Chapter 02
How to Build a Sales Funnel
There are six major steps to building a successful sales funnel, starting with careful preparation.
Step 1: Understand Your Audience
Your sales funnel is all about your audience, so it’s no surprise that’s where you start building one. The first step is to do some research to ensure you really know who you’re selling to.
“You cannot skip knowing, defining and fully understanding your ideal clients,” Ashley says. “If you don't know what those people look like and what their needs are, then your sales funnel will never work.”
There are two techniques you can use to dive into your target audience:
- ICPs or Buyer Personas: ICP stands for “ideal customer profile,” and it outlines your business’s perfect customer or client. It’s a bit of a higher level view than a buyer persona, which focuses on things like preferences, demographics, motivators and challenges. (Check out HubSpot’s comparison of the two.) These two tools give you a deeper understanding of who you’re selling to and what problems they’re facing.
- Customer journey maps: Once you have your ICP or persona figured out, you can map out exactly what steps they have to take on the journey to becoming a customer (and beyond). This map provides a visual representation of a potential client’s needs as they get to know your brand and develop their relationship with you. “These are invaluable in sales funnel design because it helps you determine exactly what information a potential client needs at each step in their journey,” Ashley notes.
Step 2: Build a Landing Page
Now that you know who your customers are, you need to give them somewhere to go. That’s where your landing page comes in. This is the page that hosts your top of funnel content. It piques their interest, gets their attention and encourages them to engage with your brand.
“Think of the landing page like the starting line of your sales funnel,” Ashley says. “Except the customer is the one who has to kick off the race.”
If you’re struggling with conversion rates, getting people to take action on a landing page might seem impossible. But Ashley recommends three ways to improve your page design so it’s easy for people to enter your funnel.
- Include only one call to action (CTA). This doesn’t necessarily mean only one place to click, but it does mean only one message. More than one CTA on a landing page is confusing for users and instead of figuring out what you want them to do, they’ll probably just leave. Distill your request into a single directive and use only that phrase on the page.
- For example: “Download the guide,” “Enroll in the eCourse,” “Register for the webinar.”
- Make the page short, simple and exciting. “Too many businesses think their landing page has to be full of information. In reality, you want to keep it very simple so the person’s focus goes straight to that top of funnel content,” Ashley says. Always use active language and focus on a single concise message.
- Most importantly, you need to provide value on your landing page. People arrive at this page expecting something from your business, so it’s imperative that you deliver. “Keep in mind that your role at this stage is to provide helpful information,” Ashley reminds us. “Make your lead generator something that your ICP truly values and can actually help them define their problem.”
With a quality landing page set up, you should start seeing leads roll in. This leads us to the next step: qualifying leads and helping them determine if you’re a good fit.
Step 3: Develop a Relationship
Now we turn our attention to the first stage of your sales funnel. The main goal is to bring people to the landing page you just built and get them to opt into your lead magnet by providing their contact information. This will start producing your TOFU leads.
Before you get excited about the prospect of leads pouring in, consider this advice from Ashley:
“At this stage, you’ll likely have a significant amount of leads and a majority of them won’t buy from you. Learn to be okay with that. You don’t need to get too serious too quickly with leads at the top of your funnel. You want to woo them, not propose.”
She adds that wooing is particularly important because leads at this stage are still in research mode. They don’t even know exactly what their problem is yet, so they definitely aren’t sure what solution they need. That’s why it’s more important to spend this time building a relationship.
You create that relationship with quality content. Become a trusted advisor by offering informational blog posts, research reports, eBooks and even white papers that help potential clients better understand their problem and start thinking about how it impacts their life.
Ashley adds that while all this is happening, your sales team should be qualifying leads in the background. (Hint: Automation can make this a whole lot easier.) You’ll have to work quickly due to the number of incoming leads, but it’s important to know who matches your ICP and who is most likely to move to the next stage of your funnel.
Step 4: Be the Guide
By this point, your leads should be in the middle of your funnel. You should have already disqualified some leads from TOFU and are now working with people who have defined their problems and are exploring solutions.
“These leads want to know how you can solve their problem,” Ashley explains. “Be their guide, their problem solver. And remember: they’re still working on building trust, so don’t sell to them just yet. Instead, show empathy and offer knowledge.”
You can do this by nurturing leads with valuable information. Email marketing is perhaps the most common method of nurturing, particularly email nurture campaigns — a series of emails that provides information and moves leads closer to the decision stage. This is a powerful method, and easy to implement with automation, but it’s not the only way to nurture MOFU leads.
Ashley recommends taking a dynamic approach to this phase of your sales funnel. Supply it with diverse types of content, such as comparison guides (of services, not vendors), video, webinars or podcasts. Anything that helps people make sense of their options and start forming an opinion about what they need.
Step 5: Ask for the Sale
A lead has reached the bottom of your funnel, and it’s time for all of your marketing efforts to come to fruition. Your leads should know what their problem is, what solutions are available and who is in the market to help them. With all this information, they should be ready to talk to you about your product or service.
That being said, it’s still not time for a hard sell. “Selling like that simply doesn’t work in this world anymore,” Ashley says. “Take a consultative approach, instead. Show them you can help them solve their problem and guide them to that solution (your business).”
Just because people are ready to talk to you and have made it to that decision stage, doesn’t mean they’ll purchase right away. These leads still need a little help getting over the finish line, which you can provide with the right resource at the right time. Things like case studies, vendor comparisons, live demos, trial periods or even consultation sessions work well to answer someone’s final questions and convince them to purchase.
Ashley also recommends using 1:1 videos to help provide specific pieces of information. “You can share strategy recommendations or show potential clients what’s worked for similar companies facing their same problems. This helps build trust in your business because you’re positioning yourself as an expert with a proven track record.”
Step 6: Stay Engaged
If your sales funnel did its job, you now have a new customer! Congratulations! Do a little dance, file it in the “wins” category, but don’t put that new client on the back burner. It’s easy for salespeople to transition clients over to the client services team and forget about them. However, maintaining that relationship is key to customer retention.
“The sales team just spent a lot of time becoming this person’s trusted advisor,” Ashley explains, “so they need to continue that relationship. It reinforces the trust between a current customer and the sales team, which builds more potential for referrals and future business.”
She recommends setting reminders for yourself every few months to follow up with new clients and see how things are going. You can ask if they’re seeing the results they wanted or send over some helpful information that relates to their business or situation.
This gives you an opportunity to evaluate if there are any other issues you can help with or ask for referrals. There is one thing Ashely stresses in this stage of the funnel: Always add value before making an ask.
“You don’t want to pop out every few months and ask for something from your clients. Build reciprocity by offering value first, showing you care, then asking for a little something in return.”