The Purpose of a Sales Funnel
A sales funnel with no potential customers in it represents a huge waste of time, effort, and money. The first thing that any sales funnel needs is an entry point, or, better yet, several entry points. You need a way to get your target customers on the hook so you can start convincing them that you have the answer to their problem. The best way to do this is with a carefully designed elevator-pitch that generates interest in your product or services. This elevator-pitch can be a line or two that you put on a graphic and share on social media, it can be something you put in a paid advertisement, something you share when you meet people at business events, or it can be something that you literally share with people you meet in an elevator. Ideally it should generate enough curiosity in your product of service to get people wanting to learn more and then link them to a landing page or online resource where they can sign up to hear more and enter your sales funnel.
Generating Interest in Your Product or Services
Many people struggle with this part, but there are many ways to generate interest. Creating amazing online content is a good way. But we all get a much easier opportunity almost daily when we meet new people. The first question that people often ask you is “what do you do?” You could answer this question in the boring way that most people by simply giving your job title and say something along the lines of, “I’m the director of a digital marketing agency.” The person you meet will politely nod and tell you their job title while the two of you make small talk for a minute or two and then you will go your separate ways.
If you answer this question like this though, you are missing a huge opportunity. If instead you share how you help people solve problems, it will generate curiosity in many of the people you meet. Imagine if, instead of answering with my official job title, I were to say something like, “you know how many businesses, despite having good products or services, struggle to gain traction online and bring in revenue through their digital presence? Well, we help people like that create effective online funnels and sales-driven websites.” Now the person that I just met doesn’t know my job title, or even my company name, but he does know what we do for our clients and it’s likely to generate a lot more curiosity and further discussion than simply providing my job title.
Memorize this elevator pitch and share it with every new person you meet. Print it on your business cards, put it in your email signature, publish it on social media accounts, write it in blog articles, and include links back to your landing page and you will see your business grow.
Generating Interest in You
Another way that we accidentally stumbled across for hooking in new clients online is to simply generate interest in you as a person. Recently, my wife Kristen (who is also one of our content creators) started making Instagram reels about cultural differences that we experienced transitioning from American culture to Indian culture and to our great surprise, she gained over 100,000 followers in three months! Even more surprising though, is that we started gaining web design and digital marketing clients from her Instagram followers even though the content on the account is about cross-cultural experiences and has nothing to do with web design. But the lesson here is simple, we all prefer to do business with people we like, so if people like you as a person, they will be far more likely to buy your product or services even if they encountered you in a non-business context.
Getting Your Name Out
In this first step, the goal is simply to generate interest in your products and services, your company, or you personally. You don’t need to qualify every lead before they enter your marketing and sales funnel; in fact, most people who don’t have the budget to become your customer often know many people who do. At this point you just need to get your name out there as much as you possibly can and worry about qualifying the leads later.
