You no doubt have heard of the term sales funnel but do you truly know what it means? This simple concept is present in all businesses no matter how big or small and no matter what industry they are in. Let’s take a step back and analyse this simple yet powerful term.
Well, the simplest definition is:
a sales funnel is a strategic relationship-building process where you take a complete stranger and turn them into a subscriber or follower and then turn them into a customer and then turn them into a lifetime customer.
And this can be done on multiple levels of your business. Your business will have an overarching sales letter or value ladder,
as the above is graphic shows each stage of the relationship as people move from being just strangers and prospects into customers and second-time customers, third type customers and lifetime customers, you’re going to be offering different products and services to them based upon how much of a relationship you’ve built with them.
So that’s the macro level, right And this value ladder is made up of multiple different types of sales funnels. So you may have heard of things like
Webinars Sales funnels
Launch sales funnels
Free offer plus shipping sales funnels
or book sales files.
These are all the micro sales funnels that are built around solving a specific problem for your customers. So each sales funnel you put together on a micro level is selling one particular product or service and we’ll get to why actually you need to upgrade that to two or three at a time. And then when you zoom out, you can see this graph here essentially shows how all of these sales funnels fit together.
So as you can see here, it starts with a landing page and the landing page essentially promises your potential customers a solution to some of the problems that they’re having.
Those solutions are going to be solved in the Webinar. Now, depending on how advanced you get, once they sign up, they’re going to be a couple of emails and videos that go out to them, essentially be further building that relationship further, building that value and seeding the benefits of showing up to the Webinar.
Now, what makes this different if someone didn’t sign up and then immediately see your pitch, right The whole purpose of a funnel is to build a relationship. You’re strategically building a relationship with a customer, right If you are in a person to person sales environment, you wouldn’t just go up to someone at a meetup and say, hey, buy my product. Right You’d have a conversation with them. You’d learn about their needs, you’d learn about their problems. You’d have a dialogue back and forth. You’d exchange business cards. You follow up a week or two later, or a couple of days later, you’d meet them for coffee, right You’re building a relationship and then towards the end of that meeting or relationship you say, Hey, by the way, I think it would be great if we work together on this because I really think I can solve your problem and they’re going to believe you because you met at a meetup or you met at a networking event.