Sales funnel

So let's look at sales funnels, when trying to make a sale, whether online or face-to-face, getting the customer hooked is not that simple. This sales process happens in several stages, where you must start by preparing the potential consumer with the notion of spending part of their income on the products or services you sell.

In today's saturated and distrustful market, it is becoming increasingly difficult to convince customers to buy certain products or services. You must already know this feeling of frustration and failure, if at any time you have tried to make a sale and explained the whole process to the customer more than once, without being able to complete the sale. It is much worse when you have invested time and money in marketing strategies in which you have not had positive results. To make this process successful, the key is to know all the steps of the sale and exploit each one of them to get your potential customers to buy. Your ultimate goal is not just the sale, but the repeat sale.

These steps are also called sales funnels, which are marketing strategies formed to transform unknown people into loyal customers by channeling them through phases. The funnel is used as a metaphor to convey that you will start with a large group of people that you will progressively reduce to a smaller and more specific group of customers. The ultimate goal of this process is not only to achieve that initial sale, but to maintain repeat sales over time that position your brand identity and customer loyalty.

Initial Considerations

Try to imagine the sales funnel process as a long journey in which you will guide your customer to the final sales destination. In order to guide your customer to this place you must follow a series of steps to better delimit and focus your efforts as a small business owner. To this end you should start with a few products or services that you need to sell.

To give you a more practical idea of this process, try to imagine if you were having lunch at a restaurant, where you sit down and try to find out from the waitress about the sandwich options they offer. She recommends one of them and then asks you: Would you like a salad or soup to go with the sandwich for only $3 more?

He might also ask: Would you like anything else with the sandwich? Following this question with the offer of dessert. By the time you come to find out, you've most likely bought everything she offered, but she's still not finished. When you are completely finished, the waitress then offers you a customer loyalty program, where after 5 lunches, the next one is free, plus free food in the month of your birthday. And she culminates by asking you: Do you want to subscribe to our program by email or text message?

Throughout this process the waitress appealed to your basic needs, including hunger and recognition, by offering you products and services for free, on special occasions like your birthday. What she did was a face-to-face sales funnel, as you must have appreciated.

Steps to sales funnels

These days, most sales funnels happen online and not so much in person. But no matter which way you are doing it, the important thing to achieve a good sale is to emotionally captivate and provide progressively higher value to your prospects through each of the stages of the sales funnel, no matter how complex.

This process has been proven to work when you use some of the concepts similar to all human beings, based on human emotions. First, you must get people's attention, so that they recognize your brand.

Then, you must awaken their interest. Then, you must appeal to their desire. To culminate in inspiring them to act in a particular way. All customers, including ourselves, go through this process when we want to buy something, without even knowing it. Let me explain these stages in more detail.

Getting your customers' attention

Getting a customer's attention is the first stage of a sales funnel. It appeals to the consumer's emotions to draw their attention to your brand, through marketing strategies and quality products or services.

This stage can be conducted face-to-face at networking events or business meetings, or it can be done over the Internet through social platforms, websites or podcasts.

Awaken the interest of your customers

At this stage, your company should start focusing on creating a better relationship with your potential customers, applying itself more to learning about their goals and issues. This will allow you to offer more specific solutions to certain problems, and experience faster revenue and greater customer engagement.

Appeal to your customers' desires

In this phase you should try to make customers see that your company can satisfy a much greater desire or need than they initially thought. That your company is the only one that can provide a solution to that problem or satisfy that need. This is where you demonstrate to the consumer the great value of your products or services, appealing to their desires.

Inspire your customers to act.

It is at this stage that you manage to close the sale, where the customer makes the decision to buy or not what you offer. This is the key moment when the customer makes a decision. You must focus on the value of what you are selling, as well as the disadvantages of not buying it. This last phase of the sales funnel works as a general description of the emotional procedure that all customers go through when they want to buy. Always taking into account the type of product or service you offer, as well as your target customer, you will have to adapt each of the phases of your sales funnel in each case.

Shaping your sales funnel

To give you an idea of the current market, you can look at some general statistics:

• 87% of buyers prefer to do business with companies that provide high-value content at all stages of the buying procedure.

• 63% of customers require hearing a business' value proposition 3-5 times before they are able to trust it.

All phases that appeal to emotions in the sales funnel are necessary in whatever type of funnel you use, whether it's 3, 5, 7 or more steps.

Let's then look at the sales funnel value ladder, in which you must delimit everything you plan to offer your consumers as they move through your funnel. From the so-called "bait" of the sale to the end of the sale, also called "back end", you must be detailed at all stages.

Try to look at your sales funnel as a whole, breaking it down into its different resources, with your end goal in mind. Knowing what your end goal is a key point to be successful, as well as what you can offer customers at each stage of the process.

It will be very useful for you to know how to link different offers within the funnels themselves. You should start with smaller offers, to prepare consumers for their potential purchase of subsequent products. When you have successfully marketed one product or service, you should build on this to attract customers' attention to others, and complete various stages of the sales funnel.

Value ladder in the sales funnel

To make this type of sales funnel, you need to plan in detail, to delineate how and why customers will move through it to your best offer. This value ladder is a strategy for organizing a company's product or service offerings in the form of a ladder, from lowest to highest, taking into account the value it brings to the consumer and its cost.

Traffic stage

This first, or preliminary, stage is where you specify the type of customer you want to attract into your sales funnel. It is where you choose the highest quality customer possible and avoid the low quality ones. These customers come redirected from paid promotions in social media marketing campaigns, or referrals from satisfied customers with your products or services. In general, they can come from many places.

In this phase of the funnel, you should focus on optimizing your marketing strategies on all platforms, to control all the traffic you receive. You must match where your high quality customers usually are with the type of content they consume.

You should try to find out, what kind of low-cost or free offer you can use to get these customers to interact with your brand for the first time. If you fail at this stage to attract quality consumers to what you offer, you will not be able to sell your more expensive products or services later on.

Knowing the type of clientele you want to attract, and what makes them want to buy, you will be able to get them to enter your funnel and guide them towards the sale.

Bait" or "bait" stage

In this stage, is where you attract this customer you chose to a free or low-cost purchase. To this end you can offer any product or service for free or in the form of samples. You can also offer some profit-making packages that are very appealing as you move through your sales funnel.

Try to think of it this way, if at the beginning you offer services or products for free or at a low cost, you will have built this customer's loyalty to a more valuable potential purchase in the near future, where you will really experience your profits.

In many occasions, in this phase, you may have losses, but it doesn't matter, since it is only a step that will help you to obtain higher profits in the future.

It is also at this stage of the funnel, where you will be getting rid of low quality customers, as they will usually only be interested in the free and low cost offers you have and not in buying your products or services.

Initial or "frontend" stage

In this phase, you start by offering a superior low-cost, low-risk package that satisfies a specific need or problem with the lowest possible investment.

You must redirect all the customers you attracted with the bait to one of your primary pages, also called "squeeze page", where you must offer th