The power of sales funnels: How to increase business growth

Martha Warner Author

Are you struggling to grow your business? Learn how to grow your business with a sales funnel.

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Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

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A sales funnel is a powerful tool that can help you increase your sales and ultimately grow your business. But understanding and creating a sales funnel can seem like a daunting task and may even seem overwhelming. If you want to be successful, you’ll have to get over it. Sales funnels are a necessary step to take to generate more sales.

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What is a sales funnel?

The concept of a sales funnel is simple. A sales funnel is the journey potential customers take from finding you to making a purchase. A lot of business owners forget to think about the whole picture, and they focus on only the product or the sales right in front of them. That works if you have a marketing team to focus on funnels for you, but business owners should be aware of their customer journey and even more aware of where their potential customer loses potential.

By incorporating a funnel into your business plan, you will be able to take your customers on your desired journey to take them from being a potential customer to being a repeat customer.

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What are the stages of a sales funnel?

A sales funnel can be as simple as you would like or more in depth to fit your customer needs. There are also considerations such as if you are trying to sell a physical product, a digital product, or a service. However, the basic stages of a sales funnel stay the same.

If you do a quick Google search of the steps of a sales funnel, you will see a ton of varying answers and steps. Note that this post will walk you through the traditional 5 layers to building a sales funnel.

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Awareness

This phase is meant to bring visibility to your brand and to collect leads. At this point, focus on sharing ideas, helpful tips, advice, and fun/inspiring content to build your reputation.
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Things you can do to build brand awareness:

• Creating social media posts

• Making your website SEO friendly

• Guest posting on other business owners blog

• Appearing on a podcast

• Creating videos

• Attending in-person events

This stage of the sales funnel is where you also need to take a hard look at your target market, your client avatar, and your metrics. You want to make sure what you are doing to try to attract the right leads into your funnel is actually working.

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Interest

If you have reached the Interest stage of your sales funnel that means you have successfully caught the interest of a lead. During this stage of the funnel, you are building a relationship with your new lead and seeing what their goals are for interacting with your brand.

During this stage you can:

• Create email campaigns

• Write blog posts

• Create a lead magnet

  • E-books

  • Webinar

  • Free trial

  • Free challenge

The goal of this stage is to provide valuable content in exchange for a lead’s contact information. Once you have their contact information, you will now be able to nurture that lead and funnel them to the next step of your sales process.

Everything that you create in this stage should keep your target audience in mind. By providing true value, you will be more likely to attract high-quality leads that will more likely convert to paying customers.

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Desire

Once you hit the desire stage of the sales funnel, your lead is now interested and considering making a purchase. However, they aren't quite ready to purchase yet. This stage is where they look at the cost of your product/service, determine how they can use your product or services to reach their goals, and weigh the value.

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For this stage you could:

• Generate testimonials from past customers

• Create a pricing page

• Provide case studies

• Offer discount codes

• Create a webinar

• Offer a consultation

This stage is also where email marketing becomes essential. You send your leads through a welcome sequence to get to know more about you and your brand. Provide a ton of value and avoid being too “salesy.” After they go through your welcome sequence, you want to consistently send emails to build trust, establish your authority, and ultimately increase your sales.

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Action

You made it! You are now ready to fully convert your lead to a customer. This stage is where you focus on setting them up for success with your product or service.

In this stage you could provide:

• Special offers

• Extra trainings

• An e-book

• Follow-up email campaigns

We encourage transparency and connection with new customers after making a purchase.

Loyalty

Once you sell to a customer, don't forget about them! It is so much easier to get an already converted lead to purchase again than it is to start over from a fresh lead. Plus, if they enjoyed your product or service, they pass along your information to someone else.

In the loyalty stage you could offer:

• A referral program

• Re-engagement email campaign

• Upsells

• A new webinar experience

By building brand loyalty, you should never make your customers feel like there isn’t any new content to engage with. Keep providing value through helpful social media posts, blog posts, emails, and/or videos. You want to keep the long-term relationship going, and it should go well beyond just selling all the time.

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Analyze and optimize your funnel

Once you have your sales funnel complete, don’t just “set it and forget it.” Funnels constantly need to be analyzed to make sure every step of the process is running smoothly and efficiently. You should also frequently look for ways that you can optimize your funnel and your client experience.

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Things you can do to optimize your funnel:

• Use analytics tools to track each step

• Look at conversion rates and drop-off rates

• Look into areas that could use improvement and make adjustments when needed

• Conduct A/B testing to see what is more effective

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Do you have a proper sales funnel set up for your business? When was the last time you took a good look at your funnel? If you don’t have a sales funnel set up or know that your current funnel is not working as well as you know it could be, take the time and get set up so you can increase your business growth.

If this is something that you need help with or just don’t have the time to handle, reach out! The team at Martha Warner, LLC can help you with. We have a proven record of capturing leads and turning them into loyal customers through digital marketing campaigns, email marketing, and through website design.

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Categories: Business, Other