Tag: sales funnel

How to Shorten Your Sales Cycle With 9 Simple Steps | Entrepreneur
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
This story originally appeared on Under30CEO.com

A shorter sales cycle not only boosts revenue but also enhances overall business efficiency. And the more you focus on shortening your sales cycle, the better your results will be over time. It’s certainly an investment – but it’s a worthwhile investment to consider.

Identify High-Value Prospects

Identifying high-value prospects requires you to analyze past successful sales and pinpoint common characteristics among your best customers. As you do this, consider demographics, behaviors, pain points, and purchasing habits.

For example, if your data shows that certain industries or company sizes tend to convert more, focus your efforts on prospects fitting these criteria. Or maybe you find that you have a much higher rate of success when you reach out to prospects on a Tuesday or Wednesday, rather than other days of the week. All of this information is valuable and useful for improving your sales cycle from start to finish.

Refine Target Audience Segmentation

Segment your audience based on specific criteria like location, age, interests, or buying behavior. For instance, if you’re a clothing brand, segmenting based on gender or clothing preferences helps tailor your marketing messages effectively. You can then craft different content or offers for each segment to cater to their unique needs and preferences.

Employ Personalized and Targeted Communication

Personalization goes a long way in engaging prospects. Use their names in emails or communications and reference their previous interactions with your brand.

Suppose a prospect has shown interest in a particular product or service. In that case, send them targeted content or offers related to their preferences, showing that you understand and care about their needs. While it may seem more time-intensive on a macro level, you’ll find that taking the time to personalize your approach leads to faster overall sales cycles when you zoom in and analyze deals on a micro level.

Leverage Technology for Automation

Utilize Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to automate routine tasks, such as sending follow-up emails, scheduling appointments, or managing leads. Automation streamlines your workflow, saving time for your sales team to focus on building relationships and closing deals. There are tons of helpful tools on the market that you can use – many of them low-cost or free. Take advantage of these and constantly be on the lookout for ways to smooth over the points of friction that slow you down.

Implement a Well-Defined Sales Strategy

Create a structured sales strategy that outlines each step of the sales process, from lead generation to closing the deal. Establish clear goals and milestones for each stage, ensuring your team has a roadmap to follow.

Another important element of a well-defined sales strategy is regular review processes that allow you to adapt your strategy based on performance and changing market conditions. This level of adaptability ensures you don’t get stuck in ruts that hold you back.

Related: How to Craft a Bulletproof Sales Strategy That Will Survive Any Economy

Provide Educational and Informative Content

Educational content positions your brand as an industry expert and helps prospects make informed decisions. For example, a software company might offer blog posts or webinars explaining how their product solves common industry challenges. You may want to involve a PR agency or specialist here.

A savvy public relations strategy can shorten the sales cycle by moving potential customers further down the sales funnel with content that educates. This content, when it solves industry problems, guides buying decisions and influences change.

Optimize the Buying Experience

Simplify the purchasing process on your website. This might look like doing the following:
- Ensure that your website is user-friendly, with clear navigation and easily accessible product information.
- Streamline the checkout process, offer multiple payment options, and provide clear instructions to reduce any friction in the buying journey.
Foster Trust and Credibility

Build trust by showcasing positive customer experiences. This may involve the use of testimonials, case studies, or reviews to demonstrate the success stories of satisfied customers. Highlight any certifications, awards, or partnerships that validate your brand’s credibility, making prospects more confident in choosing your products or services.

Follow Up Promptly and Consistently

After initial contact, follow up promptly and maintain consistent communication throughout the sales process. Respond to inquiries or requests for information promptly. Consistent follow-ups nurture relationships and keep your brand top-of-mind, encouraging prospects to move closer to making a purchase decision.

As important as consistent follow-up is, versatile follow-up is also helpful. You know your sales process and audience better than anyone, but this might include a combination of phone, SMS, email, and social media.

Always Analyze and Adapt

To be successful over the long-term, remember to regularly monitor key metrics like conversion rates, time spent in each sales stage, and customer feedback. (You can use any number of analytics tools to make this happen.) In doing so, you’ll always be in a position to improve over time.
Kimberly Zhang

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December 13, 2023
How to Craft a Sales Funnel Your Small Business Needs | Entrepreneur

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Can small businesses outperform their larger competition? Recent history would suggest so. Take a look at Tesla. A successful company now, just a few years ago, Tesla was simply a startup with an idea to revolutionize electric cars. Arguably, larger car manufacturers had more resources to do the same, yet Tesla remains the market leader.

Google is another example. Impossible as it may seem now, when Google was founded 25 years ago, popular opinion had it that Yahoo was the leading search engine. Not only has Google taken that title, but the company’s sites have also been ranked as the most popular multi-platform web properties in the United States.

How did these companies do that? Of course, they created products and services consumers wanted to buy. But they also created a highly effective sales funnel to turn audiences into customers. Your business can do the same.

Related: What Is a Sales Funnel? The Guide to Building an Automated Selling Machine.

Understanding the Sales Funnel

The sales funnel effectively describes the path your company’s customers take from being a prospect to becoming a customer.

Picture a funnel: At the top, there is a large number of potential customers. As you move toward the bottom of the funnel, the number of prospects reduces, but the likelihood of those prospects turning into customers increases. At the very bottom of the channel are even fewer people. These are customers who have made repeat purchases or recommended your business to others. They are loyal to your brand and have become advocates.

Like all models, the sales funnel is an excellent tool to help illustrate the customer journey. However, looking at this journey as a linear path can be too simplistic. Many customer journeys involve detours and U-turns. Business owners need to bear that in mind when they build their sales funnels.

Related: How I Built a Sales Funnel That Generates Over $80 Million

Top-of-the-funnel strategies: Awareness and interest

How many potential customers know about your products and services? It may sound obvious, but if no one is aware of your brand, then you won’t sell anything. Creating awareness and raising interest in what you do are the first steps in creating a highly effective sales funnel.

This is the area where marketing and public relations (PR) excel. As a small business, focus on highly cost-effective tactics like search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, and social media marketing.

SEO ensures that people who are looking for products and services like yours find out about you. Content marketing offers excellent opportunities to not only tell potential customers more about your offering but also to address pain points they may be experiencing that are connected to your services.

Social media marketing allows you to build a community of potential customers and brand supporters by talking directly to them. You could also enlist the services of social media influencers.

Middle-of-the-funnel strategies: Consideration and conversion

Ideally, you generate enough interest and trust during the top-of-the-funnel stage to collect email addresses of potential customers and build your email list. Allowing email contact is a definite sign that your prospects are considering a purchase.

This is the time to nurture these prospects and convince them to make a purchase. This middle-of-the-funnel stage is all about educating prospects on the benefits of your services and products as well as removing any doubt from their mind.

Ensuring customers know they’re receiving excellent value is critical at this stage. For example, if email conversions are slow, businesses could consider adding limited trial versions of other products.

Related: How Good Website Content Helps You Earn Potential Customers

Bottom-of-the-funnel strategies: Loyalty and advocacy

The bottom of your funnel is far smaller than the top. Obvious as it may sound, it is important to remember that very few (if any) brands will turn every prospect into a long-term customer.

It is equally important to offer your customers at this stage of the funnel incentives to stay with your brand. Why? Because encouraging them to make repeat purchases will likely be easier than winning new customers. Perhaps even more critically, these customers can become ambassadors for your brand and take care of moving prospects from the top of the funnel to the middle.

Referral programs are a great example of this approach. Consider cloud storage provider Dropbox, When the company was in its startup stage, it offered existing subscribers additional storage if they referred a friend. Additional storage strengthened the bond between provider and customer, while referrals helped grow the customer base.

To this day, Dropbox continues to offer a referral program for every level of subscription. Paid-for subscriptions have a higher earning potential than basic accounts, which creates a dual incentive for existing subscribers to upgrade and refer others.

Airbnb is another example of a successful referral program. The company’s initial referral program had not been particularly successful, but by changing its approach to one that appeared like an Airbnb user was giving a gift to their friends, the company generated outstanding results and grew its user base significantly.

Measuring success

The simplest measure of your sales funnel’s success is to compare the numbers at the top to those at the bottom. However, this approach may be too simplistic for high-value purchases or those requiring a high degree of involvement. Aside from looking at numbers, it is just as important to understand where there are obstacles in your funnel that lead to lost business.

Conclusion

Understanding how your brand’s customers move from being prospects to becoming advocates can make the difference between the brand growing or stagnating. Building a highly effective sales funnel does not require a huge investment. By choosing the most appropriate marketing tactics, small businesses can outperform and outgrow their larger competitors.

Jessica Wong

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November 21, 2023
How to Eliminate the Sales Funnel | Entrepreneur
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
As entrepreneurs, you know how challenging it is to prospect new clients. It is often the most challenging part of running a successful business. Finding the right sales strategy to meet your business needs and objectives can take time and effort.

You’ve probably gone through various iterations of trial and error, from cold calling to email campaigns, experimenting with a mix of strategies rooted in the traditional sales model. While the conventional sales funnel works for many businesses, it’s not the only approach. You can tailor or even eliminate the sales funnel, the route we chose for Rentec Direct, the property management software company I founded. The traditional sales model didn’t make sense for us, so we focused on service instead of sales.

Before I dive in, below is an overview of the typical sales funnel that most companies rely on:
- Awareness: A prospect becomes aware of your business and its products and services, perhaps through an advertisement, Facebook post or Google search.
- Interest: A prospect gathers more information about your company by visiting your website, reading a case study, or signing up for your newsletter.
- Decision: A prospect decides whether or not to buy your product or service. Many companies entice customers by offering a promotion or discount code.
- Action: A prospect buys your product or service. Many companies offer training, education and support at this final stage.
Related: How I Built a Sales Funnel That Generates Over $80 Million

The typical sales process also includes a lot of cold calls and prospecting through third parties. Through trial and error of the above, we discovered what worked for our business. We realized we were losing people at the top of the funnel when we didn’t establish that relationship early on. That’s when we shifted to building customer relationships at the very beginning through our free two-week trial, onboarding and training programs. As soon as a potential customer signs up for our trial, a dedicated account specialist reaches out to walk the prospect through the account setup process, provide step-by-step training, and go over how to access helpful resources on our blog to get the most out of the user experience. This personalized approach might seem like a high overhead to invest in a trial client who has yet to pay for the service, but we’ve found that the additional attention is of significant value to these new users.

By focusing on service instead of sales, we no longer engage in prospecting. Instead, we meet our clients with what they need, proactively scheduling meetings to ensure they get set up correctly on our software. This approach stands out from competitors, allowing clients to ask questions early on and access resources at no additional cost. Consequently, we’ve built trust, resulting in more referrals and long-term relationships, with many clients staying with us for over a decade!

Here is an example of that approach in action. We worked with a California landlord struggling with manual rent collection. She knew she needed to automate but didn’t know where to start. After a friend recommended us, she signed up for a free trial. Our account specialist contacted her when she signed up to set up her account and train her on automating rent payments. This one-on-one assistance helped her increase efficiency in minutes and gave her the confidence to incorporate the software into her daily routine. Soon after, she became a client. This personalized approach laid the foundation for a long-term relationship.

Related: 7 Mistakes to Avoid in Your Sales Funnel

Below is the framework that we use to focus less on sales and more on service, which may be helpful for your business, too:
- Build relationships early: Build trust early with potential new clients through an educational blog.
- Offer a free trial or demo: Give potential customers a chance to experience your product or service before committing to a purchase. Like in the use case above, the customer decreased her time processing rent in minutes, demonstrating the value of our software.
- Provide proactive customer service: Learning a new technology can be overwhelming, and knowing where to turn to get the right help can be tricky. Don’t wait for your customers to come to you with questions or issues. Instead, offer assistance before they ask, showing that you are invested in their success early on.
To summarize, focusing on service instead of sales has been a game-changer for our business. By providing this early support and training, we have built lasting relationships with our clients and have grown our business. It sets both parties up for long-term success and is worth a trial if you want a new sales approach.
Nathan Miller

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November 2, 2023
How to Increase Your Sales by Analyzing Your Marketing Funnel
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Your marketing funnel is the process that your potential customers go through as they move from awareness of your product or service to purchase. The funnel narrows at each stage, from the many people who are aware of your brand to the few who actually buy from you. Understanding your marketing funnel is essential to improving results and driving conversions.

Let’s say you’re trying to increase sales. You need to understand how your marketing funnel works so you can make changes that will lead to more sales. Here are four steps you can take to analyze your marketing funnel and improve results:
1. Define your marketing funnel stages
2. Set conversion goals for each stage
3. Identify bottlenecks in your funnel
4. Test and experiment to improve results
Let’s take a closer look at each of these steps so you can use them in your own business:

Related: How to Generate Interest at Every Stage of the Marketing Funnel

1. Define your marketing funnel stages

The first step is to define the stages of your marketing funnel. This will vary depending on your business, but most funnels include the following stages:
- Awareness: Potential customers become aware of your product or service.
- Interest: Potential customers are interested in your product or service and want to learn more.
- Consideration: Potential customers are considering your product or service and comparing it to other options.
- Purchase: Potential customers buy your product or service.
- Loyalty/advocacy: Customers who buy your product or service become brand advocates and promote your business to others.
There are other variations of this model, but this is a good place to start. Once you’ve defined the stages of your funnel, you can move on to step two.

2. Set conversion goals for each stage

The second step is to set conversion goals for each stage of the marketing funnel. These goals should be realistic and achievable based on historical data and current circumstances. For example, if you know that 2% of people who are aware of your brand eventually buy from you, then you can set a goal of increasing that number to 3%. Once you’ve set conversion goals for each stage, you can move on to step three.

3. Identify bottlenecks in your funnel

The third step is to identify any bottlenecks in your marketing funnel that are preventing potential customers from moving on to the next stage of the funnel. Common bottlenecks include:

Lack of awareness: Potential customers are not aware of your product or service because they haven’t been exposed to your marketing messages.

Solution: Increase advertising, and create more compelling content that speaks directly to your target audience’s needs.

Lack of interest: Potential customers are not interested in your product or service because it doesn’t solve their problems or meet their needs.

Solution: Review your messaging and positioning to make sure you’re speaking directly to the needs of your target audience.

Lack of consideration: Potential customers are not considering your product or service because they don’t know enough about it.

Solution: Create more content that educates potential customers about the features and benefits of your product or service.

Lack of purchase: Potential customers are not buying your product or service because they don’t see the value in it.

Solution: Review pricing, packaging and positioning; consider offering discounts or other incentives; adjust messaging accordingly.

4. Test and experiment to improve results

The final step is to test different messages, offers, channels, etc., to see what leads potential customers down the path to purchase. Try different tactics and track results so you can continue doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t work. Remember, it’s important always to be testing and experimenting so you can continue improving results.

Related: How to Create a Marketing Funnel That Will Increase Sales and Profits

By taking these four steps, you can gain a better understanding of how your marketing funnel works and make changes that will lead to more sales. Of course, by taking these four steps regularly — perhaps quarterly — you can ensure that any changes made throughout the year actually have an impact on ROI come budget time.
Jacinda Santora

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November 24, 2022
I Quit My Job Last Year and Have Made More Than $300,000
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
When I left my job as a consultant in October 2021, I had never made more than $5,000 per month from my business.

Courtesy of Clo Bare Money Coach

In fact, when I made a plan to leave my 9 to 5, I had an honest conversation with myself about whether or not I was okay with the possibility of only making $60,000 per year as a money coach — less than half what I was paid at my consulting gig.

And my answer? Absolutely.

As a 31-year-old millennial who graduated college with around $80,000 of debt for a degree in English and Spanish, I never would’ve dreamed I’d be able to someday consider taking a pay cut to quit my job and go full-time with my business. In fact, prior to 2018, I was still living paycheck to paycheck, knew nothing about investing and assumed I’d work the rest of my life.

You see, I grew up believing I was just “bad with money,” like it was some character flaw you were either born with or without. I’d seen my parents struggle with credit card debt, furloughs during the Great Recession and the unending stress of living paycheck to paycheck while raising five kids. I thought struggle was normal, especially when it came to money.

I started working at the age of nine to have a little spending money and hoped I’d someday do better, but money always burned a hole in my pocket, no matter what I did.

I kept telling myself if I just had more of it, things would be fine.

Spoiler alert: No matter how much money I made, it never fixed the problem of my overspending.

It wasn’t until 2018, after spending most of my 20s without an emergency fund, overspending, not investing and thinking I’d die with student loan debt, that I decided it was time for a change.

Related: Instead of Panicking, Deal With Your Student Loans Like a CFO Would

I started learning about the debt-free community, which led me to the FIRE (financial independence, retire early) community, and eventually I thought, Why not me? Why not at least try?

Well, I’m glad I did.

Not only do I now know the peace of financial flexibility and a retirement savings that I’ve already invested enough in to have millions by the time I retire even if I don’t invest another dollar, but it also led me to something I never expected.

I started writing about budgeting and investing online, which led me to creating content on Instagram and TikTok, which led me to become who I am now: a multi-six-figure business owner.

But this time last year?

I was just excited to even be able to consider quitting my job to pursue my passion of teaching people about money full-time.

So, with a year’s emergency fund saved and a solid $5,000 from one-on-one coaching filtering into my bank account each month, I went off into full-time entrepreneurship land.

Last month was my one year anniversary, and I did not make $60,000.

The gross revenue I made from my first year as a full-time business owner was $305,000 with about $45,000 of expenses.

How did I do it?

By recognizing I had to scale, bringing in an expert and focusing on one funnel and one product.

Recognizing I needed to scale

When I quit my job, almost 100% of my income came from one-on-one coaching. In fact, during my first month of full-time business ownership, I had 60 coaching calls, with more than half of the calls lasting two hours.

By the end of the first week, after 17 coaching sessions, I was already losing my voice, and feeling drained and discouraged.

I knew I couldn’t keep up with that kind of grueling schedule, so I increased my prices in October and again in December, thinking it would lighten the load without really impacting my income.

I was wrong.

By the end of the year, I charged $499 for a two-hour session and $299 for a one-hour session — but no matter how many times I increased my prices, I still sold out within 24 hours of announcing openings in my coaching calendar.

The coaching clients kept rolling in, and I had a hard time saying no to the emails requesting help as soon as possible or clients who needed another follow-up call. So, despite trying to manage my client load, I’d always end up with more than I could handle. Between October and December that year, I ended up coaching nearly 150 people.

I was exhausted and already burned out, just two months into full-time entrepreneurship.

Then, one day while lying on the couch to close my eyes for three minutes before the next coaching call, it hit me: I needed to scale. At the rate I was going, I’d be back in corporate in three months. I was capped, and despite wanting to help more people, my system at the time was unsustainable.

I needed to find a way to move beyond selling my time. But I had no idea where to begin. That’s why I decided to bring in an expert.

Related: 5 Marketing and Branding Tips to Scale Your Online Business

Bringing in an expert

Scaling beyond coaching was new territory for me, and although I’d seen other creators create courses and digital products, I wanted to make sure I was doing what was best for my business.

When I started shopping for a business coach, I was nervous because there are so many problematic business coaches who teach people how to run a business despite never having run a business before. I wanted someone I could trust, and who I knew had worked with people in a similar niche, with similar goals.

After doing my research, I decided to hire a well-regarded coach who had helped the giants in the space scale to multi-six-figure — and even seven-figure — businesses. She’d be the person who would teach me how to launch a course and build a funnel.

By working with my coach, I was able to go full-speed ahead and avoid a bunch of mistakes I would’ve made trying to do it all myself — mistakes that would’ve cost me time and money.

Investing $2,000 into my business resulted in my first product launch bringing in $35,000 — but I would’ve never gotten these kinds of results if I hadn’t hired my coach and implemented a funnel.

Related: 10 Reasons Why You Need a Business Coach

Implementing a funnel

I did not know what a funnel was when I quit my job, but my funnel was the single most important investment I made in my business.

A funnel allowed me to make sales without doing anything — no posting, no DMing people, no going live to push the sale.

Instead, I was able to get people into my funnel and let the funnel do its automated magic.

Here’s how my funnel worked:
1. Instagram or TikTok followers would sign up for a free guide.
2. The free guide would invite them to my free class.
3. The free class would have a small pitch for my course, and all registrants would be put into a sales funnel of emails for the next 2-5 days.
Keep in mind: At each stage, I was providing more value.

My funnel made me sales even while I slept. No posting. No exhausting my followers on all my accounts to get in on the sale. My emails were set up to do it all for me so I could spend my time doing other things to build my business.

The emails people received after signing up for the free class addressed their concerns, answered most frequently asked questions, shared testimonials and painted the appealing picture of what their life would look like after they completed the course.

I’ve come to view my funnel as a relationship builder.

So many content creators create a course or digital product and push it out to their audience without a funnel. They just put it on sale and hope people from their Instagram or TikTok will buy it because it exists. If you build it, they will come, right?

Not exactly.

We have to nurture the relationship, and an Instagram follower is at a much different stage than an email subscriber or someone who has downloaded your free guide and attended your workshop.

We have to provide consistent value that builds trust with our ideal audiences. Going straight for the killshot of “Hey, buy my product” would be like asking for a job without having ever applied or submitted a resume. You need to date your leads and nurture them by providing value.

Focusing on perfecting my funnel has allowed me to zone in on what is and isn’t working, understand my audience better and not get distracted by the shiny-object syndrome that so many new entrepreneurs face.

Related: 5 Steps to Building Your First Online Sales Funnel

Focusing on one product

Focusing on one product also allowed me to scale for several reasons.

First, it allowed me to streamline my messaging to my audience to make sure they were never confused about what I have to offer. I wanted to guarantee people went to my page and saw immediately what I specialized in: lazy investing. Not a little bit of lazy investing with some debt pay off, credit repair and budgeting sprinkled in. I want my audience to come to my page and understand exactly how I can help them.

Think about the last time you were shopping for a service: for example, a person to clean your home.

If you came across someone who had a list of services that included lawn care, car detailing, oil changes, handyman services — and oh yeah, they’d also clean your home for you — you likely wouldn’t choose that person over someone who made it clear that cleaning your home was the only thing their business did.

Focusing on one product also helped me master the product, which only made my confidence in the product stronger and, in turn, allowed me to sell with ease.

When we know without a shadow of a doubt that our products solve the problem we say they do, selling becomes simply highlighting the problem and explaining how our product is the solution.

I don’t think I could’ve made as strong of a course had I not focused on only that course in the last year. Every month I added to it, tweaked, surveyed my members and found new ways to improve it. And the result is more than 500 happy customers who are now out there building wealth on their own.

We all know how overwhelming and stressful it can be to manage a million different things: coaching, courses, digital products, group coaching and the list goes on. The mental space and clarity that come with focusing on one thing is something I’ll continue to prioritize as I build out more products in the future.

Related: 3 Things You Need to Know About Launching a Product Business

So, what’s next?

Now that I’ve worked on The Lazy Investor’s Course and its funnel for a year, you might be wondering if I’m moving on to something new.

But in 2023, I plan to continue to perfect the funnel and my offer. Because even though I’ve made more than $300,000 from my business so far, I know I can still make improvements. So I’ll continue to refine this one offer I have until I’m confident I’ve squeezed everything out of it that I can.

And then — and only then — will I move on to the next thing.

As my friend Allison Baggerly said in her keynote at Fincon this year: simple scales.

And for me?

Simple allows me to maintain a level of sanity and make sure I don’t burn out.
Chloé Daniels

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November 16, 2022