How To Create The Perfect Website Sales Funnel

Key Takeaways

perfect website sales funnel really perfect okay well if that's what it says that's what we shall deliver now chances are if you're watching this then your website is probably the first step in your company's sales process and particularly if your website is there to generate leads for your business it's really important that you're able to take website visitors on a journey which starts from awareness of your business into a process of actually becoming a customer and giving you money until they give you money your marketing hasn't paid off and obviously this is called your sales funnel oh thanks captain obvious get this website sales funnel right and you build a reliable repeatable scalable way of getting more customers but get your website sales funnel wrong and you risk leaving money on the table in unsold customers so in this video we're going to share some tips on how to create the perfect website sales process which not only generates leads for your business but actually increases the likelihood of those leads turning into customers so stay tuned let's go okay so what do we actually mean by a sales funnel well i don't know about you but i'm feeling pretty creative today so i thought i'd draw you a little picture two hours later [Music] three hours later what look at this beaut okay the masterpiece is ready what we've got here is a very simple funnel diagram which will be very familiar to you so we've got this thing where people come into the top of the funnel and they go through some sort of process that eventually leads them to spending some money hopefully with you okay we've got people at different stages of this process now to make this something that we can all understand and we can all identify with let's think about the process of buying a new car every time somebody buys a car there is a trigger which first starts this process kind of gets them into the top of the funnel so this trigger could be anything it could be something that somebody says your car looks a bit rubbish it could be that they've had a pay rise they have more disposable income could be that they see an advert it could be that they notice their car maintenance bills increasing whatever it might be at some point there's a trigger which begins this process now is someone at that stage ready to take a test drive absolutely not they have absolutely no intent they have no timeline in mind at all at this point they might do some very top of funnel things they might install the auto trader app for example they might start having a look around maybe they might check out some buyers guides but really they're very very early on in the process they're really not ready to take any sort of action which would represent commercial intent but now their radar is up and as time goes on and they start you know embedding the idea and getting familiar with it they start to notice stuff they start to notice cars on the road for the first time they start talking to their friends who just recently bought a car how are you finding it and that type of thing so they start becoming more interested now are they ready to book a test drive yet no that's still too high a commitment that's still too high commercial intent they're really not at that stage yet but their radar is definitely up so eventually as someone goes through the research phase they will begin to identify perhaps the particular make of car that they're interested in maybe the particular model maybe even the variant so at this point they're much closer to purchase if you offered this person a test drive of a particular card would they take it well maybe they would maybe that would be the right stage for them but it might still be a little bit too early now at this point if you're buying a new car you might be playing with a build your own car on the manufacturer's website to see the particular spec and you know you begin to visualize yourself owning it finally you get to the point where you're really ready to start looking so at this stage you're looking on auto trader with intent to purchase you might start sizing up local dealerships figuring out who you're going to want to go to you might start looking at their inventory stuff like that now at this point you are a very very valuable lead because you're almost ready to go you're ready to buy a car you know you're going to do it imminently you've kind of come to terms with that if someone offers you a test drive absolutely you're there you're ready to go okay great story tim that's a few minutes of my life i'm never going to go back how does this relate to website sales funnels well here's the thing here's where it all ties back the vast majority of websites maybe even yours only cater to people at this stage they're only targeting people who are right at the bottom of the sales funnel they are ready to go so if you've got a website which says inquire now if you've got a website which says get a quote you've got to accept that really you're targeting people predominantly at this end now there's nothing wrong with that this is the most valuable type of customer these people are worth the most because they are ready to buy but here's the thing they're also the people that all of your competitors are targeting so when this person searches for something on google usually that keyword is going to have a high cost per click most commercial intent most competitive sorts of terms to target so there's a couple of opportunities here firstly we can increase the number of people in our world if we expand to be targeting people that are earlier on in the buying journey but the second opportunity is that by targeting people in this early stage we actually get a chance to influence them as they're going through this process to becoming a qualified lead we get to help them make the decision and of course this means that when they do get to this point we don't have to compete with our competitors for them because they're already in our world we've had a relationship we've been building trust with them throughout so the first principle to building a killer website sales funnel is to meet people where they are at yes you want to give these people a compelling call to action but also a good idea to give these people a compelling call to action as well if you're offering everyone a test drive bear in mind that only these folk are gonna take it okay metaphoritis you're overwhelmed forget it right okay so let's look at a real life example of how this applies to a website so let's take a look at hubspot as an example now hubspot offers marketing automation crm type software it's a software subscription when you come onto the hubspot home page the call to action is get hubspot free now this is really compelling for people that are ready to take a test drive of marketing and sales automation and crm software this is great this is the test drive free no obligation let's get started perfect for people that are at that stage and if you go to their case studies page you will see that the call to action is get hubspot free why because case studies are for people that are interested in a solution and they're researching how they might be able to benefit from that solution so get hubspot free is absolutely perfect i can read about their story i can watch a video or i can then go and get the software free that's perfect and that's the test drive call to action for people that are at that stage but hubspot also has content on their site which is targeted at people further up the funnel i.e marketing managers who may not know that hubspot is the right solution for them they may not know that they have a need for say marketing automation software they have all these resources on the site and typically these resources are like ebooks and if you click on it then you can click to download it for free and what happens is an email capture so these people may or may not be even thinking about marketing automation software they might be very top of funnel but here's something which is targeted at those people this is great this is meeting me exactly where i am now what's going to happen is i'm going to put my email in here and i'm going to start getting emails about hubspot service they now know that i'm a good potential target customer if i'm interested in this topic and eventually i'm going to be at a point where i understand enough about hubspot's offering that i can make a decision about whether or not i want to purchase it so this is targeting top of funnel traffic we also see they've got courses and certifications and lessons exactly the same sort of thing so what's this got to do with marketing automation software almost nothing other than they know that anybody who signs up for this is interested in marketing and there's a chance that that person might then go on to become a hubspot customer at some point down the line so action item number one is to think about the different stages in your sales journey that people will go through and what you can offer on your website that targets people at these different levels if you're just starting out you're probably only going to be targeting people with commercial intent at the bottom of the funnel but as your business grows and as you want to increase your visibility it's going to be more important that you bring more of these other people into play by offering calls to action and stuff that is interesting and relevant for them at the stage they are at key sales funnel principle number two is to make your sales funnel a slippery slide i'm gonna tell you another story because i think you're up for it fast food drive-throughs they really make absolutely no sense at all imagine you've got a mcdonald's it's got a car park and people drive up and they get out of their car they go into the restaurant they order their food they have their food they leave the restaurant they drive away imagine thinking do you know what'd be good if they didn't even have to leave their car so they drive up they go around the little thing they order from a hatch they sit in their car they then often go and park in the car park and eat their food in the car park instead of coming into the restaurant why does that make any sense at all well the reason why it makes so much sense and the reason that the drive-through is often way busier than even the restaurant is because ronald and his friends knew that the key to maximizing sales was to reduce the friction at every point in the sales process so you don't even have to leave your car to get mcdonald's okay what has this got to do with sales funnel tim well we need to make your sales funnel a slippery slope and that means we need to reduce friction at every stage in the sales funnel and if you find that you've got blockages in your sales funnel where people are maybe you're getting lots of leads through your website but you're not turning those leads into customers then the problem may be that we don't have a slippery enough slide i.e the stages in your sales funnel don't flow naturally into each other i think i'm going to do some more drawing okay so let's assume that your sales process looks something like this so at some point someone's going to become a lead on your website or they might give you a call or something that's the first interaction then there's going to be a number of interactions that happen over time until eventually they become a customer and they give you money what we need to do is we need to make each step in this process three things firstly we need to make it easy secondly we need to make it attractive that's supposed to be a heart by the way and thirdly we need to make it low risk so every step in your process should feel each of these and that's what we call a slippery slide so for example exposure ninja we're a digital marketing agency so when you go onto the exposure ninja website we've got a short questionnaire for you to fill in which asks you a bit about your business a bit about your current digital marketing and your marketing goals we will then record a 15-minute video which shows you some ways to increase the leads and sales that your website generates for you we send this to you completely free of charge by email and it's fantastic so that's the first step in our process now is it easy for you to request it absolutely is it attractive absolutely it's a brilliant service we've had people say they've just followed the advice in the review and they've improved their marketing results and is it low risk completely it's totally free of charge there's no obligation to use our service so that's the first step in our sales process the next step after that is we offer a free consultation so in this free consultation you have a chance to talk to the person who put your review together so this is a great opportunity to ask them any questions ask them for any additional advice and they can also see if you need some help with your digital marketing now if you do need some help in your digital marketing then we go through a process which moves you through the sales process to potentially becoming a client of ours so this is our sales process notice how we've made the first step as easy attractive and low risk as possible and this is really important but every step in your process needs to be easy low risk and attractive so the action step for you at this stage is to think about each of the stages in your process how can you position that how can you essentially sell it to your customer as something that's easy attractive and low risk to do what do they take away from it and how can we reduce friction think the drive through how can we make it as easy as possible for someone to move through your sales process without really introducing risk without forcing them to do things that they don't want to do so component number three of a perfect website sales funnel is that it's systemizable and scalable so what do we mean by that well each of these steps in your sales process should be easy to repeat they should all be built from essentially templates they should have very clear processes built for each one now over the years we've had a lot of clients who have had a very ad hoc sales process i.e we generate them a lead through their website and hopefully if that sales person continues to do something at some point those leads will become sales eventually but this isn't really ideal because it's very difficult to improve a system if you don't know what's actually happening in the system so that's why you'll notice the most effective sales organizations will have very clearly mapped processes for each of these stages along their sales journey one of our clients did a fantastic job of this was a legal lead generation business so we blew up their marketing to the stage where they were getting over 400 leads a day now when you're getting 400 leads a day you can't have an ad hoc sales process that can't be people making a general inquiry and just giving you a call and seeing what happens you need a very clear straightforward system for processing that so what a client did was build a form on their site which took information from the website visitor which allowed their team to pre-qualify people just through the information and the form they could then process that information according to what people's answers were in the form send them out an information pack in this case by post and when the person sent that pack back they could process the legal claim so it's very systemizable very scalable and they can track improvements in the process through things like tweaking the wording in the pack that they send out adding in a call before they send out the pack to see what that does to response rates and so on but they built a process which allowed us to scale their lead volume without the whole business completely collapsing under the weight of all these leads so action item number three is to map out the interactions at each stage in your sales funnel and think through what's the desired outcome what are the possible objections someone might have at this stage and how can we handle them how can we build scripts which allow our team to handle each of those objections and doing that is obviously going to build your highly effective sales funnel which will allow you to increase your marketing investment which allow you to throw more leads through it so it's a self-perpetuating cycle of awesomeness the s p c o a so i hope you've enjoyed this video i know it's a little bit outside the kind of digital marketing stuff that we normally look up but this website sales funnel stuff is a really important consideration to make if you're looking to scale your digital marketing so remember we looked at the three components of an awesome website sales funnel firstly it meets your audience where they are remember we're not going to be offering everyone a test drive because they're not ready for that yet the second thing that we looked at was making sure your sales funnel was a slippery slide i.e moving to every step was easy attractive and low risk and then the third thing that we looked at was making your sales funnel repeatable scalable and systemizable by mapping out each interaction point thinking through what's the outcome that we want what are the possible objections we might receive at this point and basically meticulously designing each step of the process so you know exactly what sort of percentage conversion rate you're going to expect at each point so you can then make some changes and see how things interact this is how you test measure and improve so if you've enjoyed this video then please feel free to subscribe to our channel we post at least one digital marketing video every week and we also have a live digital marketing workshop here on our youtube channel you might also be interested in checking out the exposure ninja podcast you can go on a podcast app and search explosion ninja you know how to do that by now right and of course don't forget to request your free website and marketing review from the exposure ninja site at exposureninja.com until next time see you soon