What’s a Sales Funnel?

Before we go any further, it would perhaps be useful to explain exactly what a sales funnel is and what you’ll be using it for. In essence, a sales funnel can be imagined like a funnel for customers. You start out with a broad opening to capture as many leads as possible and then you gradually narrow those leads down to only the most engaged and interested customers so that you can sell to them. All the while, you’ll be building trust, building engagement and priming them ready to make a sale.

You can also think about this as a ladder, which each rung taking your customers closer to the top where you’ll eventually try to sell to them. In practice, what this means is a series of different marketing strategies, each arranged in such a way as to build more and more targeted leads for your business. So you might start with a simple advert, or a blog post and then move on to an email list, then a ‘free report’, then a seminar, then a small product sale and then a big sale.

Each of these marketing stages is a rung on a ladder, it’s a little further down the funnel. And each time a customer clicks on the next link, or follows you to the next step, they are becoming more and more likely to buy from you.

Hopefully you now understand how a sales funnel works and why it’s such an important tool for maximizing your sales. At the same time though, it’s worth noting that the steps themselves don’t need to look like this. You might not have a mailing list, you might not have a seminar – but you can still create a funnel.

What’s important, is simply that you have a series of escalating ‘steps’, with each one increasing engagement and building your fan base further. So the question now becomes: how many steps constitutes a ‘funnel’? While this varies from case to case, the best answer is five. That’s because research tells us that it takes five touches to sell to someone. This means they should interact with your business at least five times before you try and shift your big ticket item. This is enough to take someone from being completely unaware of your brand, to being familiar enough with you that they are willing to put their money and their trust in your products.

Increasing Value While Selling…

Many a sales funnel will be built around just sales. The sales funnel we’ve described so far is one with a low ‘free line’ (this is discussed in more detail in a subsequent chapter). The more you give away for free, the better. But it’s also possible to put multiple purchases below the free line. Rather than selling one item, then your big ticket item, you can instead go through gradually more expensive products and build this up to the point where your customer eventually pays for something very expensive.

This is the best way to get people to buy the very highest ticket items. This way, they will be making multiple purchases that increase in value and thereby each step will seem slightly smaller. It won’t seem like
such a big deal to eventually spend that much money. The steps are incremental and thus they seem smaller and more palatable.

Warming Up Your Leads – The Watch Salesman Analogy

Do you have a proper sales marketing processes set up for your business yet? Do you have a plan for attracting new customers and then leading them by the hand from the point where they’re just discovering your brand, to the point where they feel familiar enough and trusting enough that they’re willing to part with their hard earned cash?

If not, then there’s a good chance that you’re driving your visitors away before they’ve had a chance to buy. If your landing page right now is simply an attempt to sell, then you’ll be putting off visitors and not collecting any of their details before they do. Consider this analogy…

The Watch Salesman
Imagine that you’re out in town and someone comes up to you with a watch and offers you to buy it for $5,000. What do you do?

The vast majority of us would say no – even if we liked the watch. Why? Because we don’t know anything about that person and don’t know if we can trust them not to sell us a counterfeit. At the same time, we don’t know anything about the watch or what it’s like beyond the looks. Then there’s the even more fundamental fact that we might not be in the market for a watch. Maybe we already have a watch. Maybe we don’t have $5,000 spare. Maybe we hate watches.

Well this is exactly how a vast majority of websites operate. If you are driving traffic to your site and then trying to sell, you’re essentially trying to get someone to hand over their cash with zero preamble and zero targeting.

The Better Approach
So what does the smart watch salesman do? For starters, they hand out fliers rather than trying to sell right away. They’ve got your attention and now they’re actually going to do something useful with that by establishing contact so they can sell to you in future.

At the same time, they should stand in the right place – outside a watch-lovers conference for example or a watch repair shop. And instead of trying to sell their $5,000 watch right away, maybe they should try and sell a $500 to start with. Now they’re gradually building a relationship and building trust and only then trying to sell. This is how you need to operate and if you can do that, you’ll be 100% more successful.

Want to finally increase sales?

There’s many ways of increasing it. The most obvious way is to generate more traffic. You and I both know that. However, what’s just as important is to make sure you have the right sales funnel in place.

It will make a big difference to your bottom-line, but how do you get started? I’m about to release a new product — I haven’t named it yet, it’s only available to those who have this private link… (And hint, it’s all about Attracting, Converting and Nurturing your customers/leads). How to build a sales funnel that converts visitors into high-value customers.

You can schedule a call with me here: