How to build a sales funnel that converts

We discuss how to create a sales funnel that leads to conversions and helps businesses grow. Understanding your ideal client and the client journey is paramount to successful sales strategies.

• Importance of a well-structured sales funnel 
• Defining your target audience or ideal client 
• Mapping out the client's journey from awareness to decision 
• The AIDA model and its relevance in sales 
• Crafting valuable offers to build trust at each stage 
• Tips for qualifying leads to maximise sales efficiency 

Chapters

• 13:00 The Importance of a Converting Sales Funnel
• 21:34 Essential Steps for Funnel Success
• 39:29 The AIDA Model Explained
• 2:07:04 Understanding Your Target Audience
• 4:07:11 Crafting the Client Journey
• 11:19:56 Building Trust Through Effective Offers

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:12

One of the most important aspects of business and of sales is to build a sales funnel that does convert for you. Now I thought in this podcast I'd go through a few steps, make some suggestions. Some aspects of this go beyond what I would normally talk about because fundamentally, the area that I'm primarily interested in is what you do in face-to-face meetings. So this is a little bit down the funnel and if you think of there's an old adage AIDA, a-i-d-a. Attention, interest, desire and action. A lot of this stuff goes back to the top of the funnel, which is where you've created interest. So these are people who may or may not buy from you. They may or may not buy from you soon, so they could be people who you make contact with but they're not ready to buy. So what you need to do as you work through that funnel is to quickly identify who are the most important people, and obviously they will be the people first of all who are a good fit for what you deliver. And obviously they will be the people first of all who are a good fit for what you deliver. So remember, we're talking about solutions, we're talking about the problems that you're resolving for them. You're getting rid of that thing or those things that are keeping them awake at night and they want to move quickly. So they're really the people we're trying to find. However, as a secondary aspect, it's important to have people in the funnel who you can also support, but they're not ready to move right now. So people that you can revisit down the track and therefore you set up a funnel with prospects who are looking to buy immediately and then over the next, over the current quarter, over the next quarter, etc.

Speaker 1: 2:02

So, without further ado, an explanation, let's dive into it. So the very first thing that I have spoken about before and that's understanding your target audience. So you can think of this as defining your avatar, your ideal client, and remember, your ideal client is the person who has the problem that you are best able to solve for them. So it's not about finding people and kind of bending them to fit. Whatever your solution is, kind of bending them to fit whatever your solution is, whatever the outcome is that you or your product or service provides, but find people who are already looking for that solution, because that will be a much easier sale and you'll probably have a much shorter turnaround time from initial contact to order, and that will make life much easier. So it's really important to understand who your ideal client is.

Speaker 1: 3:02

The next thing to do, once you've done that, is to get clear on what their journey is. So what I mean by that is what are the steps, what are the processes that they go through from first contact with you? So maybe that's through an ad, it might be through a referral, which might put them some steps down the process, but what is the normal process for you? So it could be as an example. Let's look at them seeing an advertisement you've put out. They then make contact and you have a conversation, and that conversation is where you begin to screen out people who are not a good fit.

Speaker 1: 3:41

So this is called qualifying, and a lot of salespeople where they go wrong is that when they're at the qualification stage, they really try to make everybody fit their solution, and that's a huge mistake. Fit their solution, and that's a huge mistake. And the reason it's a huge mistake is that you're now going to spend time valuable time, which time is a limited resource. Whether it's yourself personally or your sales staff, everybody has a limited amount of time. So you really want to be spending your time with the people who are most likely to buy from you. And the big mistake is that a lot of salespeople spend time with people who are unlikely to buy from them or who will never buy from them. So that early qualification stage and in fact you can take that back a step when you're doing advertisements or your first contact, that could also be through email, but you really want to, as much as you, make it clear who your product or solution is for and that's your ideal client. So define them equally, make it clear who it's not for. So you really want, from the start, to be qualifying out the people who won't buy from you. And this is, as I've said, it's where a lot of salespeople go wrong, and the reason they go wrong is that they're worried about excluding people. Some people even feel they can sell to everyone. You might have a large, broad market, but it definitely won't be everybody. So you've got to get very clear about who it is you're selling to.

Speaker 1: 5:19

So what's the client journey? So they've come across you in an ad, maybe. What's the next step? You maybe have a phone call to qualify them, and you want to keep that really short and you want to keep it to the point. So there might be it might be anywhere between, let's say, two to five questions that you ask them about what they need to achieve. And you really want to fashion those questions so that they are very specific and you very quickly identify the people who are not going to buy from you.

Speaker 1: 5:51

So that might be budget, for example. You might, let's say that your solution costs $10,000 just to throw a number in and if they've got a budget of $2,000, then it's unlikely that they're going to buy from you. So you could spend time with them, obviously, and hope that they find a way of getting the money. Or you might offer payment terms or something like that. But obviously, as you go down that path, if it's payment terms, you take on some of the risk. So you've also got to look at ideally, you want business that is either very low risk or no risk, if you can achieve that.

Speaker 1: 6:28

So what are the steps? So we've gone to that initial phone call. If they've got through that, what happens next? Do they get to try the product? Do you do an evaluation, do you do a demonstration, do you do a proposal? So what's the next step? And then what happens after that? So, having identified your ideal client. You then need to identify what that journey is. What are the steps they go through that get them to signing a deal with you, and then maybe there are some steps after they've signed the deal, so you need to map the customer journey. The next thing to do is to really keep them connected, create a compelling offer at each stage. So at the awareness stage, at the very first stage. What are you trying to achieve there? Well, you're building credibility. You're also building trust, so this is a good place to offer something free.

Speaker 1: 7:32

Now, in my own case, I offer a free one hour webinar and I give three things that are real benefits, things that anybody can apply, and, in fact, that I deliberately pick them so that they're three things that excuse me, I know that are areas where salespeople often make a mistake, so I've hit three things that I know are really important to my avatar and, having given that gift, hopefully they've got value from it. So they know that I know what I'm talking about and they also start to. That relationship begins to develop because I'm developing trust. I know what I'm talking about, I can give them value straight away, and that's going to make them much more likely to buy from me. So think about how you're providing value.

Speaker 1: 8:27

A podcast is another one, so other examples would be blogs. I've mentioned a video. It could be a guide. It could be a guide, it could be a free webinar. You might even want to do a paid webinar low cost but once people start to buy from you, they're more inclined to keep investing money. So in many ways, getting that very first sale is one of the most critical things you can do. Even if it's a small sale, it's an important step. So that's at the initial stage, where you're just really going from somebody who doesn't know you at all to starting to build that trust and commitment from them.

Speaker 1: 9:03

The next stage is to go a little bit deeper. So that might be case studies, it might be a free trial, it could be a product demonstration, it could be some sort of a guide that's much more focused on their specific needs. So the more specific these things get, the better. And then at the final stage. So I've really gone through a three-stage process here, but yours might be slightly different, but once you get to the stage where you want them to make a decision, but once you get to the stage where you want them to make a decision, then this could be you're really then looking at ways of getting them to take action.

Speaker 1: 9:40

So this AIDA idea, attention, interest, desire, action, attention and interest are at the awareness stage. The decision, the desire, I should say stage, is where you're at the consideration. So you're starting to build up that desire by letting them use the product or experience it or prove to themselves it's right for them. And then action at the very end. What is going to make them take action today? So that might be limited availability, it might be a limited time offer, it might be a limited discount, something that is likely to get them to take action now.

Speaker 1: 10:22

And the reason why that's important is, if you've done your qualification process properly, then you know that you're a good match. You know that you can deliver what the client is looking for. You can give them the outcome they want to reach. And the converse of that is that if they are still looking, that would imply that they don't have the outcome right now that they're looking for. So the longer that they're in that stage, the longer that they're in that place of looking for a solution but not having one, that's going to be causing them difficulty. In many cases it will come down to money. So it's costing them money to not make a decision Could be other things too. So, going back to our side, if you like, the side of making the sale, we're really giving them an incentive to push them into making the decision, or to help them into making the decision, because the moment they do, that's when they can implement the offer, implement the solution and presumably start seeing a return, start seeing some sort of improvement in their cash flow, even if there's a payback period or whatever it might be.

Speaker 1: 11:31

So understanding each stage of the process, the client's journey, and then offering something appropriate at each stage, is also very important. So from here we can go into things like landing pages. I'm not going to talk about that. What I will say about landing pages, though. So if you've got an offer and you direct people who want to know more to a landing page, the really important thing about a landing page is to keep them and really in that process.

Speaker 1: 12:07

So what I mean by that is that the next step after the landing page, or where they go after the landing page, needs to take them on the next step to the next stage of the journey. So, for example, it could be to book a one-on-one consultation, it could be to arrange a demonstration. Whatever it is in the next step of the journey. That's the purpose of a landing page. So if it's the initial one, it could be something as simple as a questionnaire. If you're not having a phone call initially, you could ask them. Probably the easiest way of doing it is to give them multiple choice questions, and the way you design the questions is that you want to identify. You want people to rule themselves out as much as rule themselves in. So that could be one step. And then, when they finish the questionnaire, that would link them on to the next stage, which might be, if they meet certain requirements, to then have a one-on-one meeting or a one-on-one video meeting, whatever it might be.

Speaker 1: 13:17

So landing pages are there to take people through the journey step by step and ideally with them you need strong headlines, so they need to be headlines that talk about resolving the issue, so they need to talk about the client's problem. And so remember, if you start talking about your product, you're likely to turn them off because people are there, they're on your site, they're on your landing page because they're trying to solve a problem. They don't want your product. So I'm offering sales training. I'm pretty sure all of my clients are not trying to find me because they want to do a sales training course. What they want to do is to first of all get good cash flow going through the business. So they want to understand how to craft an offer, how to close a deal, how to qualify people, all the different aspects. But if you're following what I'm saying, you'll recognize that each of those aspects are steps along the client's experience, the client journey. So what I'm offering yes, the medium I'm using is a course. What I'm offering yes, the medium I'm using is a course.

Speaker 1: 14:33

But what people are interested in is being able to close a sale without feeling really awkward about it, without being pushy, without being sleazy, all these other things that we kind of attribute to salespeople and we've all experienced bad salespeople. But sales is a vital part of the business. So how do you do sales without being that kind of negative person, that almost caricature that we all think of and a lot of people think of automatically when you mentioned salespeople? So I'm teaching people how to close a deal without doing any of that stuff, to actually have an enjoyable experience, both you and the client and that's what people are looking for, or it's a step of what they're looking for. What it will give them, in fact, the emotional side of what it will give them is confidence. It will give them confidence going and talk to a client. It will give them the confidence to know that whatever a client says to them, if they get objections or whatever else it might be, that they can handle them. They actually know how.

Speaker 1: 15:34

I give them techniques to eliminate objections, not have them come up in the first place. There are very, very simple things you can do to stop that coming up. So get very clear about your offer. Get very clear about your offer and at every step of the process what you talk about is what your offer delivers for your client and don't get caught up in the medium of it. So hopefully, if you're looking at my stuff now, you'll find that I don't talk that much about the course itself.

Speaker 1: 16:09

I go into the structure of it so that people know what to expect. Course itself I go into the structure of it so that people know what to expect, but the most important thing is what that course is going to deliver for people. So again, keep it simple. If you've got social proof. That's always good. So anything that you can provide there that help people to build, feel more confident about you, feel safe with you when we're looking to buy something, particularly if it's an area where we don't have much knowledge, we are really looking for a safe pair of hands to not only guide us through the process and make sure that we get the best solution, but also someone that we can rely on so that once we've committed and once we've paid our money, got the product, the service, whatever it is, we know those people will also be watching our back and making sure that we continue to get good value. So these are really important aspects of working on the sales funnel.

Speaker 1: 17:07

Now we could go further. So here we're starting to get an area of speciality that isn't mine. So this is the specifics of landing pages how you structure them, how you use lead magnets. Now, lead magnets, I think, are important, so they could be just free PDFs that people download, could be a webinar, as I've mentioned, whatever it might be, but things like forms as well need to be simple. So, again, just think about your own experience of buying things. Which businesses, which experiences have you had that have been really good, really positive, and you've been happy with them, and which ones have been really frustrating and turned you off a business. So if you keep those in mind, that's also a very useful guide. So I'm going to stop it there, but the things I will say on the sales funnel and, as I've said, this is really important.

Speaker 1: 17:59

I guess the two key aspects are to really identify who your ideal client is and to identify them, obviously, by what they do. So are they a senior person in the business? Are they a business owner? It could be a member of the public, it could, you know, just somebody in the street. But how do you define them? How do you separate them from everybody else? So get very clear about who your avatar is. That might be through age, interests, whatever it might be.

Speaker 1: 18:30

But the most important thing to get clear about is what is the problem that they are trying to solve? What's keeping them awake at night? Because that is what you are delivering to them and, conversely, that's what they are looking for. So the closer you can match that, the better. And then get very clear about their journey. The client's journey is one way of looking at it and at each stage, make sure that you are providing information or support material, or it could be lead magnets that are helping to build that relationship.

Speaker 1: 19:07

So you want to build trust. You want to show that you have the expertise they are looking for to provide a solution that works very well for them. So that is it for this particular podcast. I hope you found that useful and if you haven't experienced my webinar, you'll find a link to it, and, if nothing else, it's one example of how you might be able to offer something to your clients that works very well for them, and obviously they're a podcast, so take a listen to my other podcast. That's it. Bye for now. Talk to you next time.