Sales funnel explained for manufacturing

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in this episode I'm gonna be breaking down exactly what a sales funnel is and more importantly how you can create one that actually makes you money let's get to it hey there my name is Adam Earhart marketing strategist and welcoming in the marketing show alright so today I'm gonna be sharing with you all about sales funnels often called marketing funnels they're pretty much the same thing and what they are is a process or a system or basically often looks like a funnel which I'll explain why in just a minute but it's a process of taking somebody prospect or a potential customer or potential client or whatever and essentially guiding them through that journey from having absolutely no idea who you are or what you do or why they should even care and guiding them through all the way through to the end to where they can become a loyal and a paying customer essentially a lifelong brand ambassador that's gonna serve you and you can serve them for years to come now the reason that sales funnels are so incredibly important and the reason that I'm super excited to get to share this information with you here today is because the customer journey unless it's being planned out and really methodically strategically designed it can be kind of a mess and a lot of businesses they're kind of approaching their marketing and their sales really haphazardly which means that there's a lot of slippage or a lot of lost opportunities and a lot of lost customers which means a lot of lost revenue and I don't want that for you probably the best way to describe this though and to really kind of differentiate classical or traditional marketing from that of a sales funnel is with our trusty board right here so let me map out kind of what classical marketing would look like and what a more sort of custom sales funnel could look like for you and you can see really quickly just how much more effective the sales funnel is gonna be all right so here we've got a couple different examples we're looking at a classic kind of traditional marketing approach at the top and we're looking at a sales funnel down below now when we're gonna be talking about sales funnels today I am kind of talking strictly in regards to online sales funnels or digital sales funnels but keep in mind that a sales funnel again is really just a process of guiding somebody through who has no idea what you do or why they should care and working them all the way through to becoming a loyal and paying customer so this can very much happen offline and in fact if you have a local business or a brick-and-mortar business then your sales funnel probably look something like somebody may be googling your address online or then may be coming into your store maybe getting greeted by a salesperson maybe being given a tour or a demo whatever the case each one of those touch points is a different stage of your funnel so with all that said let's take a look at more of a online approach and basically the classic approach versus the funnel now at the top what we've got here is we've got a visitor and this first little box is going to be representative of your website so your website's homepage where most people are gonna stumble across first so once they get to your homepage they're gonna have the option of say an about page a services page maybe a blog maybe a contact page basically all sorts of different areas that they can start to discover and start to learn about and essentially start to get lost so they're gonna start to bounce around from all sorts of different pages could be different blog articles could be different contact forms or whatever and the problem is is that when they're kind of bouncing around here they might miss your most valuable page that one spot that you really want them to get to the one with all of your testimonials and all of your case studies and the one that really sells your product or your service and gives you the highest likelihood of converting that prospect into a sale basically the way that I like to think about this is that they're gonna be ping-ponging all over the place and you kind of gambling whether they're gonna end up where you need them to in order to convert that prospect into a customer the alternative however is the sales funnel which rather than giving them all sorts of different choices and sort of risking them getting lost or at the very least getting confused we're gonna spell it out crystal-clear for them we're gonna send them to one simple page that's going to answer one simple question or provide one solution to a problem they have will then deliver that on the next page and then from there we will have the option to either take them down the journey a little bit further or provide your service or your product and basically make the offer there the beauty here is that rather than them kind of like ping pong hang around and ending up all sorts of different places and possibly never ending up in your sales page at all well rather we're gonna guide them right through here it simplifies and streamlines the entire process and gives you a significantly greater chance of success all right now in just a minute I'm gonna actually break down a real actionable and tactical thing that you can do to go out there and create a sales funnel of your very own as well as the math behind it that almost certainly guarantees your profitability so you're not just going to be creating a sales funnel you're gonna be creating one that can actually make you money before we get there we first got to cover some of the worst language and most confusing or I guess the least original kind of language ever in the worlds of marketing which describes the stages of the funnel as tofu mo foo and boeuf ooh let's talk about that now basically when it comes to the funnel and the reason that they're referred to as sales funnels or as marketing funnels often has to do with the shape of it and the fact that it pretty much looks like a funnel now the reason this is valuable and the reason it's such a good sort of visual representation to keep in mind is because at the very top of the funnel this is sort of a broad or mass appeal or basically where we're gonna be dumping a ton of different leads and contacts and all sorts of different people into it and again very unoriginal II this top of the funnel is called tofu which stands for top of funnel so again pretty unoriginal but at least it accurately describes what you're doing so not a lot of room for confusion now this describes the type of prospect who has no idea what you do no idea what you're about they've never heard about you before they don't know you like you or trust you because they've never really met you so this is essentially the cold part of our traffic now from there once you've introduced yourself your product your service why they should care well a portion of them are gonna graduate further because they're gonna be interested in what you do and basically how you can help them and they move to mo foo which is middle of funnel again completely unoriginal but very accurate now the middle of the funnel we call this warm traffic and these are people that are starting to know a little bit more about you about your product about your service and they're starting to be a little more interested in what you do and possibly how you can help them from there and even smaller percentage of people are going to want to take the next step and they're going to move to bow foo bottom of funnel so the beauty here is that you should probably never forget these terms again tofu for top of funnel mo foo for middle of funnel and Boh foo for bottom of funnel these prospects down here these are your hot traffic these are people that know you like you and trust you they are probably just about to make that buying decision possibly they've already made it depending on how your funnel is structured but this is basically the hottest amount or the hottest quality of prospect that you're gonna have and of course you're gonna be dealing with a significantly decreased number of people way down here for example if we've got a hundred people at the top depending on sort of your conversion rate percentages of different pages and different steps of the funnel we might convert say thirty percent here and then five percent here so if we've got a hundred people in at the top we might only get out one two three four or five leads or customers or whatever depending on the funnel structure alright so an incredibly point to cover here is the fact that people at tofu and mo foo and boffo they're gonna require very different styles and very different types of marketing because of their traffic temperature basically because of their level of awareness of you and the solutions that you provide so for example when we're talking about tofu traffic we're talking about cold traffic these are people that don't know you they don't like you they don't trust you because they never even really heard of you so for this reason you're gonna want to make sure that your marketing is relatively focused on awareness on basically making sure that you're letting people know that you even exist one of my favorite questions in all of marketing one of the most important questions is does everybody who could buy from you know that you exist the answer's no then you've got some marketing to do and most people do because pretty much not everybody is going to know you exist unless you're a massive global phenomenon so this is why at the cold stage it doesn't make sense to come right out there and pitch them and try to make a sale because the odds of succeeding we're gonna be really low so you've got to kind of warm them up give them a little bit of information make them aware of your business and of your solution all right from there a percentage of them are going to be interested and they're gonna want to move kind of further down the funnel and this is gonna be your warm traffic these are people who are now a little more familiar with your brand and with your business and they're taking into consideration your product and your service and if they might be interested in doing business with you at this point you can start to get a little more specific and start talking more about your solution and more about how you might be able to help them and possibly the problems that they're going through as well because the large number of people here well if if kind of self selected and those that are interested are gonna move down and those that are not interested are simply gonna go away and that's perfect because your business isn't designed to serve pretty much anybody you want to serve the people that are gonna be best for you and that you're gonna be able to provide the best results for all right so once that's all done probably no surprise the last section here is your hot traffic these are people that know you they like you they're really starting to trust you and now you can start to speak a little more aggressively about your product about your service and how you're positioned to help solve the problems that they have this is where it's okay to talk really specifically about how you're uniquely positioned to solve for them you're able to make that pitch you're able to offer them your product or your service in exchange for dollars again you can be more aggressive here because they're really at this stage should be looking for a solution and they're ready to take action alright the next thing that I want to do for you here is break down a simple four-step funnel as well as the math and the metrics behind it that can all but guarantee profitability so I want to break down some sort of hypothetical numbers for you so you can see how that might apply to your business and you can make sure at least give yourself the greatest odds of success right from the very beginning and the very start of designing your own funnel all right so the very first thing that I want to make sure to cover are the steps of this very simple funnel and why this is one of the single most effective funnels that you can run and it works pretty much regardless of your market of your business of your industry of the area that you're operating in of the demographics that you're trying to go for really because it's based on that simple funnel structure of taking somebody who has no idea who you are and then guiding them through the process allowing you to provide more value to educate them a little bit and essentially to help nurture them along so the very first step always begins with traffic now when it comes to digital marketing and online marketing we're typically talking about sources like Facebook ads or Instagram ads or YouTube organic videos or whatever the case but really traffic can mean anything it could be from search engine optimization could be from a referral it could be from a newspaper or a radio ad or a billboard or whatever the case basically anywhere that people are coming from and they first get introduced to your business or to whatever offer you're making constitutes traffic now with this traffic what we want to do is rather than just send them to your homepage where they're gonna get completely lost on your website with way too much to do we want to send them to a very simple opt-in page now an opt-in page often called a landing page or a lander is really just a super simple page on your website or hosted somewhere else that's really making one simple promise or one simple offer maybe you're offering some kind of value like a lead magnet or a cheat sheet or a download or a blueprint or video training series or something like that but what your goal here is to give them something of value in exchange for their name or at the very least their email address the beauty here is that by keeping things really focused on one of their unique problems rather than overwhelming them with all sorts of different information and really again having them get lost well you're really able to make sure that you're streamlining the process and really helping to guide them through to the end solution that your business is ultimately going to be able to provide so we collect that name and email address and then we send them to the next page in the funnel which is the thank-you page plus offer now one of the biggest mistakes I see people make is they just send people to a thank you page they say thanks for your name and email here's your lead magnet and your cheat sheet and your blueprint or whatever it is that was promised and they send them on their way here's why this is a massive mistake you see another part another thing that makes funnels so effective is that they require and they sort of have built in micro commitments every step of the way and if you can get someone to take a series of micro commitments they're gonna be more likely to take that major macro commitment further down the line this is why the thank-you page is one of the greatest opportunities for your business to actually go out there and make the first offer whether it's an introductory offer to your business or whether it's just the whole offer for your business or whatever main product or service you're selling this is a great opportunity to not only give them what you promised you would coz kind of have to do that otherwise it's not really ethical but also say like look here's this thing that you said you wanted but if you want the next step if you're looking for further support if you're looking for X Y & Z or whatever it is that you do this is how you take action and basically sort of continue on the relationship now of course some people are going to take you up on this offer but most are not which is why we have this fourth step which is a combination of retargeting or remarketing and email follow-up now retargeting or remarketing basically the same thing depending on which platform you use everybody's got their own terms but what this is is essentially providing retargeting marketing ads so following them around with those ads that say hey are you still interested in this or hey we also have this for you if you've ever been to Amazon or basically any site ever and you've added something to your shopping cart and then you've seen ads follow you around forever that's retargeting retargeting alone is fantastic but when combined with email marketing it's really a one-two punch because people still read their emails they still check their emails and it's still a phenomenal tool to stay in touch and provide more value and give someone further buying opportunities all right so now what I want to do for you here is break down the math and the metrics of what a profitable funnel actually looks like so you can model this and copy this and really make sure that you've got a funnel that's going to make you money right from the very beginning so with all that said here's some hypothetical numbers to take a look at the very first number that you're going to want to take a look at is what's your cost of traffic basically how much is it costing you to get somebody to take some kind of action in order to visit your page now costs are gonna vary wildly depending on what the traffic source is and what the quality of the traffic is and whether it's coming from organic content where you're not even paying and then attributions a bit tricky and there's all sorts of messy stuff that goes in here but for ease of numbers and for the sake of let's assume using paid ads well there's a great way to do this based on the cost per click which is essentially how much it's gonna cost you to get someone to click to go where basically you want them to go so for starters we're going to assume for easy math a cost per click of $1 again this could be either incredibly low depending on what niche or what market you're in or really high if you're in a very profitable very cheap market so again take it with a grain of salt and just use these for reference points only now let's say that we're gonna do that we're gonna have a about a dollar a click and we're gonna run a thousand clicks alright so now that we've got a dollar per click and we've got a thousand people going the next number that we need to look at is the opt-in rate of 30% again just the hypothetical number here but let's assume that of the thousand people that we send to our opt-in page 30% opt in this gives us 300 people now of these 300 people they're gonna keep moving them further and further down the funnel and now we're gonna present a thank-you page offer to them so basically we've got 30% that made it into the opt-in they're gonna make it over to the Thank You page and we're going to be able to make our first offer to them so let's take a look at that map well assuming that only let's say 5% of the people actually take us up on the offer that's basically going to be 15 people so we've got 15 people that have taken us up on our first offer and again for easy math let's assume that our offer is $100 so with 15 people taking us up on our offer that's going to give us 1500 dollars in revenue just at this stage alone but it gets even better because now we know for a fact that not everybody's gonna take us up in fact only 5% of people are taking us up on this offer well what if we could get another 5 percent over the next 180 days or so to take us up on that offer as well now appreciate for easy math here we're just gonna say 15 people I think it works out to about 14 because we're gonna have 300 minus 15 and 285 times whatever the case we're just gonna say 15 for easy math here again 15 people taking us up on that offer at $100 and we've just netted another $1,500 so the beauty here is that by taking a look at all these numbers by determining what's our original cost per click by looking at our conversion rate on our opt-in page by looking at our conversion rate on our offer on our thank-you page and then by looking at our conversion rates further down the line we're able to spell out a really profitable funnel in fact it looks like here we've spent a total of 1,000 dollars and we're gonna make a total of $3,000 for basically a three to one return which is absolutely fantastic and something you can definitely scale a business on and this is the kind of thing that I really want to encourage you do when you're mapping out your funnels basically take a look at every step that's going to be involved with getting somebody from basically having no idea who you are all the way through to becoming a paying customer and the better that you understand and you're able to sort of interpret and digest the numbers well the better and the more profitable basically the more money you're gonna make from your funnel all right the very next thing you're gonna want to do is check out the video I have linked up right over there on marketing funnels which is going to give you even more actionable strategies that you can use to take your knowledge and your funnel game up to the next level so check that out now and I'll catch you in the next episode put it bluntly you basically don't want to make an offer right at the