Want to grow your business in 2024?
Then you need to develop a sales strategy framework that can help you achieve your goals.
Here are the seven key factors that you should take into consideration if you want your sales strategy framework to be effective:
#1: Your Target Audience
Why Choosing Your Target Audience is the Most Important Business Decision You’ll Ever Make
Your target audience is likely going to be the main limiting factor when it comes to growing your business.
For example, let’s say that you are a personal trainer and you have to choose between these two target audiences:
- Broke college kids who want to get in shape
- Affluent tech workers who want to get in shape
The former demographic barely has enough money to afford ramen noodles, the latter demographic makes six figures a year.
Who do you think will be easier to close, pay you a higher rate, and stay with you longer?
You’d be surprised by how often entrepreneurs don’t think things through, choose the wrong target audience, and then wonder why growing their business is such an uphill battle!
How to Choose the Right Target Audience for Your Business
Here are the three key criteria that you want to consider when choosing a target audience:
- Do these people have a painful problem that you can help solve?
- Do these people have enough disposable income to pay for a solution?
- Are these people willing to pay for a solution?
You want to go after a demographic that meets all three criteria!
How to Create a Dream Customer Profile
Once you have a general idea of who your target audience is, you want to create a dream customer profile.
Here’s what it should include:
- Their demographic traits such as their gender, age, education level, occupation, job title, etc.
- Their psychographic traits such as their personal goals, professional goals, value system, political affiliation, religious beliefs, etc.
- What online influencers they are already following. We are using the word “influencer” loosely here. You want to know who they look up to!
Getting clear about all that will help you to zero in on your target audience in your marketing campaigns.
How to do Customer Research
Entrepreneurs have a tendency to overestimate how well they understand their dream customers. This can lead to all kinds of mistakes, including expensive ones!
That’s why we recommend doing extensive customer research regardless of how much you think you already know about your target audience.
Consider:
- Subscribing to relevant subreddits
- Registering to relevant online forums
- Watching relevant YouTube channels
- Listening to relevant podcasts
- Following relevant social media influencers
…etc.
Doing all that can help you get a better understanding of what truly matters to your dream customers!
How to Proactively Solicit Customer Feedback
Finally, you want to proactively solicit feedback from both happy and unhappy customers.
In the case of the former, consider reaching out to repeat customers and interviewing them to learn what makes them want to continue doing business with you. You can offer them a freebie or a discount in exchange for their time.
In the case of the latter, consider reaching out to customers who have either requested a refund or canceled their subscription and interviewing them to learn why they did that. You can offer them an Amazon gift card in exchange for their time.
Obviously, you need to be cautious about how you approach unhappy customers because if they are upset with you, it’s not a good idea to aggravate them further.
But showing sincere interest in hearing their perspective, letting them vent, and apologizing if something has gone wrong can help you diffuse the situation and ensure that you part on good terms.
When you are just starting out, you can do all this manually but as your business grows that may become unfeasible.
Eventually, you want to automate the process of gathering customer feedback as much as possible.
#2: Your Products or Services
Generally speaking, the more painful the problem, the easier it will be to sell a solution to it.
Software entrepreneur Marc Lou uses the analogy of vitamins vs. painkillers where he differentiates between nice-to-have products (vitamins) and must-have products (painkillers).
One of the lessons he learned from building nine products was to swap vitamins for painkillers:
That being said, it’s possible to build a business by selling nice-to-have products, but it’s going to be much more challenging.
Entertainment is a good example of this: books, computer games, live performances, etc. are not must-haves, yet people still pay for them.
However, making a living as a writer, indie game developer or performer is notoriously difficult. The “starving artist” archetype exists for a reason!
Of course, if you are really passionate about something that falls in the “nice-to-have” category, then it might make sense to choose that path regardless.
But if your primary goal is to make money, then it’s better to identify the most painful problem that you can solve and then sell that solution as either a product or a service!
#3: Your Pricing
There’s this popular belief that you should charge as much as you can for your products and services. But is that really a good pricing strategy?
Nathan Barry, the founder of ConvertKit, has shared some interesting thoughts on this subject in his article “How the Gap Between Value and Price Affects Goodwill”.
In that article, he explained that the difference between the price the consumer pays and the value they receive is called consumer surplus:
He then argued that consumer surplus is what creates customer goodwill and illustrated this idea by comparing two apps that his company was using at the time: Basecamp and Segment.
Back then, Basecamp was charging a flat fee of just $100/month, creating a massive consumer surplus:
Meanwhile, Segment was providing more and more value but also charging more and more for their software, leaving no consumer surplus at all.
In fact, Barry admitted that as a result of this pricing strategy, he and his team ended up resenting the company, which may be representative of the general sentiment among Segment users at the time.
Finally, he argued that despite being a somewhat vague concept, goodwill actually has tangible benefits such as more referrals, faster organic growth and lower churn.
Barry concluded his article with this advice to business owners:
#4: Your Sales Funnel
A sales funnel is a system designed to convert visitors into leads, leads into customers and customers into repeat customers.
You want to build a sales funnel for your business before you start marketing your products and services because that will allow you to make the most out of the traffic that you generate.
There are several popular sales funnel models out there but we recommend going with the Value Ladder sales funnel. It’s what we used to grow our company from zero to nine figures in annual revenue!
Here’s what the Value Ladder sales funnel looks like:
The main idea here is this:
You should start by pitching a free offer where you give the potential customer a free product or provide a free service in exchange for their email address.
Then, once you have their email address you should use email marketing to pitch them increasingly more expensive and valuable offers.
Ideally, you want to design each offer with consumer surplus in mind, so that the customer would always feel that they are getting a great deal.
This approach will enable you to gradually build trust over time so that you can eventually pitch them your most expensive and most valuable offer!
Example: The “DotCom Secrets” Value Ladder
Here’s one of our sales funnels that follows the Value Ladder structure:
As you can see, we start by inviting potential customers to take a free quiz and then guide them through our sales funnel.
At each stage, more and more people drop off, but eventually, some of them reach the top of our Value Ladder where we invite them to apply to the Inner Circle mastermind which costs between $50,000 and $250,000 per year.
“The Money is in the Backend”
“The money is in the backend” is one of the most important principles that you need to understand if you want to grow your business.
For example, we have some entry-level (Frontend) products like “Perfect Webinar Secrets” that cost just $7.
At that price point, we would have to make between 7,143 and 35,715 sales every year to match the annual revenue that we generate by selling a single Inner Circle mastermind membership. See how the money is in the backend?
But we can’t just ask people to pay us between $50,000 and $250,000 per year right out of the gate. They would think that we are insane!
That’s why we need a Value Ladder sales funnel: so that eventually we would be able to make some serious money at the Backend stage of it.
This approach is what allowed us to become the dominant player in our niche. There are plenty of funnel builder apps out there. Are any of them generating $100M+ in annual revenue?
Not to the best of our knowledge!
What Could You Achieve With the Value Ladder Sales Funnel?
We aren’t saying all this to brag, we are saying it to show you what’s possible.
This is what we have achieved with the Value Ladder sales funnel. Now take a moment to imagine what you could achieve with it…
As our co-founder Russell loves to say, you are just one funnel away from the life that you always wanted!
#5: Your Marketing Strategy
It’s not enough to have a sales funnel.
You also need to figure out how to consistently drive high-quality traffic to it.
High-Quality Traffic vs. Low-Quality Traffic
All traffic can be divided into high-quality traffic and low-quality traffic:
- High-quality traffic is your dream customers
- Low-quality traffic is everyone else
When you are designing marketing campaigns, it’s important to take traffic quality into consideration.
Otherwise, you might end up in a situation where you are able to generate a lot of traffic but then struggle to convert those visitors into leads and paying customers.
Remember that in and of itself traffic is a vanity metric, what really matters is sales, revenue, and profit!
Paid Traffic vs. Organic Traffic
It’s also important to understand the difference between paid and organic traffic:
- Paid traffic is the traffic that you pay for directly, typically by spending money on ads or influencer marketing.
- Organic traffic is the traffic that you pay for indirectly, typically by investing resources into building a traffic-generating asset (e.g. a social media following, a blog, a newsletter, a YouTube channel, a podcast, etc.)
As you can see, you will have to pay for traffic either way, whether with your money or with your time. There’s no such thing as “free traffic”!
Should You Focus on Paid or Organic Traffic?
What you should focus on will largely depend on which resource you have more of, time or money.
We would argue that it’s best to start with paid advertising because that’s the fastest way to get your free offer in front of your dream customers.
But if you can’t afford to pay for ads then you might want to focus on social media marketing instead.
It will probably take you 1-2 years of consistently posting high-quality content to build a social media following that you can then monetize.
In the meantime, you can use cold email to reach out to potential customers directly and then pitch them your products and services. This is probably more appropriate for B2B businesses, though.
If you are in the B2C space and reaching out to potential customers directly doesn’t make sense, then it’s probably best to have a day job that allows you to pay the bills while you grow your business on the side.
#6: Your Business Workflow
Once you start making sales you want to look for ways to streamline your business workflow as much as possible.
How exactly will that look is going to depend on your business model but we recommend documenting every single task that you do and then analyzing that task list to see what can be automated.
Consider setting up a customer relationship management (CRM) system, using integrations and taking advantage of webhooks.
Once you have automated everything that can be automated, consider outsourcing some of the remaining repetitive tasks to freelancers.
Finally, consider hiring part-time or full-time employees, potentially extending job offers to the freelancers who have proven themselves.
#7: Your Sales Targets
This may be a somewhat controversial take but we don’t recommend setting sales targets if you just launched your business. Why?
Because you don’t have any historical data that you could use for sales forecasting There’s no way to know what’s realistic and what’s not.
Moreover, your priority right now should be to find a product-market fit, optimize your sales funnel, and streamline your business workflow.
Setting a sales target at this point would be unwise because you want to keep an open mind so that you could pivot if you need to.
Once the situation stabilizes and you find your footing, then you can begin analyzing your historical data, creating sales forecasts and setting sales targets. You can do all that with our analytics!
Want to Learn How to Build Sales Funnels that CONVERT?
Our co-founder Russell Brunson used sales funnels to take ClickFunnels from zero to $100M+ in annual revenue in less than a decade.
He is now widely considered to be one of the top sales funnel experts in the world. Want to learn from him?
His best-selling book “DotCom Secrets” is the best place to start because it covers everything you need to know in order to build sales funnels that convert.
This book is available on Amazon where it has over 2,500 global ratings and a 4.7-star overall rating.
But you can also get it directly from us for free…
All we ask is that you pay for shipping!
So what are you waiting for? 🧐