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Sales funnels are an important concept to understand. You can waste a lot of time with the “noise” of tweeting and posting on Facebook. You can attend endless network meetings. If you grasp the ever-important concept of your sales funnel, you’ll have much more success in your business. You’ll be able to convert the engagement on social media since it’s now part of a strategy used to generate sales in your business.
It’s so much easier to make money and generate sales if you have a pool of raving fans to market to. You’re aware of the need to get those fans and followers to turn “likes” on a post and engaging with you into actually buying from you.
A funnel is a fancy way of saying that you are going to “touch” a prospective customer to move them along through a sales pitch disguised as a story or a scenario, or even a video, until they buy from you.
E. St. Elmo Lewis is credited with developing the components of a sales funnel that are used and referenced by most all marketers and sales professionals. His model is dated back to 1898 and is still relevant today. The steps are as follows:
Awareness—the customer is aware of the existence of a product or service
Interest—actively expressing an interest in a product group
Desire—aspiring to a particular brand or product
Action—taking the next step toward purchasing the chosen product
William Townsend is credited with mapping these steps into an actual funnel. Over the years various experts have modified and expanded on this funnel, but the concepts are all the same. It’s about touching the customer, educating the customer, and guiding them toward taking action to buy from you.
Touching the customer means sending the prospective customer an email newsletter, giving him a call, inviting him to an event—anything you can do to remind him that you have a solution for his needs. You do this most effectively by regularly sending information of VALUE to him.
Instead of always having to buy the attention of someone from someone else—that’s advertising—you can work on getting your own fan base to buy from you through your sales funnel. A sales funnel is a description of the journey a potential customer goes through to become an actual customer. If you know this journey for your products and services, you’ll be successful.
Here’s a typical sales funnel:
You have the top of the funnel. These are potential customers who don’t know you. They’re not familiar with your brand or what you do. Due to some action you did to get their attention, they’ve connected with you in some way. Maybe they saw a tweet you did and followed you; maybe they came to an event where you spoke; maybe they met you at a networking event. These are folks at the top of your funnel. We will call them your baby fans.
The middle of the funnel is made up of those who now know who you are and are starting to interact with you. Maybe they’ve attended two or three webinars you conducted; maybe they’ve downloaded a PDF. These are folks who are interested in what you’re saying (or selling). They are being educated through the content you’re providing them. This interaction furthers them on the journey of liking and trusting you.
The third part of the funnel is the bottom of the funnel. These are the folks who are HOT and ready to buy. The simple question is, will they buy from you or from someone else? Or even better, are they buying from you today or tomorrow? The bottom of the funnel, or “almost customers,” don’t need much more education, they just need to be guided into why you, your company, and your product are the best choice for them, and be triggered into actually buying from you. Here’s when you make them the offer to buy!
Things like the design of your shopping cart (for those selling online) or how you ask for business during a phone call can make or break a sale for those at the bottom-of-the-funnel stage. That is one aspect of the sales funnel.
The other aspect of the funnel is knowing your funnel for your particular industry and specific business. What’s the sales funnel of your customers? Once you get a fan, how do you convert her to a customer?
A car dealer selling a $90,000 Maserati has a different type of sales funnel than a web designer selling her services to dentists. The car dealer’s sales funnel might include a test drive, an in-home consultation, and so much more. Maybe it takes six months to a year. A web designer’s sales funnel might include a series of ten emails and a consultation via webinar.
You’ll notice that a sales funnel is often about education. It’s about trust. Your goal is to continue to offer value to your fans and to make offers to a subset of those fans in order to draw them deeper into a particular funnel.
For example, let’s say your goal is to get more logo design clients in Atlanta. Your first step would be to post on LinkedIn something like this: “Do you live in Atlanta? Want a better logo? Join our free webinar with tips on what makes a great logo.” For those who attend the webinar, you might then offer to give them a free audit of their existing logos.
From those who take you up on your offer for a logo audit, you can then find out who might want to pay $999 to have their logos redesigned. This is a very simple example, but it shows the reason and the power of turning a fan into a customer. Know your sales funnel.
Mark Swallows, a writer for Fit Small Business, writes in a blog post22 of the power of a well-constructed sales funnel. He tells us to be very purposeful and clear in how our customers buy from us. It’s also essential that our customer touch points (this includes sales, marketing, and customer service) all have a common methodology in how they communicate with customers. Finally, if we have a well-developed sales funnel, we’ll be able to forecast and predict the ebb and flow and our sales cycle.
Rarely will someone buy from you the first time they interact with your brand. It often takes several interactions before they buy—hence the power and purpose of your sales funnel. Since it takes multiple interactions to get someone to buy from you, a sales funnel disciplines you to make those multiple interactions with interested prospective customers.
Seth Godin wrote about the sales funnel in a 2006 blog post.23 It particularly relates to people using Google to search for information:
Once you see the funnel, it’s easy to understand how valuable your existing customers are, and easy to think about how you want to spend time and money in promoting and building your site. Most marketers are running a flat campaign. Embracing the funnel changes the way you treat people. And treating different people differently is what consumers demand.
You’ll see in later chapters of the book that I write about the specific tools I use to build my personal brand. It’s not using one particular tool; it’s about using a variety of tools (and services) to touch your fan base on a consistent basis so you’re always top of mind. Your marketing strategy for building your personal brand won’t be complete just by tweeting. That’s a big part of it, but it’s the full spectrum of a tweet (which could be the tip of the engagement iceberg) to having someone sign up for your email newsletter (which gets them a bit deeper into your awareness orbit) to having them attend an event (which gets them even further into your orbit where now maybe they’re a fan) to them being interested in having a phone call with you (now they’re really, really interested in what you have to offer) to them buying from you.
This is exactly how the marketing for my business works quite successfully. I post quite a bit on a variety of social platforms. I also send out a regular email newsletter. Not only do I speak at many events, but I produce my own events as well, such as the Smart Hustle Small Business Conference.24
This “circle of attention” for my fans leads to customers (mostly large brands) finding me and asking me to work with them. This works for me and it can work for you, in any industry.
Some people tease me for the massive amounts of content I post online, particularly in my videos. I often do Instagram and Facebook stories, post videos with insight on business topics, share videos of myself cutting and eating fruit . . . you get the point.
But this works.
While I have a fan base and community of thousands of followers, including small business owners, my revenue and my paying clients are the larger brands. These larger brands specialize in selling to small business owners. The reason my business is so successful is because I’m always top of mind in these brands when they’re considering a new campaign to reach their small-business customers.
It’s my funnel. Not as in depth or extensive as a funnel by a traditional sales person selling lights to a university, but it is a funnel. Through my videos and overall content, I’m ensuring that the fifty to one hundred brands that might want to work with me are constantly moving from the top of the funnel (creating awareness and interest) toward the bottom of the funnel (where they’re customers or seriously considering working with me).
Build a sales funnel to be top of mind and touch your fans, as well as potential and actual customers, all the time.