My Marketing and Sales Funnels Are Completely Wrong

Here’s what I’m doing about it.

I’ve just put down my phone with the audiobook I’m listening to (Dotcom Secrets by Russel Brunson) — and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, so instead I’m choosing to write.

Fundamentally — listening to this audiobook is making me realize my marketing and sales funnels are totally wrong.

The way I have set up www.pearllemon.com, and indeed www.deepakshukla.com has paid no mind to helping my visitors along a journey that is contextually relevant and helpful to them.

When you think about the word marketing (i.e engaging in activities in order to raise the profile of something and to direct an audience in a particular direction), with sales (engaging this audience in the potential purchase of your services/products)…

Agency owners (like me) for the most part don’t think about funnels, i.e. taking an individual person through a funnel that results in a sale.

And yet — any business owner (however bad/great) — will have some kind of funnel already in place that takes a prospect right the way through a funnel.

When I think about our funnels at Pearl Lemon it probably goes something like this –

A visitor finds us via Google Search — I could actually identify this via Google Analytics more than likely.

They head over to the ‘Book A Call/Contact Us Submission Form’ — they book a call into the sales diary of our team via the calendar and then turn up to the call.

However — there are actually many many more steps in between when you think about it –

• What about your thank-you page?
• What about the booking confirmation page?
• What about the call reminder page?
• What about any email follow-ups?

These all represent massive opportunities to actually warm up your audience and to offer them things of high value

You obviously don’t know it — but I’ve just spent the last 30 minutes making changes to all of the call booking pages across the Pearl Lemon forms, as well as sending off video instructions to the design team to tighten it all up.

And this is the key to generating more conversions, better returns, and also beginning to more keenly understand your prospect.

The new crop of agency owners (people like me) haven’t really taken the time to think about building proper sales funnels.

When a prospect lands upon your website — what message are you sending them?

How many options for contact are you giving them?

Is that helping or harming conversions?

Where is the prospect at in their buying journey?

Are you presenting the right information at the right time to them or otherwise?

Is this cold, warm or hot traffic?

When they land on your website is there a clear user journey you can take them on?

Or is it chaos and they end up going wherever they like?

Don’t get me wrong — the reason I’m writing this rant is because my website is just as terrible as anybody’s.

These are things that have represented afterthoughts to me. Nothing I have centrally thought about when I was planning the site, or any iteration of it.

I just simply thought — let’s get a page out as quick as possible and let’s try and rank it on Google.

This is such a limiting approach to take and not one that will really lead you to understand what mindset your user is in.

The potential opportunities for improvement with your marketing and sales funnels are endless.

Right now, I’ve asked my team to execute the following things:

• Replace some of our ‘As Seen In Logos’ with the more prominent mentions we have (e.g Forbes, Huffington Post, Inc.)
• Replace our YouTube link with a direct link to the YouTube subscribe button
• Replace the ‘Contact Us’ button above the fold on the Pearl Lemon site so now there are two ‘Book a Call’ buttons
• Add a panel midway down the homepage which will serve as a big ‘Book A Call’ button
• Add some more social proof to the actual ‘Book A Call’ page and to update the text above the fold to reflect all of our services
• Create a dedicated landing page for the Clutch Traffic that comes in
• Update the general ‘thank you for booking page’ so it doesn’t just talk about one of our sales team as it currently does

Myself, I have added:

• A ‘check out my free courses’ CTA on the booking confirmation emails sent to prospects that book into the diary of my sales team
• A ‘read the Pearl Lemon story’ in the meeting reminder 60-minutes before the call
• Updated the ‘thank you for booking pages’ for each of the individual sales teams so they have their unique pages
• Updated my booking confirmation pages as well
• Added SMS reminders and a pre-call reminder to the calendar of one of my sales team (didn’t realise it was missing)

Just looking at the above — I’ve implemented 12 changes/requests since I started writing this post.

And these changes (quick-wins) to my marketing and sales funnel WILL make a difference.

They are objectively better than the current (broken) system I have — and this is only scratching the surface.

I have the other websites we own to work on as well to improve the funnels there as well.

And I guess this is the main takeaway of what to think about as you build out your marketing and sales literature.

Think about the end-to-end experience you take your prospect through.

Where are there holes?

Where are there opportunities to add value to their experience?

Building in content that fits where they are at in their buying cycle will only help you generate more deals and closes in the end.

It is the act of writing this blog that’s helped me generate all of those actions.

Thank god I write every day (atm) lol.

It’s worth mentioning in all of this that it’s worth considering where your prospect is at in the mind space and then preparing material accordingly.

I’ve just had a google and here’s a visual some of you may find helpful:

Ultimately — leaving out the ‘then and now’ part — it’s ultimately worth aligning this as against any funnel you put together — demarcating where your prospect is in their journey — and then preparing material accordingly

A simple example might be that I wouldn’t present a free PDF with the title of ‘How To Choose an SEO Agency’ to someone who’s in the awareness phase.

They’re still getting the grips with SEO perhaps, or understanding that SEO is a thing.

Maybe after understanding SEO is something worthy of note (and you could have literature based around this), they then become interested in learning more — and so the material you prepare adjusts accordingly.

And so on and so on — I’m sure you get the idea by now.

And these are the bones of how to think about whatever funnels you have in place.

It’s crazy to realize I’m just discussing this now after more than 4 years as an agency owner and then realizing how inexperienced I am in this space.

I’ve already moved into the purchase phase of my desire to understand funnels, although I also think it’s worth noting that I believe it’s possible to move to and from the evaluation and purchase phase and even further back up depending on what you read, the experience you have and what you learn from it.

Now it’s worth noting that in this blog I’m NOT talking about the ‘standard funnel’ — i.e running outreach, then pitching, then selling, then upselling and taking a strong focus on outreach activity to close.

The same really even if it’s inbound.

It’s about all of the steps involved, it’s about mapping out the entire funnel/journey — and then looking at how you can optimize that process to generate the most results — and for the most part — if you’re anything like me…

You’ll realize you’re terrible at it.

That’s all for today.

It’s me, Deepak — sharing my aha moments with you all.

Better Entrepreneur

Business, Marketing and Entrepreneurship stretegies

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