Sales funnels can help your company identify potential customers, generate leads, and finally convert them into paying customers. So how do you go about finding these customers? Today, let’s talk about sales and lead funnels in funnel building 101.
Quote:
“You always want to be attracting, delighting, and engaging whoever you’re connecting with because even if they don’t do business with you, they might have somebody in their network that will and they can make that introduction for you.”
Topics and Timestamps:
- 3 main stages of buyers (00:54.1- 02:02.2)
- Being trustworthy gets the business (02:02.9- 02:22.9)
- Awareness stage (02:23.1- 03:02.8)
- Consideration stage (03:03.0- 03:34.0)
- Decision stage (03:34.2- 04:08.5)
- Sales funnel map (04:08.9- 04:35.5)
- Lead funnel (04:58.7- 06:30.0)
- Awareness stage as top of the funnel (06:38.2- 06:56.6)
- Consideration stage as middle of the funnel 06:57.0- 07:24.5
- Decision stage as bottom of the funnel (07:24.6- 08:16.7)
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Transcription
Are you ready to take your digital marketing to the next level, using tried and true methods and emerging trends? It’s Ashleigh and you’re listening to the Digitally Grounded podcast. We’ll talk about all things digital marketing from sales funnels and flywheels, social media, email marketing, and more. So if you’re ready to take your marketing to the next level, keep listening.
Hey, it’s Ashleigh again here for funnel building 101. Let’s talk about sales and lead funnels. In the previous episode, we talked about being an authority and using your thought leadership to build your business.
Now, the next step once you’ve established what you want to talk about and how you want to talk about it, I want you to start to think about the stages of the people that are going to come across your content.
So there are 3 main stages of buyers. You have people who are in the “awareness stage” meaning that they’re just becoming aware of you and your brand. They don’t know you and maybe they’ve never met you in person or virtually. Maybe they’ve stumbled across some of your awesome organic “content marketing strategy” content, right?
The second stage is the “consideration stage” and this is when they’ve gotten to know you a little bit, they’re starting to trust you a little, and they’re considering, maybe this person does know what they’re talking about, maybe I can trust them enough to give them my email address, sign up for a consultation, download a product or attend a workshop, something like that.
And then, the third stage is the “decision stage”. Some people say a “decision” falls into when they book that consultation call but they’re still in “consideration” in my mind. The decision is when they are about to hit the buy button or they are about to sign that contract and they’re trying to decide between you and somebody else.
Within those 3 stages, you’re going to be communicating with someone differently. In the awareness stage, I don’t recommend saying “buy this from me, buy this from me”. They’re just getting to know you and you’ve got to remember that people that they know, people that they like, the people that they trust are the ones that are going to get their business.
So in the awareness stage, I think it’s great to just sell the thinking, sell the methodology and in terms of free content so sharing your expertise, your knowledge, keep it basic, it doesn’t have to go you know super in-depth at this stage because they’re just getting to know you and share your personality you know, make it about you because people connect with people even though we run businesses. Businesses are owned by people, they’re run by people, we connect with people so put your personality in there, let your expertise shine and connect with them in that awareness phase.
In the consideration phase, then I would say you can get a little more specific here. This is where I would share case studies or more in-depth research or topics that are an intermediate level. Being able to book a consult call with you or something like that where somebody can learn at an intermediate to a high level and be able to connect with you personally in some way.
And then finally, in the decision phase, this is when you want to have that face time if you haven’t had it already. Get on the phone with someone, get on Zoom with someone, and connect with them if you can’t do it in person and let everything shine through. Your expertise that you were talking about and your awareness stage, your personality, the fact that you’re knowledgeable.
And this is when depending on your business and depending on your industry you can get really specific into you know advanced topics and that sort of thing in the decision phase.
And in these 3 stages of buyers, they also map to a sales funnel so you have the awareness stage is typically the top of the funnel, the consideration is toward the middle and then the decision is at the bottom of the funnel. That’s something else to consider when you’re deciding what to talk about with a buyer or potential buyer depending on where they are in this journey.
And it doesn’t matter what stage they are at in the journey. You always want to be attracting, delighting, and engaging whoever you’re connecting with because even if they don’t do business with you, they might have somebody in their network that will and they can make that introduction for you. So these are things to consider when you’re talking about sales and lead funnels.
Typically, when you’re talking about getting those leads, I like to focus on the awareness stage at first, and then as you get more complex offers and complex funnels building in, then you can build specific funnels for someone who’s in the consideration phase versus someone who’s in the awareness phase or somebody who has already been attracted to you because they’ve consumed your free content.
Maybe they’ve signed up for a consultation or they’ve purchased a lower value offer that you have, like a digital version of your service because many times, one thing that I love doing for people is looking at their service and thinking. How can we adapt this into some sort of digital product or create some sort of digital workflow that will save you time, right?
If there’s something that you’re repeating with every single client is there a way we can automate that digitally and so let’s say you create something like that and the person has already come to that attract stage and now you’re delighting them because you’re giving them all this wonderful content on autopilot and you’re engaging with them regularly and then finally by the time they get to you, you know and they’re sitting down with you whether it be on zoom or in-person meeting, they feel like they’ve known you forever and that’s where we want to be as service providers right? We want to be in that relationship with them where they trust us and it feels like they’ve known us forever even if we’re just sitting down with them in person for the first time.
So just to recap, in funnel building 101, we talked about lead funnels and sales funnels and the 3 stages of buyers. We have the buyers that are in awareness mode- this is the top of the funnel, they’ve probably never heard of you and your main goal is to attract them, right? You want to impress them with the knowledge but you don’t want to keep it too heavy, you want to keep it light, keep it basic at this stage.
Consideration, this is where they’re middle of funnel and they have come to know you, they’ve consumed some of your content and they’re considering booking a call with you, considering working with you, they’re also considering your competition at this stage and you want to delight them. You want to show them that you are unique and that you can help them exactly with what they need help with so you can solve their problem.
And then finally the third stage is the decision stage and in this stage, you want to be upping that engagement, you still wanna delight them but you really want to have those close connections with them, you want to share some high-level, high-value information with them and also be able to build that level of trust. There at the bottom of the funnel, they’re probably comparing you to a handful of other folks who offer the same or similar service and you want to stand out, and in the digital world that we’re in sometimes it’s the little things that could make a big difference, sending a handwritten note, you know. Sending a bumpy envelope. Because the bumpy envelopes always get opened. So think about that in the decision stage, and attract, delight, and engage no matter the stage.
I know that I sort of broke them up into 3 things just to make it simple but you always want to be in the position of making people happy and helping people out to the best of your ability. That’s it for funnel building one on one.
In the next episode, we’re going to get into content marketing plans, we’re gonna break it up into a few episodes actually because I have a lot to cover. Hopefully, you’re following along and I will see you in the next episode. Have a good one!
The Digitally Grounded podcast is written and produced by me, Ashleigh Lindsay, our editor is Jessica Marshall, and our music is ‘Summer Hip Hop Upbeat’ by Lightbeats. Thanks for listening!
