When you’re running a business, having an effective sales funnel in place can really help you reach your goals especially if they involve turning your audience from mere spectators to raving fans and customers.
This won’t happen by accident and a sales funnel is a very strategic process that is required to take people from point A to point B with your business.
Sales funnels can be tricky for some people and can vary depending on your business and your needs. Some funnels can take minutes for prospects to go through while others can take weeks, months or years. In order to demystify sales funnels and highlight why yours may not be working as well, keep in mind that there is one key thing you could be missing the mark on.
Why Do You Need One In the First Place?
Before we jump into what your sales funnel could be missing, it’s important to identify why you really need one in the first place.
A sales funnel is necessary for any business owner who’s looking to gain more quality customers and clients. It allows you to reel in prospects and provide them with value, build trust, then convert them into paying customers and raving fans of your business who will come back for more products and services.
Having a sales funnel can be great because it can automate your business so you can consistently bring in profit. Here’s an example of an automatic sales funnel:
Blog post w/opt-in at the bottom (promoted on social media automatically) —>
Person signs up for opt-in and is welcomed to your email list —>
Person is invited to attend free webinar —>
Person is presented with upsell mini-product during webinar —>
Person is followed up by larger product offer weeks later after seeing positive results with mini product
However, if your sales funnel is not performing well and bringing in a steady cash flow, it could be missing something crucial, like the focus perhaps.
Know, Like, and Trust Factor
You probably email your list and follow up regularly as apart of your sales funnel. You might even be familiar with the know, like, and trust factor which states that all three of these things need to be established before you can expect someone to become a customer of yours.
When you think about it, people don’t buy things from people or businesses that they don’t know, like, or trust. A few weeks ago, I was watching a webinar about sales funnels and the host compared it a lot to dating.
He brought up a good point that you shouldn’t ask someone on a date, then propose marriage shortly after. It’s important to let create a detailed sales funnel process and give your audience time to work through it so they can develop more familiarity and trust.
Where Focus Come Into Play
That being said, you still may not see such positive results after offering value and grooming your audience for several months. While you may be consistent with your engagement, you need to be consistent with your message and make sure it’s relevant to that person’s needs.
When someone first opts into your email list, they do so for a reason. They want to solve an underlying problem. Too many times, we as business owners get so caught up in the marketing and offering value aspect that we fail to continue to focus in on that person’s problem and how we can help them solve it.
If we start presenting valuable but unrelated content to them, they will lose interest and won’t move forward in the funnel. This isn’t to say that you should try to serve everyone, but it’s crucial that you narrow down your funnel so its focused and consistently helps provide a solution to one or two main issues instead of going off on a tangent.
Summary
Instead of setting up a broad system that could serve anyone (but will in turn serve no one), ask yourself if your sales funnel and opt-ins are set up to satisfy a real need of an ideal client.
Also, ensure your follow up series continues to focus on solving that issue so you cain retain interest and work on the know, like, and trust factor. You’ll start to see more funnel success by narrowing it down this way.
