4 Sales Funnel Stages All Profitable Companies Have In Common

In Todays Episode... Your potential customer needs to go on a well-crafted journey where they can transition from being complete strangers to feeling like they know you before they purchase your product or service. And every sales funnel has 4 key stages. Links & Resources If you would like to support the podcast, please rate 5 stars and review on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about Wild Audience at www.wildaudience.com Follow us on Instagram for news and updates. If you are generating at least $10,000 per month or beyond and would like a long-term marketing and funnel strategy, please visit Wildaudience.com/Consulting to apply and work with us.   Episode Transcript 00:02 Welcome to the Wild audience podcast where entrepreneurs talk about how to grow your business with marketing. 00:17 Welcome back to another episode of Wild Audience TV. This time we're going to talk about the four sales funnel stages every single profitable company has in common. It's important that you note them. Let me walk you through them by actually telling you a story first. Okay? This story is funny. Basically correlates to why a sales funnel or the sales funnel stages are somewhat similar to dating. Okay? So imagine this so you're on a train, you or on your way to work and then you see this beautiful girl, you like yours. So you go over there and you start to a conversation. In the end, what you get is hurt. What's up? So you work in your office, you should work, but what's up with her? I had you get to know each other a little bit. You get her Instagram, so you go to Instagram, you scroll through the feed, right? 00:59 You check out her profile. You can get to know her a little bit better in the end, two days later, you schedule your first stage. You keep it casual, right? Not going to propose her for a wedding. A, you're not going to go to a super romantic dinner. You just go for, you know, after work drinks, uh, around the corner, have a few drinks, eat shit. You can have a version only the Instagram version and facebook version, but now it's been a week and then after another couple of days, you would stop again. This time the date is a little bit more romantic. Things get hotter and hotter. One thing leads to the next thing, and I'm going to stop the story here. So that's what happens. Usually, if you meet someone and you like that person, right? A funnel, a sales funnel, it's exactly like dating. You're not going to ask for a wedding proposal, you're not going to go to this super romantic dinner in Santorini in Greece. 01:42 You're not going to do that. I get to keep it cool. We get a plate cool at the beginning. No something similar needs to happen when marketing online or building relationships online. A potential customer needs to go through a series of sales funnel stages where you build up a relationship before you can expose that person to offer up. Before I can walk you through these four stages, I need you to swim out and understand something really fundamental and that is audience temperature. So there are three different types of temperatures, cold, warm, and hot. Someone who does not know about you and your company is a called person. Someone who is a warm person is someone who has engaged with unique content. Maybe sign up for your email newsletter, read a few blog posts and so on. Red Hot person, someone who actually purchased from you. Now, if you build a sales funnel, your goal is of course to get some who don't know you become a paying customer. 02:29 In other words, if you were to transform a cold person into a hot person, a sales funnel is the vehicle that helps you to do exactly that. Now, how do we do that starting now? So the four stages, that winter stage, the relationship building stage, a sales stage, and the upsell stages, starting with the awareness stage. So the awareness that is right at the top of your sales funnel, and there are two questions you gotta, ask yourself, what is the temperature of my audience and what type of lead magnet can I create in order to make people aware that I exist? Your focus, the awareness stage is lead generation. Your goal here is to make people aware that you exist. You can do that by offering them a free educational content piece. Here's how this works. A lead magnet is a great way to turn cold traffic into leads, basically to turn website visitors into email subscribers. 03:16 So lead nine is good for two things. On the one hand acts as a filter, meaning it pushes away the wrong type of people and pulls clothes or the right type of people. So we gotta make sure that the elite nine is very much aligned to your paid product or service. So that's one thing a lead magnet does. The other thing elite magnet does, it actually gets people into our funnel by offering an educational piece for free in exchange for an email address. A lead magnet is usually a pdf, a video, a guide, depending on what type of traffic you try. If you offer a lead magnet, it's extremely important that you keep awareness level in mind. The awareness level is also extremely correlated to the audience temperature. Let me explain. So there are five different awareness level number one, someone is extremely unaware, meaning they don't even know that they have a problem. 03:59 Then there are people who are problem aware, meaning they know they have a problem, but they don't let any solutions, and then there are people who are solution aware, meaning the note, I have a problem and they know about the solutions, but they haven't chosen their solution yet. And then we have product aware people. These are people who are problem aware, solution aware, and they also know about your product or service. The only thing is that they're not 100% sure. Yet if your product or service helps them to solve their pain points, and now we have most aware people, they know about your products and offerings and services. They want to know the specifics. They're ready to buy. So in the awareness stage, we want to acquire core people. That's an example, right? Usually, we are going to choose people who have an awareness level of problem aware or solution aware. 04:36 If you choose the word as possible too. It just requires a little bit more off of education because they don't even know that they have a problem at wild audience and our clients as well, They have a segmentation engine, meaning we're going to ask them a couple of questions in order to get to know our people. We want to know their budget, their goals, their desires, their problems and so on. The interests, these data points, we're going to store them and now active campaign tool in our esp and then we're going to personalize the experience in the relationship building stage. It's just like dating, right? You could ask your date a couple of questions and then you know what this person's interested in and then you're going to lead that conversation more towards that topic area. It's the same with online marketing. Okay. Welcome to the relationship building stage. 05:14 In the relationship building stage, we have a different goal. We want to establish a relationship. In order to do that, we need to ask ourselves a few questions. Here we go. Question number one. What's the best way to communicate with my people? Is it email? Is it a bot sequence? Is it an average hiring funnel? Is it a facebook group? Choose your medium. Question number two, what is my belief system? What does my ideal client or customer need to believe before he or she can accept the desire or need of your product or service? So you need to create your belief system and then to believe mapping meaning, you need to map your belief system on your funnel. All right, so that's question number two. Question number three is all about a unique mechanism. How can I introduce my unique mechanism? That's the thing you known for at wild audience. 05:55 We're known for respect based marketing and relationship funnels is a term we coined and own. You got to do the same thing for you. Create your unique mechanism and ask yourself, how can I introduce that unique mechanism to my audience and the relationship building stage is already in the middle of the funnel. That's got more for middle of the funnel. Top of the funnel is tofo. Middle Mofo. Remember that and more for his whole about lead nurturing. Lead nurturing is just another word for establishing a relationship online and actually pull out interesting research about Hubspot where they say the following thing, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50 percent more sales-ready leads and those leads make 47 percent larger purchases than non nurtured leads. That's huge. Basically what this means is double down on becoming the best on establishing a relationship online because the better you get at establishing a relationship online, the more money you will make later on in the sales stage. 06:45 Remember that, but sometimes the relationship builder stage is viewed as the most complicated stage just because of the broad diversity of different leads with different problems, different desires and so on. At wild audience, we use a relationship. Funnel or relationship does not a thing else and bonding with people, creating trust, positioning yourself as the authority and installed buying beliefs. At the end of the relationship building stage, your goal is to have a potential buyer, someone who is ready to pull up the credit card, can pay your money and believe all necessary buying beliefs in their mind. So how do you do that? Well, the relationship, it all starts out with the segmentation process in the awareness stage where we collect the data. Now we're going to use the data and inside the relationship with the state, which is usually an email sequence of seven to 10 emails. We're going to use the data to personalize the content through dynamic content. 07:32 In the emails. You're going to show them relevant ads. We're going to use engagement hooks like activation hooks, frequencies selector, open loops, cliffhangers, in order to get the right people to engage with us and our content. This makes people micro invest into you and your content every time the micro invest meaning to do certain things you want them to do, like clicking a link, responding to an email, checking on a certain page that will increase and build up their lead engagement score, and then once they already we are gonna introduce them into the sales stage. Before I'm going to talk about the sales search, let me drop some social proof you to illustrate how important the relationship building stage is. Mathias went from one point seven grade all the way to 58 percent email click rate. Why is it important? Just imagine if you get one percent liquid and I get 10. 08:18 If you send out an email, I have 10 times more people check up my sales page. Plus they did all the micro-investment on all the psychology triggers before that, so meaning they are sales-ready. They are prepared. They're preframe before you sell them. Let's talk about the sale stage now. Now the question you could ask yourself is, of course, how can I get them to pull up their credit card and pay me money right now? We already arrived in Bofo. Bofo stands for a bottom of the funnel, so people, they you know, they arrived in your awareness stage. You put them through the relationship building stage. They're warm now, right? They know you. They know your unique mechanism. They believe that what you have is the solution, that opportunity to solve their problems. They're ready to buy. They're so ready to buy. In some cases, people will even reach out to you and ask you to sell them before you have even offered them your opportunity as a solution to their problem. 09:05 That's the power of the relationship funnel because we focused on establishing a relationship first and sell second, not the other way around, and the benefit of that is that selling will become easier. Your sales score will be easy. Why? Because people already believe all the things you need it until believe you don't need to convince them anymore. It's more of a back and forth, maybe handling some objections and so on, but he won't talk to a core person. Do you talk to what? Warm slash hot person. That's the main difference, but it's not only on a sales call, but it's also the same on the Webinar. It's the same one. If someone checks out your sales page, regardless, if you expose someone to your sales stage, now they're almost ready to purchase, just going to give them a little bit of a kick in the butt. The kick can be very soft. 09:41 You can offer them a product for free just as a reason to buy, but it's not necessary versus in a sales funnel, it is necessary. Otherwise, they're not going to buy it because there is no relationship. There are no beliefs, so how can we close them now are different rates depending on what you sell to whom you sell it to. At what price? There is the standard sales page, which is can be text-based. It can be video-based, which is called vsl. It can be a hybrid which is a video on top and the text on the bottom. It can be a Webinar. The webinar can be evergreen, meaning it's automated and you never change it, or it's a live webinar which is doing a weekly or monthly basis, or there's a sales call, meaning there's usually a discovery call, get to know each other core application call, or it could be an application or at trial, depending on to whom you sell, at what price you choose your conversion event. 10:22 Oh, and can you share a little bonus tip with you? It's a secret, so don't share it too much. It's called behavior-based pitching. I'm not sure if other people do this. At least I call it like that. We coined that term. The way it works is that you track people's behavior and then the right time you pitched them. That's why it's called behavior-based pitching. So for example, if the lead score threshold 1:50 points or 200 points form, you're going to trigger a pitch. If someone visits your sales pitch three times, boom, a pitch. If someone bought your front end product, you're going to trigger an email to invite them into the core, which is a pitch behavior based hitching to secret. Don't share too much, so let's assume the purchase your product, awesome winner, winner, winner, chicken dinner or whatever it's called, life is good. 10:58 Now. Don't stop here and that brings me to the upsale stage. Let's talk about it. The question to ask yourself now is what's the best way to upsell and cross-sell my existing customers? Because think about it. You have someone who paid you real money at someone who bonds with you, has a relationship with you, sees you as an authority, don't you think it's way, way easier to sell that person. Then acquiring someone who is very cold, someone who is in the awareness stage, we need to go through the whole process, right, is way more difficult than reselling and upselling. Cross-selling to an existing customer. That's what the upsale stage is all about. What there's the difference between cross-selling and upselling. Upselling is all about selling something more expensive, higher tickets via p thing, a new feature and additional that cross-selling is all about selling something that is related. 11:40 The next step sort of Save, so it makes sense for this person to buy this other product which is related to the first purchase because it's the next step. Practical examples, well, you can send them an email sequence. You can connect your email automation tool like an active campaign to your sales CRM. If you don't want to use this here, I'm instead of active campaign and you can call them or you're going to send them a message or you're going to show them some ads and Facebook. These are all different ways in how we can upsell people, but usually, it's all around an email sequence and potentially a phone depending on what you're saying. I don't want to end this video, but asking you the following question, would you do a wedding proposal on your first date? Of course not, right? Who will do that? That's crazy. 12:18 Don't do that in business. The reality is most companies do that though. They have a sales first mentality. This scream inside the awareness stage, buy my stuff. Do you think it's going to work? Maybe they used to work in the past. Now it doesn't work anymore. People change the mindset changes people in while where people see a connection, give them that connection, so my call to action from me to you today is to treat your potential customers and clients just like your first dates. Start slowly establishing a relationship, get to know the person, use what you learned about your people and use it in your conversation until you have their person at a specific spot so you can actually do the next big step which is maybe a kiss, maybe it's something else or maybe it's offering them a product or service 13:04 as well as if you liked the video, make sure and hit that like button. Subscribe if you want, because we're launching a new video every single week. If you have any other problems, put them into the comments below so that I can read them and actually think about what type of videos I should create over the next couple of weeks and guys go build some relationship funnels and go check out our love page, wild audience.com/love. That's the type of results you will get. If you build a relationship from, I'll make sure to embed all these four stages, which we've talked about in this video, the relationship funnel, belief systems, unique mechanism. That's how you win. 13:36 Hey you, thank you so much for tuning into wild audience Fm today. It Literally means the world to me, so thank you very much and here's something else you want to hear it well. We help companies that have great products and services, but not enough customers and we help them by building evergreen relationship funnel step and make $4 for every single dollar spent without any type of fixed scarcity and have created a 34 minute workshop that could forever change the way you market and sell your products and services. You can check out my free workshop by visiting wild audience.com/workshop. People who join my workshop and implement what I teach achieved funnel sales conversion rates of eight percent and above. That could potentially mean that eight percent of the people sign up on your website become your paying customers. So if you're interested, go to wildaudience.com/workshop and register for our free workshop. Thank you so much guys, and talk to you in the next episode. Peace out.