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Building a sales pipeline management system and creating a business with customers who flock to you is the point of all marketing. Whether online or offline, you want to attract, engage, and sell people all day - forever! There are a lot of tools to use, but the biggest question our agency gets asked is, "What's the difference between Pipeline Pro vs. Clickfunnels.
That's a valid question, too, because both are great tools!
In this video and blog post, we will give you a behind-the-scenes look at building a converting sales funnel.
First, we need to break down what a sales funnel is and isn't... A sales funnel is much more than individual pages (i.e., landing and sales pages).
A sales funnel requires that email marketing campaigns and automation be set up, that you have traffic campaigns going, and that people are being moved and pushed through the sales funnel from piece to piece. So when they enter the sales pipeline, they learn about you and your company on autopilot. And then, they go through the entire sales process, also on autopilot!
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Three Pieces To Your Sales Pipeline Management
In setting up sales funnels, there are three pieces to any sales process... And part of your sales pipeline management should be to create reporting on:
We've got an entire book about it - Convert.
What often happens when business owners are marketers is - they begin with traffic. Then, they back-end into their offer and their follow-up. It's one of the biggest mistakes you can make because you're spending money on traffic without necessarily having a clear path to make that money back to generate revenue from your offers.
Where To Start
When we do sales funnels for clients, we start the project by creating the offer.
Your offer can take lots of different shapes. It can be:
You name it. There are so many different ways to generate revenue online and so many different kinds of offers that you can make to the world. That's what business is!
Choosing Sales Pipeline Management CRM and Software
Pipeline Pro
PipelinePro is a cloud-based sales CRM platform that helps businesses of all sizes manage their sales pipelines and close more deals. It offers a wide range of features, including:
- Contact management: PipelinePro allows you to store and manage your contact information in one place. You can track contact interactions, create lead-scoring rules, and segment your contacts for targeted marketing campaigns.
PipelinePro is also highly customizable and can be integrated with a variety of other business applications, such as email marketing software, accounting software, and customer support software.
ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels is a cloud-based sales funnel platform that helps businesses of all sizes create and manage their sales funnels. A sales funnel is a series of steps a potential customer takes on their journey, from becoming aware of a product or service to making a purchase.
ClickFunnels offers a wide range of features to help businesses create and manage effective sales funnels, including:
- Landing page builder: ClickFunnels includes a drag-and-drop builder that makes creating high-converting landing pages without coding knowledge easy.
ClickFunnels is a powerful tool that can help businesses of all sizes increase their sales. It is particularly well-suited for companies that sell high-ticket products or services, as it can help them create and manage complex sales funnels.
Here are some of the benefits of using ClickFunnels:
- Increased sales: ClickFunnels can help you increase sales by helping you create and manage effective sales funnels. By tracking the progress of each lead and deal, you can ensure that no opportunities fall through the cracks.
Overall, ClickFunnels is a powerful sales funnel platform that can help businesses of all sizes increase sales, improve conversion rates, reduce costs, and increase efficiency.
When To Have A VSL In Your Sales Pipeline
Now, depending on your offer, you need your sales material. That's the point in your sales pipeline management to get prospects to purchase something from you.
If you have an offer under $1,000, you can usually sell it with a video sales letter (VSL) or a multi-video launch process. If you have a video sales letter, you need an upsell and downsell process. You can take a $100 sale and then pitch something that's $300 on the confirmation page. After that first upsell, you can then create a second upsell.
That, my friend, is how you increase the average customer lifetime value of your buyers!
What About Webinars?
If your offer is over $1,000, you need an automated webinar with some webinar marketing behind it. If you sell something above $2,000, you'll need a consultative sales call in your pipeline. The call to action you make on your webinar will be, "Click the button to sign up for a call." The sales call will be the thing that does your selling.
Do Long-Form Sales Letters Still Work?
The short answer? No. Unless you also combine them with a video sales letter or a video.
Long-form works when it's a heavily graphical page with many images, and you see it selling a lot of SAAS software. But for the most part, video sales letters and webinars will be your two main pieces of sales pipeline management.
Getting Your Marketing Pages Set Up
Once those are up, then, of course, you need the marketing pages. Those are the pages that CONTAIN your sales collateral.
Think landing pages, sales pages, confirmation pages, strategy session pages... Those kinds of things.
Nowadays, they're pretty easy to build with page builder software. There are lots of options to choose from, including our Axis Page Builder.
Creating Your Followup Campaigns
You get into the follow-up once the pages and sales material are done—your follow-up followup automation campaigns for outbound email marketing, text messages, your CRM, etc.
That's going to handle the marketing automation piece of the sales pipeline.
- You need an email copy for your auto-responders.
There are probably 25 to 35 emails that you will need, all pre-done, ready for when you launch your sales funnel and sales pipeline management initiatives to general traffic.
... Then You Can Start Driving Traffic
Then, and only then, can you start going after traffic?
And your traffic takes many forms depending on the networks your customers hang out on!
There are tons of different ways of getting traffic.
You Need Your Sales Pipeline Management Set Up First
Here's my point. All you need to do is set up the foundation and infrastructure for your business before you can go out and start finding traffic.
All this is so your potential buyers start to know, like, and trust you.
They need to know that they will make a good decision if they invest the time in getting to know you better by exploring the idea of giving you money for your products and services.
That's what it is. It's a lot of work to get built and set up initially. Way more than it was two or three years ago when all you needed was a landing page or a webinar registration page and a couple of emails... Then boom, you could start getting $10,000+ clients.
It's a lot more work than it used to be.
But it's what's required now. You have to be able to put all of this together, launch it, and re-invest your profits back into more advertising!
If you want help putting this stuff together, click the button below to sign up for an action plan call with my team and me. We'll discuss your business, offers, follow-up, automation campaigns, pipeline management, etc.
Whatever you don't have, we can build for you. I like to think of us as the glue that brings your sales pipeline together. We will make whatever you don't have. But first, we need to have a conversation. So, click the button below and watch the short video on sales funnels...
Watch The Video >>
[VIDEO TRANSCRIPT]
This is GSD daily, episode 50. We are halfway to 100, which is fantastic. This morning, I saw that we broke 100 members in our DFY Funnels group, which is amazing. I'll drop the link here, which I'm pretty excited about. I think that is pretty awesome.
Let's see, dropping the link. All right. Here's the link to our funnel group. So make sure to sign up for that, and the stuff we'll talk about today is how to build a sales pipeline. So, this is the original post that we wrote a while ago.
We're going to talk about some tools, strategies, etc.
First, for those who don't know who I am, I am Jason Drohn, creator of doneforyou.com. I've been building funnels for a very long time for many different niches and categories and everything. We specialize in creating offers, automating sales funnels, and clarifying messages. Then, I also set up marketing automation and ran traffic. Making offers and building the sales system that powers the rest is what we are good at, so what we do.
We're capping off the high ticket week. Earlier this week, we talked about selling high-ticket offers. We talked about selling on Zoom presentations, and we were joined by my friend Patch. We talked about marketing.
Yesterday, we discussed doing conditional logic forms so that you are only working with the people and pitching the people who make the most sense for you and your offer. And what you can do then is based on how they answer specific questions. They will see a particular result, like maybe they know a calendar booking, or if they answer a question differently, they go down a different rabbit hole. So, that's kind of the power behind the applications and stuff.
What we're going to do is we're going to talk about the tricks to effective sales pipeline management. Now, I know that sounds like a mouthful, but basically, what it is is there are some rules that I follow when we're looking at putting sales funnels in place and sales pipelines in the area for clients.
There are three pieces in every Sales Pipeline.
Those rules, what it comes down to is that there are three pieces to every sales pipeline out there. The channel itself, the funnel itself, the system itself, whatever you want to call your sales system, you boil it down to traffic, your offer, and your follow-up. Your request is the follow-up you pitch, whether it's a coaching service, consulting, digital product, or whatever.
What offer requires a pipeline that involves follow-ups?
For purposes of followups our offer is above $1,000 because if you're charging something that is more than $1,000, chances are you're going to be getting on a sales call with this person at some point unless there is tremendous bonding and relationship that has happened for a long time through email. Or throughout an extended live stream or a multi-day event. So, an immense relationship needs to be built whenever you sell something over $1,000. So, one thing about the sales pipeline management piece is that the offer is crucial, and if the request is above $1,000, you will have a certain kind of pipeline. That pipeline involves specific follow-ups.
Where to start?
Followups on how to assemble this pipeline, we're looking first at the offer.
We don't have too many; we don't have any live events now. Live physical events, we have, of course, life digital events. If it's a live event, having the creative business owner put on that live event, it needs to be big enough room to make sense for them, and so on.
Offer is lower than $1,000
If your thing is lower than $1,000 or you're pitching a strategy session or a consultative sales call, which is what we've talked about this entire week, then you can have a little application that shows up under a sales page. You saw an example of that. We went through this application system; we call these the fully qualified lead video sales letters. We go through this kind of application system for all of our services. Yesterday, we talked about this conditional.
Do people leave your site without buying at an alarming rate?
That autoplay, we found that out a couple of times yesterday. But, we explored how this conditional logic application works to qualify our prospects. And then, we added a couple of variables here. You could see a couple of different scenarios.
1. Add an application below your sales page
You'll see all that if you go back to yesterday's livestream. We have a sales video, a VSL, with an application below it. They fill out the application, they get sent to our calendar, and they can book a time on our calendar to schedule a call with us. Now, of course, you have a different version of this, which is rather than a sales video, you can put them on a webinar, an automated webinar.
The call to action on that automated webinar to get them into a consultative sales call is to click the button below to sign up for strategy sessions. So, it's very much the same thing. They're going to go and apply. They will click the button below or type a URL into their browser and then use it on a page.
2. Add software to tie into the CRM
Sometimes, we talked about some of the software yesterday for that, too. Typeform, jotform, but ideally, we want to tie that into the CRM, which kicks over into your pipeline. So, that's where it all comes back around.
You have your sales piece, your sales piece is set up upfront, and you have your offer, but then the pipeline is all of it.
The pipeline is how people are moving through, getting to know you.
They're signing up for a call, then they're scheduling a call, then they're getting on the ring, and then they're leaving, or they're being pitched, or they're being proposed. So that's the idea behind this sales pipeline management piece.
Pages of the Sales Funnel
Now, your pages are the pages of the sales funnel. There are many ways to set up pages for the sales funnel. Our preferred method is using WordPress, a plugin, a theme engine, and a template system called an optimized press. That's how most of our clients are set up. There are lots of other ways to do it.
There are lead pages and click funnels. Everybody and their brother has some page builder, a template builder, or a funnel builder. It just depends on whether you want to pay it monthly. Or what kind of proficiency you have in it. But the pages, the marketing pages themselves, they're inconsequential. You have to have them, and they have to convert. So, some pages reverse better than others.
We have our own set of pages that we always use for controls, and they always work well. It's just something you have to think about.
Follow-up Campaigns
Now, the followup campaigns that follow pain, a critical piece of the sales pipeline management is they come in they schedule a call with you; what happens after the call? So, what happens after they receive the proposal? What happens after they don't receive a proposal? They set up a call, and they're not a great fit.
What happens then? Do they get emails in your nurture campaign, and you try to bring them back later when they are probably more qualified, or do you just let them go? So, you have to think about all the follow-up scenarios, too. Your sales guy, followup are pitching this person in your pipeline, then what happens next?
Do they have template emails that go out to this person? Do they drop them in a CRM, and then it goes out afterward with some blog posts, or do you just let the lead die?
1. Continue sending blog posts, podcasts and videos
So, like for us in our pipelines or sales funnels, we continue sending them blog posts, podcasts, and videos like this—the occasional book offer, but we never stop. Sometimes, people will come back and do business with us six years later. So, it would be best not to stop once you start building the list, cultivating the relationship with those prospects, and setting up the sales pipeline that works. Then that's how it should go about. You keep doing it.
2. Start Sending Traffic
Once all that is set up, once you have your sales funnel, webinar, and VSL in the mix of your offer and your system, you can start sending traffic.
Some of the best ways you know, you've heard of them. Facebook ads, fantastic traffic drivers, Google ads. LinkedIn, we've gotten into it a little bit. It's more expensive, but the quality of prospects is just astronomical for a B2B list.
You can do email solo drops; you can do SEO, which we've been doing quite a bit of SEO lately, just in terms of transcribing these GSD dailies and then dropping them as blog posts and ranking for a bunch more keyword phrases.
You need to have the sales pipeline built first.
So, that's kind of the mix of the traffic coming in, but the thing is, you need to have the sales pipeline built first. You have to have the website, the sales funnel, and all that made to build the marketing onto the front side. You have to have the sales funnel building, you create marketing, and then leads start flowing out of the back. Your sales pipeline lights up off out of the backside. So, you need the copy, the sales copy, and all that stuff.
Tools for your Sales Management Pipeline
Now, some tools make the pipeline piece easy. I'm going to show you some of those. So, when somebody comes,d they fill out a form and start the relationship. Often, they hit a sales page, then they come to this page and fill out this form.
1. Zapier
There's a couple of things that we do. The first is whenever somebody fills out this form; we use Zapier to trigger a message to our Slack channel. I'm just going to log in real quick. I want to show you this because it's super cool. If we go into my Zaps, two different kinds of things happen. The first is whenever somebody hits this page, and we know their information, it triggers a Slack message that says, this person is on our page right now.
This is marketing like Ninja-level shit right here. So, hopefully, nobody's watching. Yeah, there's a couple of people watching. So, these are some of my best tricks. So, inside Zapier, basically how it works is Ontraport... When a lead comes in on this page into Ontraport, then a Slack message fires.
This person is on a page in Slack, then it adds it to a spreadsheet in Google Drive, which is super cool because not only does that let us know A, who is on the page, and when they are on the page, but B it also lets us know... It tabulates them in a spreadsheet. So, we can see all our leads and then scroll down and say, okay, cool. Now, let's look at how this is set up. There are three pieces to this. When a form is submitted, and we went through this yesterday. So when we were kicking through the conditional logic of this form, when this form is submitted, then... So, new form submission and that new form submission is, that's my Ontraport account.
Then, the title of that form is FQL VSL, for Fully Qualified Lead Video Sales Letter, Ad Management Application. Then, what it does is send the data. That's just some examples from the data. It sends all that data right over to Slack, and then inside Slack, a message sends a private channel message to Slack. And then there are my accounts here. And then the private channel is this. The news that I received is from the new FQL lead ad management. And then I get a readout of the first name, last name, email, and SMS number.
As soon as that lead hits, I don't even need to wait for the text message that goes out. I don't need to wait for the email that goes out. I don't need to wait for tomorrow's report. It pops up in Slack, and I can pick up the phone, which I probably just screwed up my clarity. But I can pick up the phone and call that person and say, what's up? So, this is the next level of marketing automation 101-level stuff. You know what I mean, so this is Ninja shit.
I haven't seen anybody who does this, maybe some Fortune 500 companies, but I tell people this, and they're like, that's nuts, that's wild. Then, after it sends Slack a message, it tabulates that as a spreadsheet, it sends it to Google Spreadsheet and adds another row, and then boom, that entire contact history is there. And then, we can take notes on that call. So that's how our pipeline works. So, if you remember this form, once they submit it, it goes off to Pipedrive.
2. Pipedrive
Pipedrive is the following tool in this mix. Pipedrive.com and this tool have calendaring; it also has different stages. So, stage one, stage two, stage three, stage four. So, you can see somebody moving through the steps of your sales guys, and everybody's on the same page about where that person is inside the sales pipeline.
Are they in the lead stage, or did they schedule a call, or did they have a call and they're not ready, or are they willing and have been proposed, and we're just waiting on feedback? It also has email marketing so that you can fire emails off to these leads.
3. Pipeline Pro
It's pretty cool stuff. There is another one called Pipeline Pro, which is... I have some of my friends. So, Pipeline Pro is a very similar tool. Pipeline Pro, there we go.
Pipeline Pro is another tool that can be used from a sales letter or a sales pipeline standpoint. Now, the other thing I wanted to show you was that it shows leads when somebody is coming in. I have another folder called VSL page visits. And what this folder does is, if I have data about somebody, if they have signed up as an email address inside my CRM, and we have that person.
4. Ontraport
Ontraport tracks, it keeps hold of... So, when somebody comes to doneforyou.com and enters their email address, it creates a customer record, which is then tagged to them. So, if they come back a day or a week later and haven't cleared their cookies, then Ontraport knows that they came back. And the reason they do that is for recency.
After somebody doesn't do anything with us for... I think it's 60 days; it might be 90 days. But if they don't open an email, they haven't been to the website, they haven't done anything, then they go to an inactive list. So they don't receive our general emails. What that does is it means our sender score and our deliverability is always pretty high. It's higher than the industry average because we cut everybody who hasn't engaged with us.
The new leads are on, and they're on until they spend 60 or 90 days, like I said, where they haven't done anything. They haven't opened an email, they haven't come to the website, and they haven't interacted with us in any way. So, at that point, they go on like a... It's not a blocklist but on a cold list. Every once in a while, we'll email them and try to open them up, get them to open back up, and reengage with us. And sometimes that works, but if they're on the cold list, they'll probably be deleted before long.
It is that Ontraport tracks Infusionsoft tracks and most of the significant CRM track recency. Being that Ontraport recency, when somebody comes to doneforyou.com or any page on doneforyou.com, it fires every time a page loads. If somebody comes to this retargeted sales page and we have their information, then this page will load; Ontraport will know that this page is the one that did it because we already have their information.
What I do is I have that information sent to Slack so I can see who was on the site on the main pages of our site. And if they're coming back a lot, I can email them. If we have their phone number, I could also call them. I've done that a couple of times, where somebody repeatedly returns to the same page, and it pings. It'll ping inside Slack like this guy was here two days ago or this guy was here a day ago.
You can tell me Some email addresses, so I'll pick up the phone and say, "Hey, you're on the sales funnel page." And they're like, "Well, you're spying on me." Well, we're a marketing automation company. It's kind of what we do, sort of. If you've ever gotten a call from me, from just being on the website, that's how.
This is just some marketing automation stuff we get into Pipeline Pro, Pipedrive, and incredible sales tools. You can easily do sales pipeline management without them, but they make it very easy to keep track of your leads. Who's coming in, who's been pitched? And it becomes crucial when you have more than one sales rep. If you are the only person and you're doing three or four calls a week, then it's probably not all that big of a deal, but you start growing to the point where you're doing 10, 15, 20 calls, it's easy to forget who you talked to, what you covered and then where they are in the process.
That is how we do sales pipeline management. Now, it's Friday, and we are 20 minutes in.
For Questions and Guide
I think we're just going to wrap up the shop. If you have any questions, go to doneforyou.com/blog, and we will answer them. If you want to go through and have an action plan done, we will go through your business, talk about your business, traffic sources, and automation, then go to doneforyou.com/start. We will get that up and running, and I will see you soon.
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