What is a sales funnel? You’ve heard of them before, right? But what are they and how do they work? Sales funnels are kind of like magic little money-making machines. They’re designed to make money because they take people through a predefined journey. Unlike websites that have many options and lead to overwhelm, sales funnels have just one distinct pathway forward.
That’s why they’re like magic little money-making machines. They’re designed to convert prospects into customers and browsers into buyers. It takes a prospect from being unaware of who you are, to knowing, liking and even trusting you, in a brief period. And the best part? When done right, sales funnels transform into personal ATM machines, spitting out cash day and night, around the clock.
Sounds magical, right? If you’re struggling in your business, it sounds like more than magic, doesn’t it? It sounds like something you desperately need to get through the tough times. After all, business is hard. Let’s not get that twisted for a moment. But before you get too excited, understand this. The concepts behind sales funnels are simple. But it’s not about the concepts. It’s about the execution.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. So are websites. Websites are not the answer to your revenue problems. Sales funnels are. When executed the right way, these magic little money-making machines can transform your business and your life. And building sales funnels isn’t hard. It’s easy. It doesn’t take any tech skills or specialized knowledge. Just the right software.
When you have the right software complete with premade templates and a drag-and-drop editor, you can build any funnel and make money fast. Remember that money loves speed. So if you’re stuck and struggling, a sales funnel is your answer. It’s your answer to generating leads, making more sales, getting customers to buy more often and getting them to spend more money.
The crazy part? Funnels can make a lot of money. Certain funnels that adhere to the principles of marketing can be explosive money-making machines. After all, we have funnels making over a million per year, over ten million per year, twenty-five million per year, fifty million per year, and up. That’s a lot of cheddar, right?
The question is this. What are the sales funnel secrets that these guys know that you don’t? How can someone go from broke and hopeless to absolutely crushing it and making millions per year? After all, so many in this community have done just that. All you need to do is look because the proof is out there. Do these people have a magic wand? Or is it something else?
It’s not fair to call these sales funnel secrets. I would argue that these are marketing secrets designed to leverage age-old secrets from the world’s best marketers. People like Gary Halbert, David Ogilvy and Russell Brunson. We’re talking about the brightest minds in marketing who understand the basics of human psychology and know how to connect with prospects on a deeper level and get them to take action.
Curiosity is by far the biggest lever of initial action. When you create curiosity, people pause monetarily. It’s just long enough to pique their awareness. If you lay it all out there and they think they have the answer they’ll leave just as fast as they arrived. However, when they’re curious enough to click through that’s when the real magic starts unfolding.
Every traffic piece must drive curiosity to fuel conversions. The prospect must want to know more if you want them to convert from a browser into a prospect. Prospects gladly give you their contact details in exchange for valuable information that could transform their business or their life. But it all starts with curiosity. You must make them curious enough to take the next steps.
Curiosity begins with ads and continues on landing pages. It takes people over the line just enough to take action and move forward. So where does curiosity exist? It can exist in the ad title, the image on the landing page, the title of the landing page, the text, the spoken audio, and so on. It creates the basis for the hook. A good hook must stir curiosity.
Most people start with a product or a service. They spend months, even years, creating, designing and building something they desire to sell. They take this thing to market and start shouting about it from the rooftops. They spend money, tell friends, post on social media, and do everything they can to get the word out.
Eventually, they burn out. Sales falter and are few and far between. They begin questioning their decision to go into business in the first place. If you know this feeling, and have been down this road, you may have started with the “what” and not the “who.” Let me explain. The “who” is greater than the “what” because you must know the individual and the problem they face before anything else.
Why is this so important? Without understanding who you’re trying to help and what problem they’re struggling with, how can you build something effective? You can try to do that but it doesn’t work. However, when you understand who you’re helping and the problem in such detail that you can describe it better than they can, that’s when the real magic happens.
People have their guard up today. They don’t want to be sold. What they do want is to solve a problem that’s been keeping them up at night. It’s a problem they don’t know how to solve or have tried to solve it in the past and failed. This problem is festering and growing in their mind, creating endless fear, doubt and uncertainty for the future.
That’s where you come in. Instead of selling to the prospect, help them solve the problem. When you have the right bait you can catch the right fish. The bait is the thing that solves their problem (aka a lead magnet). A lead magnet is a free offer that you present to a prospect to help solve their problem (or at least part of the problem).
Prospects exchange valuable contact information with you to retrieve your lead magnet. Imagine that your free lead magnet is so valuable that it helps solve part of a major problem they’re experiencing. They now look at you as an authority. And if your free thing gave them so much value, they can only imagine how much value your paid thing delivers.
Stories date back to the dawn of language. They’re part of the fabric of human evolution. Growing up, you’ve heard stories told from people near and dear to your heart. Why do you think that is? Stories carry important lessons and evoke strong emotions. The best stories paint a vivid picture in your mind that stays with you for a long time.
However, most people don’t use stories in business. They talk about facts and features rather than sharing stories with important lessons. If you’re not sharing stories, you’re making a major mistake. Stories build a bridge of trust with prospects. They allow them to know and like you, spurring the sale. That’s because people want to buy from people they know, like and trust.
If you’ve never shared stories before and don’t know how to do it effectively in your business, then read this book. It reveals everything you need to know about sharing stories with prospects through various channels such as through email marketing and your landing pages. Do not skip over this part of the online marketing equation because it’s vital to your success.
Most people get discouraged when their ads don’t convert or they can’t make sales after an initial marketing blast. They run an ad and spend a bit of money. When it fails, they question their existence. Some even swear off paid ads for good, thinking they just don’t work. Those people don’t understand the need for more touchpoints.
In business, one touchpoint will not get you the sale. Most people are resistant to ads, especially today. That’s why you need to increase the number of touchpoints to make the sale. Most sales take at least eight touchpoints. And you can’t do that with ads alone. That’s why savvy marketers build lead-generation funnels and tripwire funnels. It brings prospects into their world.
When a prospect is in your world, you can begin communicating. This increases the number of touchpoints. You can also retarget that person and follow them around the internet (to an extent at least). You can push them into your YouTube videos, social media posts, and so on. The more touchpoints the more profit you’ll make.
The 50/40/10 Rule reveals the exact formula that your sales letters must follow to maximize the chances for success. When it comes to selling, remember that your copy is everything. And without well-written copy that interweaves stories and follows the 50/40/10 Rule selling will feel like an uphill battle. So what is the 50/40/10 Rule and how does it work?
There are always false beliefs standing between you and the prospect. False beliefs develop over time based on experiences throughout life. These create dominos that you must knock down if you want to get the sale. But the point is to go after the biggest domino first if you want to get the sale. That’s the biggest false belief standing in the way of the sale.
Take a step back and think about the biggest domino in your business. What’s holding people back from buying? What must you convince them is a false belief for all other beliefs to fall down? Thinking about this like dominos is helpful because if you can knock the biggest one down, the others will fall with it. Makes sense, right?
People will not always act on their own. Even if you have a great story and a lot of touchpoints. Even if everything else syncs up, you must compel action. For every compelled action inside of your sales funnel, there is an equal reaction. Meaning that by pushing people a little bit with authentic urgency, you can push the sale over the goal line.
Urgency comes down to basic human psychology. Think about it this way. When you see a sale with a countdown timer, how does that make you feel? For most people, it urges them to buy now. That’s especially true if they’ve been shopping around for a while at that store. Sales create urgency because they provide a pending deadline.
Amazon does this all the time. You can see a countdown timer to the end of a sale and it spurs you to take action, right? You can do this with countdown funnels yourself. It’s not complicated and it requires zero technical or coding skills.
Imagine this. You’ve been waiting to join a class that teaches an important money-making skill you need to advance your career. Last year you were waitlisted and couldn’t get in. This year you’ve sworn that you’ll get in no matter what—even if that means staying up throughout the night and refreshing the screen until the class is available for purchase.
This class is meaningful to you because you know it can potentially transform your life. But there are only ever a handful of spots that open up in the class so you have to be quick to the draw. That right there is called scarcity. The more scarce something is the more likely you’ll be to buy it. That’s the meaning behind less is more.
Amazon does this too. You see a message with “only 2 items left in stock” and it compels you to order now. Why? Because of the fear of missing out. We all want what we can’t have, right? And that’s precisely how scarcity works. Think about how you can interweave this into your sales funnels and offers next time around. It’s incredibly powerful but must be used authentically.
Tony Robbins always says that success leaves clues. Meaning that if you want to succeed in some area of your life, find the person (or sales funnel in this case) succeeding and model that success. Don’t copy. Model. There’s a big difference. It means going in and reverse-engineering everything that happens in a sales funnel. How? By buying every single thing in the funnel.
When you buy everything you hit all the upsells and can see precisely what offer is being used where. This is part of the beauty behind sales funnels being magic little money-making machines. It’s because they can squeeze so much money out of a single customer that it makes them incredibly powerful. When you buy everything, you can see every upsell page you hit.
You can use this information to reverse engineer the sales funnel and build your own. Plenty of people have used this approach by modeling the sales funnels of two comma club winners and two comma club x winners. Those are people who’ve made over a million dollars per year in a single sales funnel and over ten million dollars, respectively.
Sales funnels work by taking customers on a predefined journey. They have one distinct pathway forward. And unlike websites, they don’t lead to overwhelm. Instead, they drive increased conversions that help business owners make money and stop struggling.
Depending on who you ask, you’ll get a different answer. But the original sales funnel stages are broken down into four parts – awareness, interest, desire and action. This represents the AIDA model that was originally created by advertising pioneer, E. St. Elmo Lewis.
No. ClickFunnels makes it easy to build sales funnels. You select the premade template from a list of templates. Then, you can use a drag-and-drop editor to place items and build out different pages in your sales funnel with ease. No coding or technical experience is required.
Making money with sales funnels isn’t complicated. But it does require you to follow some key components of online marketing. To understand this better, read this book. It breaks down exactly how to make money with sales funnels.
Yes. You absolutely should use a sales funnel in your business. Why? Because websites are dead. They overwhelm people with too many choices. Sales funnels have one direct path forward. That’s it. This is why they are massive drivers of lead conversions and sales conversions.
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