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In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about what sales funnels really are and why everyone should have one in their online business.
Sales funnels help you find the people that can buy your product and really get value from your online business.
Once you understand exactly what the goal of a sales funnel really is, you’ll be able to come up with a clear strategy to grow your business and better serve your customers.
You will learn
- Exactly what a sales funnel is and the big picture reasons of why you need one.
- What kind of numbers should you be looking for in your sales funnel?
- How this helps you to narrow down your targeting
- We talk through a practical example so you can figure out how apply this to your music.
- The power of “eliminating” people from your database and email list.
- The true goal of the sales funnel.
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show
- The Flip Your Life Community
- Jocelyn’s website Elementary Librarian
- The Flipped Lifestyle Sales Funnel Template – Free PDF
Click Here to Download The Flipped Lifestyle Sales Funnel Template
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Listen to what others are saying about Flipped Lifestyle
You guys mentioned that you wanted to see a picture of our first, digital income. So I’m attaching it to this email. There’s a special appearance of my cash cow in the photo the little guy inspires me and my online dreams when I think about quitting. Here you can see I made $23.95 off of the sale of my first, digital e-book, ‘The exception of Jesus’. Thanks so much for your encouragement. Had you not helped me to get past my perfectionism, I would have never gotten it out there for people to buy. I probably wouldn’t have even launched. I am now working on my second book, ‘Building blocks for a strong, Christian life’ and I think it is something that can really help a lot of people
Ronnie Brown RonnieBrown.net & bivocationalpreacher.com
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Can’t Miss Moments
Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family.
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Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we’re going to talk about creating a sales funnel template to grow your online business.
Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome back to the podcast; today we are going to be talking about sales funnels and you may have heard of the word sales funnel. It’s kind of the latest buzz-words in internet marketing; everyone is talking about the sales funnel. So today we’re gonna be talking about what they are and why every online business should have one. But before we get into all that, we want to share a success story.
SHANE: Our success story today comes from email and it’s written by Ronnie Brown of Ronniebrown.net and Bivocationalpreacher.com and Ronnie writes in and says, “You guys mentioned that you wanted to see a picture of our first, digital income. So I’m attaching it to this email. There’s a special appearance of my cash cow in the photo –” and you guys need to head over to the show notes for Podcast 44 and check that out because it’s hilarious. He’s got like a cow-doll or something that he sits on his desk to remind him that he needs to go fill up the cash cow. It’s like a piggy bank or something. Anyway, “– the little guy inspires me and my online dreams when I think about quitting. Here you can see I made $23.95 off of the sale of my first, digital e-book, ‘The exception of Jesus’. Thanks so much for your encouragement. Had you not helped me to get past my perfectionism, I would have never gotten it out there for people to buy. I probably wouldn’t have even launched. I am now working on my second book, ‘Building blocks for a strong, Christian life’ and I think it is something that can really help a lot of people.” Ronnie has a great point here guys, just launch your book whether it’s good enough – if you’ve got a video that you’re trying to sell, launch it and see what happens. You’ve got to have some kind of baseline and you’ll never know if you’ve got something that people will buy until you put it out there. Don’t sit on a product and let no one ever see it because you’ll never make any money off a product that’s not launched. Ronnie just went at it and we had an episode a couple of weeks ago about perfectionism, he took that to heart, he hit ‘Publish’ and somebody bought his book when he did that and you can probably do the same thing. If you need help creating a digital product, if you don’t have anything at all to sell online, if you need help creating an e-book, getting your website set up or even creating an e-Course full of videos, we have instructional videos for all of that in our Flip Your Life e-Course. You can find that at flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and we can help you started online just like Ronnie.
JOCELYN: And just remember that we do love to hear your stories, we want to see your emails, we want to see a picture of your first sale. If you have done something that we had told you to do, or we have helped you in any way, send us your success story. Just head on over to Flippedlifestyle.com, you can click the ‘Contact’ button and we are actually starting to print those out and we are going to start hanging those on our wall. So, as soon as we get those up, we will take a picture of that and let you guys see that.
SHANE: And the cool thing is, we’ve already had a lot of response to our call for your – you know, it’s kind of like you going to the barber shop and you look and the guy’s got his first dollar bill hanging on the line, you know, his first money he ever made in his barber shop. We’re doing the same thing but we’re hanging your first dollars that you are making online and we’ve already got a bunch of them. We had a wall picked out, above our station where our printer is, and we got a cabinet and I’ve got a standing workstation there, and I think we’ve already probably got enough success stories to fill that wall. So, help us fill up our office to where we don’t have any space and we got to start taking our dry [Inaudible 0:03:43] boards down to hang up more success stories because we would love to hear it from them.
JOCELYN: Yeah, this excites us so much; it just really helps us when we look at those and it helps us to keep doing what we are doing. So let’s get into today’s topic: Sales Funnels. This one is somewhat advanced but we do want to talk about it because it is very important and it will make your online business better if you can get it going from the beginning. This is something that we wish we would have done. We’re just now really getting into this full force; so we want to go ahead and let you know about it and just get it on your radar screen so that you can hopefully use it going forward. As I said, we have been doing a lot of research on sales funnels lately and we believe that it can really take your business to another level with just a little bit of extra effort.
SHANE: I think the reason that sales funnels seems like such an advanced topic, and seems so confusing, and people really don’t understand how to put them together is, a lot of times people on podcasts or experts, they just talk about sales funnels but they never tell how to do them. They never put one together; they never create a sales funnel template that you can use in your online business when you start out. So, that is our goal with this podcast. We want to guide you through what a sales funnel is and show you, piece by piece, what it looks like and then create a sales funnel template that you can apply not only to your business, but even to your auto-responder where when people sign up for your email list, they get four or five emails. It’s an actual, organized, process that’s designed to take them through what you want them to know about your business, show them the most important things, and at the end, give them something to buy because that’s why we are all in this. We want people to buy our information products. So take notes on this, listen through it once, this is going to be a very dense episode of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. But when you get it done, you’re going to have it on paper. We’re going to have some resources for you in the show notes so you can have a sales funnel template for your business. All right, part one of this episode, let’s define exactly what a sales funnel is. A sales funnel is called a sales funnel because it’s an illustration of what it looks like to get your message to a huge audience, and take it down and identify all the people that would actually buy your product and give you money. If you start with a hundred people, you know, all one hundred people are not going to buy your product right away. There’s a big audience at the top that’s wide and broad, but as you narrow it down, you’re going to find those, maybe ten people in that hundred, that would buy your product because it solves their problem. The sales funnel analogy comes from a funnel like you would use to put oil in your car. It’s big, and broad, and open, and wide like a bowl at the top but down at the very bottom that goes actually in where – I not – I hate– I’m not good at cars. I’m not like –
JOCELYN: How did we get into this car example?
SHANE: I don’t need to be talking about cars because I know how they turn on, I can put them in ‘Drive’, that’s about it. But basically, the sales funnel at the very bottom, is going to turn into a very small straw and that’s where you want to focus on and get people to because that’s where people are going to spend your money. So, a sales funnel is a process for finding customers in a large group of people that we call an audience. They say online, ‘You really only need a thousand true fans to become a millionaire’ and that is so true. Jocelyn and I have seen this over and over again, you know – like you take my coaching site, I didn’t need – you know, there’s 250,000 football coaches in America at all levels. I don’t need all 250,000 people to want to run my defense. I need a couple of thousand people to buy my playbooks that I release every year or maybe a thousand people. If a thousand people, you know, give you a hundred dollars every couple of months, that’s a lot of money. Same thing with librarians; we don’t need every librarian in the country to buy Jocelyn’s lesson plans. We just want to find those elementary librarians that solves their problem and they are willing to pay. Or, if we can find a thousand people to give us 400 dollars, that’s 400,000 dollars. So a sales funnel helps you identify those thousand true fans. It helps you get rid – or not get rid of, it helps you find the people that really, really have that pain point that your product reaches and it identifies the people that your information will help.
JOCELYN: And there may be a lot of people out there thinking, ‘Well, don’t I want a larger audience?’ and the answer is really no.
SHANE: Yeah, you don’t.
JOCELYN: You want to really niche that down and find the people that you really speak to and that’s going to be your actual customers. So this sales funnel is going to be able to help you to be able to get there. So our next question is, ‘Why should I use a sales funnel?’ and the answer is, because this whole online business thing is a numbers game. If your niche only had 1,000 people, odds are not really great that you’re gonna have a lot of customers because that’s gonna be the top of your funnel and only a handful of those people are going to make it to the bottom. Shane laughs at me because I came up with this crazy example –
SHANE: This is big-time folks; I’m telling you, when Jocelyn told me this, I was like, what are you talking about? I’m not sure but she made total sense when she explained it but then, you know, how everybody uses an example like, ‘Let’s say you do fly-fishing’ or ‘Let’s say that you’re a tennis player and you’re selling –’ whatever; wait till you hear this example of an online business. I’m just telling you. You only hear this on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, I promise you.
JOCELYN: Right. So, you know, as I was saying, you don’t want choose something that’s so narrow that you are not going to have enough customers. So, instead of choosing botanists who play racquetball in Thailand –
SHANE: Boom! What are you talking about?
JOCELYN: That’s right. You might start marketing just to botanists who play racquetball. So you don’t want to narrow it down so much at the very beginning.
SHANE: You could even start at botanists at the top, till you take all the botanists on the planet, however many there are but then as you move down the sales funnel, you find the ones who play racquetball. It kind of gets narrow there.
JOCELYN: Right. So you do need to narrow down your niche but it’s going to get more refined as you move down through your funnel and your potential customers tell you more about what they are looking for.
SHANE: Botanists who play racquetball. I’m just saying; that’s a great example of an online business. Somebody out there who is a botanist and plays racquetball, you need to start racquetballforbotanists.com or something like that. I’m just telling you.
JOCELYN: That’s where it’s at.
SHANE: Somebody needs to get that domain name. And the point we are really making here is this: your market will always have a lot more people in it than are willing to give you money and that’s okay. The botanists, however many botanists there are on the planet – if there’s any botanist listening to this, we are not trying to insult you, it’s very – it’s an awesome profession I’m sure. But if you are a botanist, you may not play racquetball, but if I am a botanist who enjoys racquetball and I want to create, I don’t know, botany-friendly racquets that don’t hurt plants or something like that, then I’m going to try to identify all the people who are botanists and play racquetball. Sales funnels are designed to help you look at your market and find the people who want to buy your product. So, it’s really important that you start thinking about this from the beginning. Sales funnel can be extremely complicated, very complex; some of the ones that we are putting together right now are layer, after layer, after layer of follow-ups and things like that. You don’t need to mess with that right now but you do need to say, I’ve got 10,000 people who like this and I need to figure out 1,000 people who would get on my email list and then I need to find the 100 people that would buy my product every month or something like that. So that’s what we are going to talk about, that’s what it’s for; it’s to find those people.
JOCELYN: And it really does help you to start out broad and narrow people down along the way. That’s really what we want to do and I think that that’s where a lot of people make mistakes in online business is that they never do the narrowing down. They try to keep everything so broad so that you’ll have a bigger customer base but –
SHANE: Then you don’t sell anything.
JOCELYN: That’s really not what we want.
SHANE: Those people don’t want to buy your product anyways, so why talk to them? It doesn’t make sense.
JOCELYN: We want you to narrow it down to the group of people who are your most likely customers. So, that is what we are taking about today. Don’t be overwhelmed by this terminology and this idea. It is a little bit overwhelming but sales funnels are very basically just communication forms that you’re already using. It’s just a more sophisticated way of making everything work together to get you the end result that you want, and that’s customers who are going to pay you for solving a problem for them.
SHANE: And one more example of this is like how – I can take how I target football coaches; you know, if I were to go in and look at the targeting in an Ad set or something in my sales funnel and I said, ‘I want to find all the football coaches’, okay or, ‘I want to find all the football coaches who are in high school and run my defense.’ I would never start with ‘football’ as a targeting word because there’s a million people out there that like football. Millions of people. That’s a huge, broad area. But I can find all the people who are football coaches and once I find them at the top of my funnel, I can bring it down and say, okay, now which ones are in high school? The funnel gets smaller. Which ones are only defense coaches? It gets smaller. Which ones are searching for my defense and want to learn more about my defense? That’s the very bottom. That’s the spigot that’s gonna pour through and those people are going to buy what we do. We got a quick disclaimer here too before we really get into the sales funnel stuff, one size does not fit all. You may hear other people explain this differently; there’s different levels – some people think you start at a different place in your sales funnel and you finish the middle parts of the sales funnel; might be a little odd compared to what you have heard in other podcasts but this is just a starting point. This is just a general overview of what we feel, is a very basic and good sales funnel that anyone can take as a template. You can add things, you can take away, you’re gonna have to adjust this to your niche. You can just apply this and see if it works and then add and take things away as you discover your data and you figure out what your audience wants. But this is not a one-size-fits-all thing. If anybody ever tries to sell you a product and says, ‘the way to make a sales funnel and if you don’t do this you’re wrong’, they’re wrong. They are just trying to sell you that. This is what we think goes into a nice, basic sales funnel and you are going to have to adjust this a little bit to your niche. So before we get into that, I just want to say that make it your own, don’t just take our word for it. Take what we do and mimic it but make it relatable to your niche. All right, so the example that we are going to use for this is, we are going to be a band and we are a Christian rock band and our goal is to sell a digital product. We want to sell our new album with ten, new songs. So we want people to download this album. We’re going to use the sales funnel to find the people that would love to download our specific album, all ten songs together for 15 bucks. So that’s the example we are going to use for this sales funnel to show you kind of how it works. All right, number one: at the very top of the sales funnel, where it’s very broad, very wide, very open, we want people to enter that funnel and start moving down it. That’s our target market. That’s the whole market together. We’ve niched a little bit but we’ve not totally niched down to exactly what we were doing and this is where we introduce ourselves. This is where we show people, hey, we are someone that you might be interested in because you like this. So, if we’re a Christian rock band, the people we are going to target are people who like Christian rock music. So we’re gonna look at everybody, we might go into Facebook, we might write this down on paper and say, all right we need people that also like this band, this band, this band and this band or we need people that just enjoy listening to Christian music in general and then we need to figure out who the people who like Christian rock – we eliminate gospel, we eliminate other things like that and we really target all the people that like Christian rock music. Now, so that might be, you know, a couple of million people or whatever. Our goal is to get something of us in front of them, whether it’s one song on the radio, or on YouTube, or maybe we can get them to – you know, give it away for free and we introduce ourselves to the people we already know kind of like our genre. They may all not like us but that doesn’t matter. So, let’s say we have a few thousand people and we put our song out there for free or something, we introduce ourselves at the top of the funnel and all those people are moving around outside of our funnel. They are not in our funnel right now but, a couple of thousand of those people may hear our song and say, ‘Hey, I like this. I like this song.’ They may like us on Facebook, they may give us an email or something like that and they are going to go into our funnel. So we’ve narrowed that huge, broad base down now to a few hundred thousand people or whatever that like Christian rock music and we’ve identified, you know, maybe 10,000 that dug our song, dug what we were doing, they liked the introduction that we gave them and now they move into the largest part of our funnel at the top. So now they have actually entered into our sphere, they are a part of our general audience.
JOCELYN: All right, so after the people are in our audience, maybe they’ve liked or followed our YouTube channel, they’ve liked us on Facebook –
SHANE: Or even just listened to the song basically –
JOCELYN: Yeah, they are aware of us in some way. Next what’s going to happen is, a percentage of that audience is going to become your lead and you’re going to do that by offering them some type of a lead magnet. So maybe, if you are rock band which – that will be kind of a scary rock band, I’m not sure that would work out.
SHANE: Terrible rock band.
JOCELYN: But let’s just pretend; okay so for a rock band, maybe we offer them a free song, maybe we offer them an exclusive video, something like that in exchange for their email address. So, once they give us their email address, they move a little bit further down the funnel. So a percentage of those leads, these are people who have joined our email list, they will respond to communication. So in other words, they will engage with us somehow. Maybe we’ll send them an email and say, ‘Do you prefer this type of music or this type of music?’ And they’ll click on something.
SHANE: And they’ll click a link, yeah.
JOCELYN: So this is a way that you can learn more about your audience. This helps you to segment them so I know that if you click on link A, that you like this, or if you click on link B that you like this or there’s other things that you can know from that too. If the people don’t open the email at all, then maybe they are not all that interested in what you have to offer.
SHANE: They didn’t like your song that they downloaded for free or something like that.
JOCELYN: Or maybe you are going to their spam folder so that’s something else that you can investigate. But, if they do open it and they don’t click anything, you know that tells you something too that maybe they just didn’t like the type of email that you sent or whatever. So this helps you to learn more about your audience. Once they start clicking things, then you can get them on, you know, one list or the other. That helps you to know what kind of offers to give them in the future. So a percentage of those people are going to respond to an offer. So maybe a few emails later, you’re going to give them an offer and maybe it’s to download your album. So this gives them a chance to become your customer. So, this further segments your list; you’ve got customers and you’ve got people who are not yet customers and this helps them to keep going down through that funnel and you’re getting closer and closer to finding your ideal customers.
SHANE: Who’s gonna buy everything that you do basically. We went through that pretty fast. Let me go back over that real quick; okay, so basically at the top of your – outside of your funnel, imagine a funnel like you put oil in your engine with, okay, and so we’re outside, we are above the funnel floating above it. In our example, that’s everyone who likes Christian rock music. Outside of the funnel, we introduce ourselves to all the people who might like our genre or niche. So we might – like we said, we’re gonna put our song out on the airwaves, we are going to do something to where people hear about us. Once they engage with us and they are introduced to us, they are going to either take an action or they are not. The action will be, ‘Hey, we will give you a free song, another free song that you didn’t get to listen to, if you’ll just give us your email.’ As soon as they give you the email, then they’re gonna go into your funnel and they are gonna become a lead. That’s someone who liked the first song enough, they liked the blog post that you posted the song on whatever, that they gave you an email to get the second song. They have entered your funnel. Then, you’re going to send those people emails, you’re gonna talk about your music, you’re gonna say, ‘Hey, we’ve got some concert dates coming up’; ‘Hey, we’ve got a couple of other songs we like for you to listen to –’ or whatever. So some of those leads that came from the audience will now engage with you and that’s a smaller percentage that gave you the email. Those engagement people move down the funnel, they are closer to becoming paying customers. Once they have engaged with you, they are now really good prospects for selling something to. So you’ll offer a pitch. You might say, ‘Here’s my third song. Get it now for a dollar on iTunes.’ Very small pitch, very easy thing; some of the people that engaged will buy that dollar song, some people won’t. But those people who do buy are now hotter leads. They move down the funnel and then you can make a bigger pitch like ‘All right, now download our whole album for 15 bucks.’ Some of those people that paid a dollar will pay the fifteen dollars. So now, like Jocelyn said, you’ve moved all of these people from the huge audience that wasn’t even in your funnel, you’ve captured a portion of those and you kept moving them through to see who was more interested and then towards the bottom of the funnel, the most interested people will start giving you money.
JOCELYN: I think that a lot of people get discouraged at this point because they think, ‘Oh, I sent an email out and only a handful of people bought it.’ That’s what’s supposed to happen.
SHANE: Right, that’s a good point.
JOCELYN: Don’t get discouraged about that. Everybody in your list is not going to buy. Everybody in your audience is not going to join your list and that’s okay. That’s the way it is supposed to happen. This is something that’s taken us a while to learn as well but that’s just part of it. But the part that we want to emphasize is that you know, once you make an offer to your audience, it’s not over. You still have your audience there, they’re still in your funnel, maybe you didn’t present them the proper offer, maybe they needed more time to think about it, maybe they needed a different offer. So that’s what we want to enter your mind, is to get you thinking about these things and how you can reach the rest of your audience who maybe didn’t take your offer the first time.
SHANE: Yeah, somebody might just get stuck at the engagement level; maybe they liked your song they heard, they entered your funnel by giving you their email to download the second song but then maybe that third thing that said, ‘Hey we’ve got five concert dates coming up, check them out.’ Maybe they don’t go to concerts. So maybe that person just needed another message. You can go back and catch those people later; the goal is to just find all those people on the first wave and then you can go back and reach the other ones again. So you’re not necessarily losing people. A total side note, I’m gonna get off on a tangent here too is, this is kinda related to ‘unsubscribes’, right Jocelyn? You’re going to get people into your funnel, they’re going to get in and they are going to be about three emails in or something or maybe they poked around your site and they liked the first song, maybe they liked the second one, but they start looking at other stuff you are doing and they’re like, ‘Oh man, I got into this but it wasn’t exactly what I thought it was.’ They are going to unsubscribe, they’re going to leave; that’s fine. That’s just less people that you have to talk to. That’s no problem. So, don’t get depressed when people don’t click your links. Don’t get depressed when people don’t engage and don’t get depressed when people unsubscribe because when they unsubscribe – you pay for emails on your list so that’s less money you got to pay out. Don’t worry about that. Don’t get depressed about it. All that is, is people communicating with you and saying, ‘Hey, what you’re doing is great but it just wasn’t for me. It wasn’t my thing.’ So they are going to leave you.
JOCELYN: Or they are not your ideal customer.
SHANE: That’s right. You don’t want to talk to them anyway because they are not going to buy anything.
JOCELYN: And that’s fine. There’s going to be people who just don’t want to hear your messaging for whatever reason and that’s fine, don’t take it personally.
SHANE: Right. So basically we’ve got the audience, we get them interested, they give us an email, now they’re in our sales funnel, they start engaging with us, they may buy a small product and then they may buy a big product. Now, at the very bottom, all those people who followed all the way through and bought that digital product that you created, in this case, for example, it’s an album, or a Christian rock album, they’ve got that funnel. They are now in a place at the bottom. If you ever look at a funnel, it’s completely straight on the sides. On the right and left, there’s no more – like bend or bevel or whatever you call it where they are kind of funneling and getting smaller. They are in that straight part where the actual oil is going into the engine. And that oil or that fuel or whatever it is that’s going into the engine of your business is where you are going to make your money because once you find the people that are really into your brand and they love what you are doing, you can now keep creating new products, and you’re going to find a percentage of those people will buy almost every single thing you do. Once you find those thousand true fans with your sales funnel, now your business is going to start humming and running. Jocelyn’s fans are extremely loyal to her lesson plans. She made lesson plans the first year and then when she came out, she made a second set of lesson plans and all it was, was the same thing but variety. So each day had a different lesson plan. Almost every single person that bought the first year bought that. I released a playbook and an installation manual for my defense and I improved it the next year. All I did was record some videos that were basically going through the chapters of me talking about what I was teaching a little bit. So I added a layer to it. Almost every person that bought my original installation guide and playbook bought those videos and got into that system. So once you get down to the bottom of the funnel, the power is, all those people that don’t care, they’re gone, they said, ‘I don’t like this, it’s not for me, I’m going to go find something else’ and you’ve got this true, customer-base that you can actually build a business on. You can offer more albums, you can give them concert – those are the people who will go to your concerts and do things like that and make more money and all of that. So basically, the goal is to take the audience and get them to that point where you find the people that are willing to buy what you’re selling and keep selling them stuff over and over, keep solving their problems and keep helping them.
JOCELYN: Once you reach a point where you have those super-fans, they can now become your advocates. So this is at the very bottom of your funnel, these people are buying from you, they are engaged from you, they are interested in what you have to offer and they love your stuff. And this is a perfect opportunity to get them involved in, maybe, affiliate opportunities. So, you could have them share your content for a percentage, a lot of people do this; you could do contests for them to share your content, maybe if in our rock band, example, you get a free song for sharing with your friends, you get an exclusive video for sharing this with somebody, maybe if they sell so many, they get a front-row concert ticket. You know, there’s a lot of different ways to incentivize people to share it with the perfect person that may be interested in joining your audience.
SHANE: And if you look at the funnel example, there’s kind of an analogy here; the bottom of the funnel is open. People go into the funnel, they come out of the funnel. You got to follow up with these people, these advocates, these super-fans, these ideal customers to keep selling them things in the future. But you know, people can get out of the funnel but they’re going to go back to that audience at the top and now they are going to start filtering it for you. They are going to go find their five friends that love the exact same music as them. All those people outside of the funnel that had never heard that initial introduction, and they are going to grab them and drag them kicking and screaming into your funnel and those people, those new people are already farther along because they are more identified by your super-fans to pull into that funnel. We had this happen with Flipped Lifestyle all the time. People will email us and say, ‘Hey, my friend told me about you guys, they were in Flip Your Life. I want to sign up.’ Or, we just had a client who basically did a consulting call with us and then joined Flip Your Life and he went and got his cousin. His cousin had never heard our podcast, never done anything but he was kind of dabbling in online business and this person that was in Flip Your Life told him, “Don’t even listen to anything else. Just buy this and get in here with me.” And he bought Flip Your Life and got into our funnel. So he skipped all that other stuff, that engagement, and he just jumped straight in. Those advocates, those super-fans at the bottom of your funnel are going to go out and find new people.
JOCELYN: And some of the favorite emails that we get are the ones that say, ‘My friend told me to listen to your guys and I love your podcast and love what you do.’ Those are some of our favorite emails. So, if you’re out there listening and you’ve never communicated with us, we’d love to hear from you and just hear how you found us and what you are doing now and, yeah, it’s just exciting.
SHANE: The sales funnel is cool because once you get it in place and if you do this early – I wish we had done this in the first six months of our business, had thought about this like ‘How am I going to find the ideal customers?’ not ‘How am I going to find a million people out there that like what I do?’ don’t do that. Find the thousand people that love what you do and pay for what you do. I wish we had put that in place because once the sales funnel starts happening, it gets easier and easier and the sales funnel starts moving faster and faster. It’s almost like it’s really wide and really narrow at the bottom. Really wide at the top and really narrow at the bottom when you start out but as you do this, as you keep improving your sales funnel, it gets more – the top gets a little bit smaller, the bottom gets a little bit wider. The top gets a little bit smaller, the bottom gets a little bit wider and all of a sudden, that funnel is not so hard now to get those – first it’s just a drip of people coming out the bottom because it’s really little at the bottom of your sales funnel but as you get better, the funnel gets better. It gets open at the bottom, less at the top, the right people are coming in and more people are becoming fans faster. A sales funnel template for your business is a very powerful thing to do early on. If you think about this early on and you get this down correctly, you’re going to have so much more success so much faster because you actually figured out how to get people through to being customers and not just fans.
JOCELYN: All right, so we just threw out a lot of information here and I know some of you are probably thinking, ‘Whoa! This is a lot of stuff.’
SHANE: But we’ve only scratched the surface. I mean, we really have only started touching on this.
JOCELYN: So, what we are going to do for you, we’re out of time for this week but next week, we are going to go through a real-life example of what one of our sales funnels looks like and how we are going to be implementing it to grow my Elementary Librarian business, starting this summer. So, we’re going to go through and tell you about how we’re attracting customers, how we are engaging with customers, and how we are moving them through that sales funnel to hopefully purchase our products and then become advocates or affiliates for us later on.
SHANE: So make sure – I want you to go back, you probably need to listen to this episode a couple of times. There was a lot of information there, go through, check it out, I’m gonna put an image up of what the sales funnel that we talked about today with our rock band example looked like in the show notes of this page. So head over to Flippedlifestyle.com/podcast44 and that will give you a nice, visual to kinda go through this podcast. Maybe you can – you just listened to it once, maybe you can go back and take that image and kind of look at it and see where things are happening with this example that we gave today. And then next week, we’re gonna have a full-blown, downloadable, sales funnel template for how to create this and implement it in your online business. So, as you start out, you’re gonna get this right and you’re gonna be much farther along than we ever were when we started out, when we did it three years ago. All right, before we close up today, we are going to go over our can’t-miss moments and Jocelyn I think you’re going to start off today?
JOCELYN: So last week, we had to go up to one of the larger towns in our area because we had something we needed to do, and sometimes we go just during the day, like while the kids are at school, or at the babysitters or whatever. This day, we were like, ‘You know what, let’s go up there and stay for a night. We’ll take Issac out of school for a day –’ he very rarely ever misses school so it’s not –
SHANE: Issac totally played hooky that day. We pulled him out and we were like, ‘Yeah, we’re leaving. Bye, we don’t care.’
JOCELYN: It’s kindergarten, you know, so he’ll be all right. So anyway, we just took him out of school for one day and we went up to the next larger city and we just stayed in a hotel. We let them swim and we did what we needed to do that day and it was just a lot of fun.
SHANE: Ana loves hotels because we get to travel a lot. It’s so crazy like, I don’t think I took my first airplane ride till I was like 19 or 20-years-old or something like that. But our kids have already been on a bunch of airplane rides and they get to stay in hotels and things like that. That was something that we never got to do as a kid. We probably went every three months or so to a hotel and – you didn’t travel very much at all when you were a kid; did you?
JOCELYN: No, I had never even seen the ocean until I was in college. So our kids are six and four and they’ve been twice. Yeah, it’s just awesome; the things that we’ve been able to do since we started our own business and you know, we can leave and go and come whenever we want to. So it’s pretty sweet.
SHANE: But Ana loves hotels because of all this travel that we do now, and like she was just begging us to go stay in a – she calls them a ‘Shotel’ I don’t know why she calls them that but she calls them a Shotel like it’s a show and a hotel or something like that. But she basically was just like, ‘Oh, I want to go to a hotel, let’s go stay in a hotel.’ And we were like, ‘We can’t go to a beach or anything like that –’ but you know what, we just went up to that city and we just said, ‘Hey, let’s just say all night.’ And man, the kids had a blast. You would have thought, we were at Disney world; they were jumping in the hot tub and swimming around in the pool and just having a great time. So if you want to see some pictures of our one-night trip to the “Shotel” as Ana Joe would say, head over to Flippedlifestyle.com/podcast44 and start working on your online business. We want you guys to have all the freedom that we found through this too so you can start making can’t-miss moments of your own.
JOCELYN: That’s all we have for you for today, hope you enjoyed this discussion on sales funnels and we will flush this out a little bit more for you in next week’s show.
SHANE: Till next time, we’ll catch you on the flip side guys. See you later.
JOCELYN: Bye.
Ashlyn says
This is EXACTLY what I needed! You guys are seriously the bomb dot com for sharing this! I’ve scoured the web for how to do this and all I could find was people wanting me to pay thousands of dollars for their course to teach me *how* to do a sales funnel. Kinda frustrating. This is what makes you guys stand out from everyone else – you give valuable information for free when everyone else is charging money for it. I love you guys!!
Rachel Garrison says
Thank you SOOOO much. I love the template. This template is the first I have seen like this.
Shane Sams says
Thanks Rachel!