I talk so much about funnels it drives my wife, and everyone I know, nuts.
I’ve become known as “The Funnel Guy” in my daily life.
The problem is, even when people call me that, awhile later they always end up asking “So, what exactly is a funnel?”
Being the funnel geek that I am, my jaw usually drops before I remember that there was a time where the concept of a sales funnel was new to me as well.
My Journey To Funnels
It started back in 2016 when we found out for sure our dream of having a baby was becoming a reality.
Even though she was planned, my daughter’s eminent arrival sent me into a kind of insane business spiral where I began throwing money at everything at hoping something would stick.
I basically brought my business to it’s knees trying to scale my wedding videography too quickly, hire employees when I didn’t even have much revenue to begin with, and try to remove myself from the process to make money while not actually working in the business.
It was at this point that I had decided to start a crowdfunding platform online. People like asking for money, and people like giving people money who need it, right?
The site traffic remained flat-lined, and eventually was shut down, but born from this experience was the need to be found online.
I had built something pretty cool online, and I expected people to just flock to it and make me a millionaire.
But that’s not how the world works my friends.
Just because you build something doesn’t mean they will come. That saying is bogus and only good in the movies.
You have to have a way to attract people to your website and ultimately lead them to your end-goal, making a purchase with you.
That process, my friends, is funnels.
Why Traditional Selling Doesn’t Work
If you are selling with a traditional approach, you are likely either making cold calls, pounding the pavement going door to door, or randomly emailing cold prospects in the hope you won’t hit the spam folder or just get deleted.
These methods rely on you calling people who YOU THINK may be a good fit for your product or service, and hoping you find someone who isn’t too busy with their work day and not off-put by random communications trying to sell them things.
Traditional selling is a numbers game.
You have to call a lot of people in order to close a few.
You may even set up in person meeting with people that you approached, only to find out they don’t want your services.
Wasted time.
Wasted money.
What you need is a system that pulls in leads automatically and SELLS people for you.
What Is A Sales Funnel
Our automated sales system needs to be set up ahead of time, provide value to the right customers, and bring our target market to us rather than us having to spend time going to look for them.
This is what a sales funnel is: a planned and automated way to bring leads into your business and warm them up for a sale.
Bring leads in who are interested in our services.
Make the sell.
That is the simplest way to describe to you what a sales funnel is, but we will be going into more depth in this article.
A Duplication Of Your Time
Another way to put it, and the main benefit of a sales funnel is the duplication of your time.
If you cold call a prospect, give them advice on their marketing strategy to try and warm them up to your online marketing package, and then make a sale, that’s great!
But it took you that hour of your own time to do it.
What if you have a system setup that will warm the customer up for you and bring them to CALL YOU WHEN THEY ARE READY TO BE SOLD?
The system can be warming 1,000 people up at once.
That’s 1,000 hours of your time saved.
That’s a duplication of your time.
The Structure Of A Sales Funnel
Sales funnels can take many different forms depending on the goal of the funnel and whether you have traffic that knows nothing about you (cold traffic), or traffic that knows about you and your solutions (warm traffic) or traffic that has already bought something from you (hot).
What every type of funnel had in common is it’s shape.
Think about an oil funnel. Wide on the top, very narrow on the bottom.
Liquid flows out less and more concentrated at the bottom.
Sales funnel work the same way.
Say you have 10,000 visitors to your website every month. You can’t expect all of them to opt-in for your free guide.
So say 20% of visitors opt-in to your free guide. You now have a narrower set of people (2,000) who made it down to the next stage of the funnel.
That may not seem like a lot out of the original 10,000, but 20% is a pretty darn good opt-in rate, and now you have 2,000 people who you know are interested in the topic related to your product or service.
You can follow the opt-in page directly with a sales page, or sell the next step in the funnel through an email list. It’s pretty common practice to do both.
Now that people have shown interest and volunteered to become leads, you need to find out who the buyers on your list are.
Of the 2,000 people, maybe only 3% will buy your low end product, so your funnel is down to 60 people.
Again, seems like so few, but now you have a list of 60 people who have shown faith in you, pulled out their credit card, and gave you money.
The other 1,940 people? You can keep providing value to and selling to through your email list, eventually working them down the funnel.
You can keep selling higher value and higher prices products and services (high-ticket items) to people the more they buy from you and the further they get down your funnel.
Eventually you have a select few buying your highest item or service.
Why All This Matters
Did you catch how much work you actually put into all this?
You made a free guide once.
You made some low-end offers once.
People are coming to you and eventually calling you ASKING you to sell them your high ticket items.
A lot of work up front, and a crazy duplication of time that would take an Enterprise-level team of round the clock employees to replicate.
Automation is the key.
Funnels are the key.
Ready to dive into the world of automation and funnels?
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