Create an Effective Sales & Marketing Funnel

Ensuring you have a plan for your sales and marketing funnel is key to seeing results and most importantly not wasting time but improving how you use your time.

Someone recently asked me how I can come up with so much content and teaching articles for my newsletter.

My answer is really simple:

1. I believe in giving my subscribers good content they can learn from. After they registered for something to get on my list, and this indicated to me they wanted to learn. I love helping people learn more about marketing to build their own business.
2. This is one part of my marketing and sales funnel… Content Marketing. Newsletters are content. They need to contain good content for my readers – and not all need to teach – sometimes I share funny stories as seen recently in my Cottage story. I still have a few people emailing me about that one!

So, in order to help you all learn more about ramping up your own sales and marketing funnels, I thought we would start a series of articles to walk you through your own funnel creation.

Let’s start by learning to understand more about the overall Sales and Marketing Funnel.

Every business needs a sales funnel if they want to succeed in their marketing efforts. So many businesses do not create a marketing plan. Instead they do what everyone else is doing or what they feel is easiest or cheapest, without knowing whether or not it actually works. Random Planning and Marketing I call it.

Sales funnels help business owners know what products/ services they have in place, and the path they plan to use to bring in leads and prospects. These are the folks you want to convert into potential customers. Your Sales and Marketing Funnel helps you know where they come from, and what path they’re going to be brought into -the product or program cycle in your business.

What is a Sales Funnel?

Essentially, a sales funnel (or any funnel) provides a way for you to look at your model visually. It will show at a glance what steps you need to take to get clients and customers to purchase your products or services. A sales funnel provides a lot of information about prospects, conversion rates, how long your prospects remain in the funnel, what it takes to get conversions and more.

Most sales funnels look like this one below:

Some funnels just have three main stages: Awareness, Evaluation and Purchase. In today’s online world, more and more have added more steps than in the image I shared. It is primarily because social media, emails and blogs and many other systems, allow your customers to get more involved in their decision making than ever before. They can take their time to get to know you, to learn more and consider if indeed they will buy from you.

No matter how you design your sales funnel, it’s important to put as much detail as possible into each of the different stages. This ensures you don’t miss out on important information that will help you develop content to move a lead to becoming a customer.

Whether you have a few stages or several in your sales funnel, it’s what you plug into each stage that makes the real difference. This is what makes a business truly stand out and convert more prospects to customers.

Why is having a Sales Funnel Important?

Well-crafted sales funnels show how you attract qualified leads. With the right information and content, it helps you move them through the sales process to make a conversion. It’s a good way to visualize what you’re going to do, have done, and what the measured results are when it’s all said and done. Sales funnels help a business determine how they will grab their audience’s attention, overcome objections, improve engagement and make more sales.

A sales funnel is a valuable tool to help you get deeper into not only how to market, but why and when to do certain things when implementing your overall marketing strategy. It is especially helpful when creating content and products that educate and serve your audience.

How to Start the Creation of your Sales Funnel

Creating an effective sales funnel is essential to having a long-term business. You want your business to not just last a long time, but also to prosper. Creating a sales funnel will assist you in reaching that goal better than most other things will. Plus, you can learn a lot about your business as you’re creating it. Start with the basic funnel above, or if you prefer divide everything up among the stages to plan out your actions.

Over the next few weeks, I will take you through the steps in your sales funnel and give you ideas to plan your own sales funnel in order to make your marketing more effective.

A sales funnel is a valuable tool to help you get deeper into not only how to market, but why and when to do certain things when implementing your overall marketing strategy. It is especially helpful when creating content and products or services that help and serve your target market.

The first step is having you complete an exercise that will help you create or even adjust your current funnel to review what is missing.

I do this with a tool I call the ” Money Mountain“. It is a simple spreadsheet that helps you list out all your current offerings from “Free to VIP” as I like to phrase it.

If you are interested in your own copy of "The Money Mountain Tool", please contact me by direct message here on LinkedIn.

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