Lead funnel analysis for sport organisations

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hi everyone i'm trying something a little bit experimental today um but before we dig into it first off you know it's it's been a really tough several months both for me personally as well as for the world as you all know right now when i look outside my window it is really uh dark and cloudy skies but really that's just smoke and it really smells smoky outside it kind of feels like the world is about to end but i feel that hopefully we're turning a corner i feel like i say that every month and i hope you all are staying safe most importantly and and doing well to the best that we all can so i think with that it's important to keep going and i want to pick up on some of my past posts i've talked a lot about marketing a lot about tactical marketing and specifically around funnels but i really want to dig into some concrete examples and that's what we're going to do in this video today we're going to go through a couple of concrete examples because i feel like when things are taught at a high level people understand conceptually but who really cares and who really knows so let's give this a whirl i'm i guess on a zoom recording by myself and i'm gonna try to whiteboard on this zoom this is a little bit experimental as i said but we will give this a whirl so first off what what is a funnel just as a quick recap well you know funnel looks kind of like this and it's really representative of how sales happen so down here we have sales once we close people and at the top we have a bunch of like perspectives these could be you know website visitors or if you're trying to sell something in person they could be people coming into your store and just loosely speaking this is the top of the funnel this is the middle of the funnel and this is the bottom of the funnel and the goal as we all know is to get customers so we want to try to get as many people from up here to move down here and buy like that is the goal in most cases now obviously if you're running a consumer app the goal may be slightly different but for most of you out there your goal is probably making money and ultimately that's what you need to do as a business so that is what we are going to focus on today customers who can actually pay you whether they're consumers or or if you're a b2b company company customers all right so let's go through some examples i think the first example that i have today is why don't just talk about hustle fund itself since that's a funnel that i'm most familiar with and spend pretty much every day thinking about so what is the funnel for hustle fund and you may be wondering well a vc doesn't really have a funnel do they like what is your business model and our business model's a little bit weird right we invest in companies and hopefully they exit and make money and that's how we make our money but let's just kind of map out what that funnel looks like so at the top of the funnel we need to have a startups learn about us at hustlefun so uh call it startup applications of sorts and uh well actually no uh let's let's actually remove that that is a middle of final goal i'm already messing up here so first we need to have startups here about us so you know let's just call it website traffic so people who come to the hustle fund landing page you see our video on there you read about us then as an intermediary step we have actually startup applications and that's what i was saying earlier this is actually an intermediary step because you need to find out that we exist first before you even fill out an application and then lastly at the bottom of the funnel is where we make money so somewhere in here we invest and the company does well and exits so this is our funnel for hustle fun and let's just talk through this you know we have basically everybody has top of funnel middle funnel and bottom of funnel and i think the important thing to understand in marketing is it's it's really really important to focus on just one thing at a time as i've mentioned before in past content you can track all kinds of metrics you can track your social media followings you can track your revenue you can track your cac you can track your ltv your sales cycle they're just 101 things you can track and it's very overwhelming and the honest answer is the best marketers actually really make things simple just pick one pick one metric that matters focus on it now and try to move the needle on that one metric that matters do not worry about the other things maybe you have a dashboard to keep your eye on the other things but just focus on one thing at a time and after you move the needle on that one thing then maybe you refocus your energies and focus on a different thing and just that only one thing at that time so for most startups the problem with their funnel is well the problem is in all three sections the the beginning the mill and the end but i think for a lot of people where you can move the needle the most is actually top of funnel because even if you improve the conversions very often people don't have enough top of funnel traffic to really justify spending time down here so let's talk about this well i mean i think for us we also are a startup in some sense and we also focus a lot on top of funnel traffic um at other times we have looked at the middle of the funnel we actually haven't spent very much time in conversion and so we've spent most of our time at top of funnel and middle funnel but almost all of our time in this type of funnel and we'll talk about top of funnel and middle funnel for us at hustle pawn in a second so how can we increase traffic well let's just kind of start rattling off there's twitter we spend a lot of time on twitter we do twitter threads we retweet people especially influential people that brings in more people to find out about us etc we do events we speak at both online events and offline events during non-coveted times um that's another way people can find out about us and end up on our website uh other ways like you know through news tech not just if techcrunch writes about us but if they write about our companies or about a thought piece about changing diversity in the startup ecosystem whatever techcrunch writes about if we can get our name in there great and in fact actually yc does this incredibly well where most pieces are not about yc but they have so many companies that they inevitably get in every single techcrunch piece so news and then you know there are plenty of other channels as well um certainly you know at this point some of you read my blog so there's my blog there's a hustle fund blog um and there's some level of seo we don't take out uh many ads but on occasion we do um to drive people to either our events or other things but we'll talk about that in a second and so you can keep on rattling and the list goes on and on you know maybe they're ads um you know maybe there are partnerships like if we were to do talks with accelerators in fact i do um the rounds and go visit a lot of accelerators and and do talk with companies and accelerators so partnerships is another one so you know there are many ways to get top of funnel traffic and you can do this exercise for your own company as well now let's talk about the middle of the funnel and i said that we have spent some time in the middle of the funnel and what does that really mean well it's it's one thing to send everybody to our website but a lot of people who go to our website are just not really at the right stage and by right stage i mean they are ready to apply and receive funding and then you know continue on well there are a lot of people who may have heard of us but they are just thinking about starting a business or they may not even be there yet but they maybe in five years will start a business so there are people at different points in the funnel and so if we just send people to our website and we don't actually capture um you know their information in any way then it's actually really hard to stay top of mind like somebody who is not yet starting a business but may leave a company in five years to start a business we want to make sure that person is top of mind and so as such the middle of the funnel is the place to do it and this often to many people they call it lead generation i had no idea what this term meant when i started my company which was by the way a marketing company um an advertising network of sorts but lead generation is a good way to do that and what does that actually mean well in most cases it means capturing an email address on some sort of web page it could mean capturing a phone number and maybe you keep up with somebody by texting them so keeping up with somebody by texting or by emailing is a good way to stay top of mind there are other forms of messaging as well but those are probably the two most common and i would say the most effective so lead generation via email and also by text um for us we do lead generation solely by email at least at this point in time well how do we do that there are a couple of ways for this middle zone one is you know some of you have been to our free online events we do a lot of free online events on very tactical things um a tactical topic such as this one but for our hustle fund events our official hustle fund events we have a sign up page and people fill it out with their with their name and their email address and then there are other ways as well we have done in-person events from time to time during non-coven no during non-coveted times and people can sign up for an event right or something like that so events is a good way to do it whether it's online or offline other things hubspot does this incredibly well if you have an e-book or if you have a white paper or something like that maybe you have a landing page and you have a way to sign up hey get this free ebook on how to you know come up with 10 listicles that are great for social media or something like that that's another way that you can generate leads we don't have that with hustle fund but we do a lot of our lead generation through online events and that's our primary method i think frankly speaking i just do a call out from time to time asking people to sign up for either my personal newsletter or the hustle fun personal newsletter or company letter i should say and we do send out a newsletter about tips and tricks on various things as well as about these events as well so that's lead generation so these are the two areas where we have spent the most time top of funnel and middle of funnel all right let's move on now um let's kind of pull this together for hustle fun and then i want to actually dig into examples that may be more relevant to you but it is really important from time to time to connect the dots on both uh you know top of funnel all the way to the bottom of the funnel because for example the leads you are generating let's say in the middle of the funnel you don't know if they're relevant that may be your focus but you do from time to time have to keep your eye on how everything connects together so let's just kind of map this out as i've kind of mentioned here you know there are various ways that we do top funnels so one is just like talking on twitter and we ask people to sign up for things like you know our events whether they're online or offline we will write a blog post about it you know we will shout it across the mountaintops sometimes we will do partnerships asking people to share about our free events and they could be tactical events teaching something or it could be more social events so we have all these sources that drive to landing pages and then we cultivate those leads using email so our email newsletter and and we drive people back to events and then back to the email and back to events and back to the email so that way by the time you are ready to start a company hopefully you will remember us and apply at some point people then get to the next bucket and they apply on our website hustlefund vc and this is why i am so adamant about everybody going to the home page hustlefund.bc and submitting their application there instead of sending it to somebody on our team through email because then things just drop through the cracks but if everything is in one spot just like how you would run a company like you would never have your user sign up with you personally maybe in the beginning you do but eventually you want to streamline everything that is the most efficient way to do it so in fact even if somebody sends me a warm referral i actually ask everybody to submit here and in the rare cases when i forget i have to do it so this is you know this is how you build out a process even if you're a vc firm you still have to build out a process so eventually people remember us and then they apply and then in some cases you know we will fund with dollars and then in some other cases you know maybe we make money that's that's the whole cycle and what you need to analyze here is okay people we are uh let's just take this step people we are investing money in where are they coming from and you got to be able to backtrack into all this do they actually come from events and if they come from events where do they come from do they come from twitter the blog of partnerships like what are the good channels for us and and referrals as well and as it would turn out actually we have uh you know done the analysis on this um oh about half of the people we end up investing in had at least a touch point on twitter which is actually incredibly high now the problem with marketing is you often don't know the order of events like you don't know if somebody saw your tweet and then later they clicked on that link and then converted or the other way around it's oh they found out about you through that link and then they decided to read your tweets and then later they applied right so so sometimes these things you have to do a bit of guesswork but it but the interesting tidbit here is that 50 of people who end up getting funding from us have come to twitter and seen our stuff or interacted with our stuff or whatever so this is why we actually spend a lot of time on twitter we don't know the order of how things happen whether it's all of our tweets that drive this action or the opposite like people are engaged by our tweets but that was an interesting tidbit the other interesting thing about this this process that i would just say is that actually 15 of people who get funding from us come completely cold so meaning they did not come in from a referral or a partnership they did not come in from basically anybody whether it's somebody we know really well who's a vc or a portfolio entrepreneur or even an entrepreneur whose business we didn't back it means there was zero referral like nobody recommended or referred that company they just went through this process you know maybe they came to an event maybe they were on our newsletter but they eventually directly submitted on our application so this is why we spend a lot of time on twitter this is why we spend a lot of time um doing you know direct communications like this because we want to encourage everybody who is interested in potentially looking for funding to apply directly with us you do not need a warm referral and a high percentage of our companies already do you know do not um do not have any referral all right so that's that's just a little bit about us but who really cares about us i the point here is i wanted to illustrate that you need to track everything and understand if your leads are good and where they're coming from and that is why backing into that we spend a lot of time on twitter now if it turned out i think hypothetically that actually a lot of the leads uh were coming not from twitter or coming from our blog or whatever it is then we would be doing things differently we would not be spending this much time on twitter right so that's why you have to understand where then to spend your time on top of funnel and connect the dots to bottom of funnel even if you're one metric that matters is top of funnel you want to make sure that the activity you're spending your time on to move the needle on that is actually important or relevant so that is a bit about um our concrete example with our funnel analysis and i'm just going to erase this here now let's talk about some product companies all right so this is more interesting or relevant to all of you so let's just say that we have a run-of-the-mill um you know b2b sas company and you know a lot of these bb sas companies have a very similar model um you know if we just kind of look at it you know maybe maybe what you have here is you have a bunch of people who come to your website and they come through a variety of channels we'll talk about that in a second and then uh you know maybe people are not ready to sign up right now so you try to maybe convert them to your white paper very common maybe you try to convert them to your online event or something but you try to collect an email sign up and then at some point maybe people sign up which is a warmer lead than just filling out your email and then at some point you know if you have let's say freemium model then then people convert and then from there you have an upsell into more money as well so that that's a very typical b2b sas model so let's kind of dissect this in terms of what the funnel looks like well you know top of funnel is the website so how are we going to get lots of traffic coming in up here and then bottom of the funnel is people actually paying for this and then somewhere in here there are essentially various levels of lead qualification and so there's the let's just call it the event sign up and then you also have like a free user right so you have a couple of different stages of that middle section so let's kind of dig into this well as i mentioned for most people their biggest problem is actually top of funnel not conversions because in the beginning when you have no traffic improving conversions is not really going to help so how are we going to generate more traffic for this you know run the mill b2b sas company well as it turns out in marketing a lot of things are fairly cookie cutter certainly you want to be creative to stand out but with a you know with b2b uh you know the the detail in terms of standing out is in the actual copy or the content but in terms of the mechanics it's very similar to other b2b companies so what can we do to generate top of final well one thing we can do is uh we can we can do outbound we can send a lot of direct emails to people so outbound sales like just cold emails to drive traffic um and we'll talk about what that funnel looks like how that may differ but a second thing we can do here is um you know we can do partnerships it's very common for b2b companies to partner with each other maybe you do a webinar or you cross-promote on each other's email lists or something like that so with your partnerships you can certainly take out ads um to some extent you can work on your seo although that's not going to kick in in the beginning but it could be a good long term play so there are lots of different traffic sources regardless of actually whether you're b2b or or consumer so that's all type of funnel now the the middle stage is all right well how are we going to capture all these people and this is where i think this differs from b to b versus from b to c like with b to c a common thing that you may see in this this middle part of the funnel is i'm going to offer you 10 off like if you're an e-commerce site i'm gonna give you a discount or if you're food delivery i'm gonna give you a discount or or something like that discounts are really popular for b2b in general i would say that works less well and the reason being is there's a bit of a disconnect like the people who really benefit from the company doing well not necessarily the marketers right like if you hired a marketer for your company like okay yeah maybe you you tell them to be frugal and save money but in all honesty the person's not really incentivized to save money or try to get 10 off the b2b marketer in this case is just trying to do his or her job and generate leads and sales so you know the to the extent that you can like um if you if you're selling to a company you gotta understand what is that particular buyers problem and i think you know the the if we're selling this b2b marketing solution like what is a typical buyer's problem well so we're marketing to marketers which is a little confusing but you know they they want to drive more revenue as well they want to drive more traffic as well so what can you do well you can have an event on how to get more sales on how to drive more traffic and you i think the the key here is well how can you differentiate your content from other players in the space who are doing something similar so can you think of an angle that is unique to you it could be in the copy or it could even just be in the approach um so that that's something that i would think about like how do you solve that particular person's problem events are a great way to do it whether it's online or offline another good way to do it is you know people often poo-poo white papers but they actually really do work i like when i was running my b2b marketing company um i thought that white papers were just really stodgy and archaic but actually they they do work and and why is that well people want to know that other people have had success with this so to the extent possible how can you prove that or show that and so that's another thing that you can gauge so that that's what i would think through here i think a lot of people are a bit careless in what they produce whether it's the event or the white paper it's just like oh let's just throw up a white paper and get people to sign up for well it's going to be interesting and it's got to be uh you know something worth signing up for and i think a lot of the language that people use is either too boring or doesn't actually solve a problem or uses too much jargon or things like that and so you know people will sign up for these things but it's it's got to be helpful informative and interesting and that i think is the crux um and so this is the middle of the funnel here and then at the bottom of the funnel is like okay well now that everyone's on your list how can you convert them to sign up and this is the other area where i think a lot of people have problems is like okay i'm just gonna send weekly emails and if i look at a lot of the weekly emails i get like they're just so cluttered with random news and stuff honestly you know some of the best uh weekly emails that i get are either very personal and a couple of uh newsletters to look at or whatnot i'm a bit biased here but you know certainly in our newsletter to the extent that we can we try to show that there's a person so this is not an email just from you know some stodgy company but it is from an actual person so i think that's one thing you can do to make it more personal add the person's picture add the person's personality a bit and language so that's one thing you can do another thing you can do is actually don't even make it a newsletter format at all like one of our portfolio companies called unstack actually does a great job with this the emails you get from them they seem like they are actually just personalized emails to me like plain text um of course there's a link in there every now and then with a call to action but just plain text from the ceo and it seems like he is sending me a personal email even though i'm on a list so that's what i would do with email to try to increase the engagement and keep people cultivated in um you know during this stage of trying to move them from basically middle of funnel to bottom of funnel and i would say here that in addition it's very important to show authority and and people often say the words thought leadership which i feel like is jargon but but really it's can you trust this company and can you trust that this company will give you good advice on how to solve your problem and if the answer is yes people will buy not just for your product but because they like you trust you believe you to some extent they are investing in you as a person not as a company but they are they become customers of you because they like you and want to be supportive of you as a person so that's what i would say about um you know b2b marketing i think to recap on where the pitfalls often are it is uh that people are either not interesting or unique enough so boring um not differentiated in your content like i can learn about this anywhere uh not personalized so it's you're not a person that's what i often see um wrong format it looks to cookie cutter mass email it's not again i think personalized in this case i'm talking about the copy but in this case i'm talking about the email format itself um other things you know it just it just doesn't like seem like it's um credible i guess is the right word like why can you help me with my problem and so that's that's really what this is all about like can you can you get people to buy by selling them on these things about yourself that's really what this is about in moving people from the middle stage to the end of the funnel and so you get all these people at the top of the funnel this is all middle of the funnel stuff you know and getting people down and then how do you drive traffic to the top of the funnel we we rattled off all those sources before the question there is how can you create a repeatable process such that you put a dollar into that process and then eventually you get a dollar and one out so what are the cheap ways you can do it well partnerships like can you do with one partner and then figure out how can i rinse and repeat this if i hired two other people to do this can i really saturate out partnerships as an example or same thing with ads sometimes ads actually do work in generating leads to let's say an ebook or white paper or an event or whatever can i put in a dollar in ads and then eventually those ads lead to a sale which means on and on average across all the the people who clicked um am i making a dollar and one so that that's the thinking behind funnels in a very concrete way let's talk a little bit about the consumer use case uh i don't want to belabor this point but i do think that there are some slight differences between consumers and b2b so i'm just going to clear this actually i'm going to keep this this part so again same thing what are all the top of funnel leads or what are all the you know traffic sources and then how can we generate leads and how can we generate sales so for a lot of consumer businesses let's say that we're selling uh pet hippo food something random or weird like that you know ways to do it like can we do it on twitter can we write a blog um can we do cross-promotional partnerships you know very same sets of activities uh you know can we you know even random things like can we do direct mail to get people to our website and let's measure the cost of all those activities and then how good of a job can we do in generating leads well with consumer we can offer discounts that certainly works well for people who are close to converting um but maybe there are also other ways we can gate some landing pages people may not realize that they need to feed their pet hippo so maybe we need to do an event on pet hippo care and get everyone to this zoom event and and so how can you solve this pet owner's problem like you know maybe he or she has issues with hippo grooming or feeding or logistically how do you feed or things like that can you build a landing page essentially around that content whether it's in webinar form a video form pdf form it doesn't matter but get people here and then from there cultivate their relationship with them over time with you know maybe email or text and that's kind of it that is how you at a high level work people through a funnel and i wanted to use these couple of tactical examples um and as you can see actually in all three cases the tactics are very similar the difference is though in what makes or breaks something is one i guess isn't even a problem or need in the first place like in this case with this you know this hippo food issue i i don't even think that's an issue right how many people even have pet hippos so you so maybe your problem is not actually a problem and you may find that but if it is a problem or you know it's a problem because you have competitors in the space then the question as we went through before is like well how can you stand out on your content how can you differentiate yourself how can you actually be helpful how can you show your personality how can you get people to believe in you that you are credible and want to be a customer because they want to be supportive of you not just in solving the problem but believe you can solve their problem so those are typically the pitfalls that i see once you get traffic to your site i'm going to halt right there and thanks so much for joining me on this you know seemingly terrible friday afternoon but hopefully this helps out a bit in thinking through tactical examples of your marketing funnel