In the current climate it is more important than ever to generate new leads and more importantly to convert them. To do this you will need a sales funnel so What Is a Sales Funnel?  The Automated Selling Machine

So, do you ever wonder how many businesses make consistent sales?

Really successful businesses are not making sales here and there, they are making sales consistently day in day out.

But how are they doing this? Well the key to making consistent sales is a sales funnel. The humble sales funnel is one of the core concepts in the digital marketing industry.

What Is A Sales Funnel?

To understand what a sales funnel is simply think of a real-world funnel. At the top of the funnel we pour something in, say water for example. This water filters down towards one final destination at the bottom of the funnel.

A sales funnel is no different. At the top we push lots of visitors in and slowly some of these visitors will become customers. However, unlike the real-world funnel where all of the water will eventually come out of the bottom, not all who enter the sales funnel will re-emerge out from the other end.

So, if we translate this into a typical sales funnel, we have prospects going through the funnel like so:

1. Awareness: At the top of the funnel we have awareness, this might be an advertising campaign we are running. We would typically be giving away some value here such as a white paper or another really useful piece of information. These can come in the form of a email newsletter signups, ebook downloads and many more.

2. Interest: This would be where the visitor would sign up to download the information or to receive something of value. You are growing the prospects interest through an email sequence. This is where you need to get the prospect to like and trust you, begin by relating stories to them that tie into who you are and what your business stands for. Are you the person they can turn to and trust to solve their problem?

3. Decision: The Decision process can you provide a solution? Getting prospects to make a decision isn’t easy. Here is where customer reviews and testimonials will help to sway them into making a decision to purchase.

4. Action: This is where the prospect becomes a customer.

As you can see prospects will fall out of the sales funnel, maybe your giveaway was not enough to persuade them to hand over their details.

This is a simplistic view and there are many things a good digital marketer will do to nurture the relationship through these stages.

Sales Funnels Are All Around Us

Most of us do not realise that sales funnels are all around us. Take a look at Starbucks for example. You may be driving and see a advertising billboard or hoarding, you see Starbucks branding which is the awareness stage. That evening you may be browsing a magazine or watching TV and you see an advert for Starbucks which explains how they make the coffee or showing people really enjoying drinking the product.

The next day you are on your way to work when someone hands you a ‘buy one coffee get another free’ flyer to be redeemed today. With that you decide to pop into Starbucks to take them up on the offer. Once inside the person behind the cash register will ask you if you want a biscuit or a cookie with your coffees so you say yes, this is a great upsell.

When you get the two coffees there is a sticker on the second coffee saying, “for your favourite co-worker”. You give the coffee to your co-worker and a week later they return the favour for you. A great sales funnel right before our eyes that is pulling new people into stores consistently.

Growing Your Business

Many people really struggle with the marketing side of the business, meaning that the business often does not grow fast enough or does not grow at all.

When in this position company owners have two options:

1. Bury their heads in the sand and rely on ‘hope marketing’

Hope Marketing is where people see what others are doing in their marketplace and simply repeat it. This often involves waiting around for referrals and word of mouth, visiting networking events in the hope that they bump into people that can help them and hoping that business comes their way.

2. The other option is to build a system (a sales funnel) that actually attracts leads and turns them into paying customers.

Successful businesses and consultants have built and scaled their businesses by using sales funnels.

All these businesses have a plan for finding and cultivating leads and turning them into paying customers. They will also often have a plan get them to buy more products or services during the sales process which is called an upsell.

Such entrepreneurs as an example will know that sending 100 people to their site costs £200, they get two people to convert at £300 each. This means you would have a £600 return on a £200 invested (300 percent). This means they can keep on scaling their business.

Which Option Would You Go For?

Now many business owners will be sat with option 1 but would you really prefer option 2?

Do you want to continue relying on external factors that are completely outside of your control and continue to wait around for business to come to you?

Why Do We Need a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel can solve one of the biggest problems that companies, and consultants have, which is creating a system to acquire profitable customers at scale.

A current client of mine realised that hope marketing was not the route that they wanted to continue to go down as the business was slowly falling away.

Their product lent itself really well to an online webinar and we put in place the funnel below which is currently giving them a 352% return on investment. We are using a combination of content marketing and paid adverts to pull traffic into the funnel which is converting very well.

Click the image for an expanded view

Want Results? Here’s What to Do Next.

Of course, putting in place such a funnel can be complicated.

You need to ask yourself these two questions:

1. Is my current website a sales funnel?

Does your current website have any automated system in place to generate leads and eventually convert them into sales?

2. How much does it cost you to acquire a customer?

This is vital information if you want to build and scale your business profitably.

If creating a step-by-step system sounds good to you and you are unsure how to do it then drop me a message or book a free consultation today.