a day. (Yes, this can take up a lot of your time, so spend one day or even just a half a day in your most promising Lead’s or Prospect’s office.) You will notice such a difference in how your sales presentation goes!




30. List something interesting about every Lead. If you can’t list anything, engage them in a conversation until you have something interesting. Then use that interesting thing in conversation with them to build rapport.




31. Give your Evangelists an incentive to talk about you. This is not only a great way to encourage talking about you, it’s also a measurable way to know who is talking.




32. Increase your number of buyers by adjusting payment plans to make your offering more accessible to those who might not be able to pay the way you’ve conventionally been charging.




33. Make it easier for your Audience members to become Leads by reducing the information they need to give to become a Lead.




34. List the parameters you are using to qualify your Prospects and evaluate whether you need all of them. Can you present to more potential buyers simply by broadening what you define as a good Prospect?




35. Schedule time to periodically touch base with Customers to share additional ideas and recommend ways to improve their lives or businesses.




36. Build some ancillary products or services that your Customers can buy once they have bought from you already.




37. Make your Customer to Evangelist trigger easier than it already is.




38. Make your Prospect to Customer trigger easier than it already is.




39. Make your Lead to Prospect trigger easier than it already is.




40. Make your Audience to Lead trigger easier than it already is.




41. Turn a single product into 3 products — make your current product the silver level, add value for a gold level product and take away some value for a bronze level product.




42. If you sell services, offer a free initial consultation.




43. Extend your guarantee to the ridiculous.




44. Do a sales blitz one weekend: Overwhelm the web with press releases, pay-per-click marketing, and incentives.




45. Get a cool logo and have them printed on shirts and hats, with your website included on them. Turn people into Evangelists by giving away branded merchandise.




46. Create a “center of excellence” for your industry and pull together information and resources from the great thinkers in your industry. Include yourself in that list.




47. Find a few big names in your industry who offer non-competing products or services to your target market and ask them to review your product or service.




48. Create a course and offer it at various virtual university sites, or offer it at a site like prfessor.com.




49. If you don’t yet have an ebook, write one (or have one written).




50. Hire a freelance sales person on a contingency basis to sell for you.




51. Get in touch with trade organizations in your area that serve your target market. Find out when the next trade show is and set up a booth. Collect names, give out information and an incentive to buy from you.




52. Get an affiliate account with a few carefully selected vendors that serve a similar market to yours. Offer these to your Customers.




53. Write an ezine and offer it to people in exchange for their email address. Build a list of Prospects.




54. Read Tom Hopkins’ book “How to Master the Art of Selling“. Then read it again.




55. Publish a series of blogs and press releases with a “public service” flavor to the — offer helpful, timely advice on a problem that your market faces.




56. Look at your buyers and figure out where they initially engaged you as an Audience member. Then temporarily increase your effort in that one channel while you temporarily reduce your efforts in other Audience channels.




57. Segment your market into smaller, more granular segmentations (i.e. By demographic differences) and fine-tune your marketing to engage more effectively with your newly defined markets.




58. Answer questions on Quora, LinkedIn, Answers.com, or wherever your market is asking questions.




59. Start a daily digest on paper.li.




60. If you have a physical location, get a presence on Foursquare and offer the mayor a promotional incentive.




61. Extend your Foursquare reach by connecting with another Foursquare-savvy business (who serve a related market) and offer their mayor a promotional incentive of some kind.




62. Offer seminars to local organizations.




63. Package up some of your material (product excerpts or blog posts) into themed infopacks and give them to Customers with a commitment that they send it to their peers.




64. Make sure your blog is mobile-friendly, allowing people on the go to read what you have to say.




65. Get a toll-free number. Include some basic pre-recorded information for callers to hear, plus a regularly changing value-added recording. (Reuse podcast snippets but make them available for people who don’t listen to podcasts.




66. Put a chatbox on your site so contacts can interact with you immediately. Hire a virtual assistant to cover it during the times that you cannot.




67. Do a competitive analysis to see what your competitors are offering that you aren’t. Explore how you might offer similar benefits in a superior way.




68. Find a keyword that matches a search your target market does. Buy a domain with that keyword and set up an optimized page with a single call to action — to become a Lead.




69. Devote a series of articles and blog posts to specific problems your target market experiences — one problem per article and post. Attract people with the article and send them to your blog post where they will learn more.




70. Offer a discount to those who buy early in the sales funnel.




71. Find a forum where your target market likes to spend their time. Go there daily and just listen for the first couple of months.




72. Write down their frustrations and challenges then figure out if and how your offering solves it. (You probably shouldn’t present your solution to the people in the forum, though).




73. Write a magazine article targeted to your market and publish it in a magazine that your market reads.
74. Seek out Audience members who have followed/friended you but have never interacted with you. Engage individually with them.




75. Reconnect with old Leads by sending a series of follow-up emails, either enticing them with a special offer or asking them to confirm whether or not they want to be removed from your mailing list.




76. Get in touch with Prospects who have said “no” to you in the past. Find out if anything has changed that would allow them to buy from you now.




77. Contact past Customers who haven’t bought from you in a while. Offer them a product or service with some incentive to buy again.




78. Offer something free earlier in your sales funnel that is made more valuable by a product or service that your contact can purchase. (I.e., the first chapter of your book).




79. Hold an event (in person or via webinar) where your Customers or Evangelists can attend with a friend.




80. Ask your Customer to suggest the name of someone they think would benefit from your service. Ask every time you talk to them.




81. Double your Audience-generation efforts. (Your ratios should remain the same so the rest of your sales funnel should approximately double).




82. Write a blog post about a Customer. Make it a glowing recommendation as well as a useful post for THEIR Customers.




83. Connect with other businesses who serve the same target market as you (but who aren’t direct competitors). Set up an affiliate agreement with them and generously direct your Customers to those other businesses.




84. List the top 5 objections that you hear from Propsects and create a brochure, blog post, or page on your site that addresses each one.




85. Add structure to your sales funnel by implementing a CRM system. Sounds too complicated? Start with a simple spreadsheet.




86. Add value to existing products by recording a series of videos and packaging those videos with your products.




87. Try a new channel to reach your Evangelist stage contacts.




88. Try a new channel to reach you Customer stage contacts.




89. Try a new channel to reach your Prospects stage contacts.




90. Try a new channel to reach your Leads stage contacts.




91. Try a new channel to reach your Audience stage contacts.




92. Look at the benefits offered by your product and consider who else (besides your target market) requires those same benefits.




93. Identify the people in your sales funnel who have not purchased anything and create a different version of your product that might appeal to them. (Try something smaller for a lower price, or something more targeted).




94. Interview someone famous in your market — either in print or in an audio or video format. Give them a copy of the interview and welcome them to post links to it wherever they want.




95. Buy a related URL and post a long, keyword rich report on it. At the bottom, include “Subscribe to my ezine” as your call to action.




96. Guest blog. In fact, hold a “guest blog challenge” with yourself to write 5 guest blogs next week.




97. Identify a small, long-tail keyword or keyphrase. Write 2-3 blogs and 3-5 articles (pointing to those blogs).




98. Write a free report, make it available to your contacts if they leave an email address, and promote it with keyword rich press releases.




99. Once you have gone through the list, start over.

I was in a conversation with another business owner recently about blogs. We were discussing traffic and the large volume of people he gets to his blog, then he asked me how many visitors I get. I don’t like playing this game of “how big is yours?”. By comparison, I get considerably less traffic than him but my readers are highly targeted and well into my sales funnel by the time they get to me.

Metrics have always been a problem for small business owners. Too often, entrepreneurs mistakenly measure quantity over quality when it comes to metrics. They go for the easy-to-identify and easy-to-understand numbers and skip the real numbers that lie below the surface. Blog traffic is just one example. Twitter followers or Facebook fans are another. People spend a lot of money to get lots of Twitter followers or Facebook fans but then they don’t do anything with them. It’s not the number of followers or fans that count… it’s the level of engagement of your fans. That’s why replies and retweets are a far better metric for Twitter engagement than the number of followers you have.

In a recent article on Mashable.com entitled Making Data Relevant: The New Metrics for Social Marketing, social media engagement manager Prashant Suryakumar talks about the relevance of social media metrics and how business owners can learn more when they find the right metrics to use.

He lists valuable opportunities for businesses to use social media to discover and exploit opportunities, and what I want you to pay attention to specifically is the role of social media metrics in your sales funnel. Below, I’ve listed some of the areas of social media opportunity that Suryakumar explains (in bold), and then I describe how these tie into your sales funnel.

• Invest in data (to bring structure and understanding to the unstructured abundance of social media data): Data can so much about your contacts — from what stage they are at in the sales funnel to how likely they are to become a customer. With insight like that, why wouldn’t an entrepreneur WANT to move from a number-of-followers metric to something more meaningful?!?
• Real time monitoring (to keep your finger on the pulse of your sales funnel at any given moment): Watching the ups and downs of your business is so valuable in creating a predictable, sustainable business. But until social media became ubiquitous, it was difficult to have useful, real-time data. Now, you can see what people are saying and when, and you can respond accordingly… far earlier than you were ever able to before.
• Sentiment analysis (to see if people are generally positive or negative about your brand): Happy Customers tell their peers about you. But how can you make sure that your Customers are happy? Social media helps you watch all stages of your sales funnel to see how people are responding to your brand.
• New metrics (to move beyond followership to understand how group dynamics can improve your sales funnel): Selling to each contact takes a lot of work, and the people who are truly successful in business know that they can’t sell to everyone individually. What is needed is an endorsement from a key influencer. Trace the success of many entrepreneurs (especially online entrepreneurs) and you’ll see that a lot of it was tied to a key influencer who gave a hearty endorsement.
• Testing (to modify your activities and offerings based on immediate feedback): Ford’s Edsel is a great example of a product that could have undergone more testing. It was pushed out to the public and completely flopped. Today, social media gives an immediate avenue for businesses to try out new ideas before investing a lot of money in them. For example, social media allows you to quickly and easily identify what messages work well in a particular stage of your sales funnel.
• Behavior segmentation (to anticipate buyer profiles with information that goes far deeper than simple demographics): Your sales funnel contacts aren’t just made up of age and income statistics. They are living, breathing people who live very transparent lives online. Social media allows businesses to tap into that information to discover new connections (and thus, new opportunities) of understanding their target markets.

If you’re using social media as a tool for your sales funnel, it’s time to move beyond the simple number-of-followers or number-of-fans you have and go deeper into the data.