Jade Boyd: Many people think that the sales funnel ends as soon as someone buys, but that is very short term thinking. I don’t want you to fall into that trap, and it’s a really unsustainable way to run your business, honestly.

One of my top five strengths is learner and I love learning about business and marketing, and recently I was on YouTube and the algorithm served me up this video about building your sales funnel and I clicked to watch it. And this video was riddled with tech jargon with affiliate ads for paid software platforms that were really expensive, complex paid advertising recommendations, and for most business owners, this kind of advice on building a sales funnel isn’t really helpful. It’s just overwhelming and a little bit demotivating, but I want you to know that building a sales funnel that converts and books out your services does not have to be complicated or expensive. You can create an evergreen organic sales funnel that helps you book your services on autopilot without all of the stress and overwhelm and tech jargon.

So today I’m going to share my five step sales funnel framework and a roadmap for building your business without the social media hustle this year, if that is your goal. So starting out, what is a sales funnel even? A sales funnel is just a map of your sales process from the moment someone becomes aware that you exist to them becoming a client and repeat client or referral partner.

The map of your sales funnel looks kind of like an upside down pyramid or an upside down triangle. The widest part at the top is the large audience that is aware that you exist. And then the bottom point of the triangle Is the smaller segment of your audience that are repeat clients, it’s people who are really your referral partners sending you new clients, but that’s a much smaller portion of your audience. So it just is this visual representation of how people move through that journey in your business from, Hey, I just discovered you exist to, ooh, I’m really interested in what you’re doing, to I’m going to hire you to help me and then wow, that was an amazing experience I’m going to tell everybody about it. So if you want to see a visual of this, definitely head to the show notes and there’s a really simple graphic that’ll show you each stage as a little summary and how this process actually looks.

So mapping out your sales funnel and going through this exercise is going to help you market your business more strategically and really pick the right marketing tactics that make sense for your business that also increase your sales and move people through that buying process at every stage of the funnel.

And too often, I think business owners who are struggling to hit their sales goals just don’t really know what to focus on to solve the problem. And when you can’t accurately diagnose what’s going wrong in your sales funnel or in your buying process or in your marketing funnel, you will probably throw spaghetti at the wall, just trying to fix the wrong thing, which can obviously be very frustrating and potentially expensive.

But when you have a clear sales funnel strategy that identifies the goals and the metrics for every stage in that process, it’s so much easier to diagnose what’s going wrong. If you notice that you’re in a sales slump and how you can actually improve your marketing strategy, and close the gap and book more clients.

So mapping out your sales funnel will also help you do a better job of nurturing your audience at each stage of that funnel and making sure they’re getting the right information at the right time to give them a better experience. But again, to move them through that journey so that they’re going deeper and deeper into that funnel, and they’re not just remaining stagnant at the same stage or like bouncing out of that funnel and unfollowing.

And the last reason why this is really important is that setting up your sales funnel will help you end that feast or famine cycle for booking clients and start making more regular sales in your business without relying on social media or constant launching if you don’t want to.

So with that being said, let’s dive into what this actually looks like. There are many different marketing funnel, sales funnel frameworks to choose from, but I’ve created my own simple five stage funnel framework that works really, really well for service based business owners and solopreneurs and online business owners.

And the five stages of the marketing funnel are awareness, community, leads, marketing, and then at the very bottom, repeat clients and referrals. So let’s go over what the goal of each stage of the funnel is. And I’m also going to share some of my favorite marketing tactics that are not social media that you can use to drive sales in your service business at each stage of this funnel.

The first stage is awareness, starting at the very top of the funnel. So before someone can become a client of yours, they obviously have to know that you exist, right? And the goal for the stage of the funnel is creating brand awareness and getting your business and your services in front of your ideal audience.

The goal isn’t necessarily to grow your audience, but making sure that you’re attracting the right people to your audience. So most service providers don’t need a huge audience in order to reach their business goals. You can accomplish a lot in business with a very small audience, as long as you’re attracting the right people. So the goal here is bringing the right people into your audience and making them aware that you exist.

And when most business owners think about brand awareness, the immediate thing that jumps to mind is social media, right? But that’s not the one and only solution. And you don’t have to use that here if you don’t want to. There are so many other strategies that you can utilize when it comes to connecting with the right people.

And make sure you’re clear on the exact person you’re trying to attract. So refer back to episode 62 if you’re not clear on that, to learn more about how to clarify your ideal client and your core marketing strategy before you set up your sales funnel. And for marketing tactics at this stage, my top three favorite business minimalist marketing strategies as I like to call them for building brand awareness are first guest podcasting, second creating evergreen content that’s SEO optimized, and then third Pinterest. And each of these strategies can help you reach your ideal people and grow your audience without showing up to social media. And all of these tactics also drive results for much longer than individual social media posts, which disappear very quickly.

And let me just say that at each stage of the funnel, I’m going to give you like one to three of my top favorite tactics, but there are so many tactics that you can use at each stage of the funnel. So what I really like about this framework too is that it gives you a guideline. This is a tried and true strategy and generally how people are going to move through that buying journey in your business.

But you have so much flexibility and freedom depending on what you’re good at, what you like doing, who’s on your team, what feels most aligned to you to move people through this funnel and serve them at each stage in that journey in a way that is strategic for you and your goals, but also works well for your business and your time capacity and your team capacity and all of those things.

So again, It doesn’t have to be super complicated. It doesn’t have to be super expensive. You can align this to wherever you’re at in your business, but I’m just going to give you some tips and some hints of what some of my favorite tactics are at each stage.

Okay. Moving on to the second stage, the second stage of the sales funnel is community. So once someone is aware that you exist, It should be your goal to bring them deeper into your community and build that real relationship with them. And this is so important for service providers, especially because we all work with people we know, like, and trust.

So once someone finds you through a guest podcast or a blog post or that Pinterest pin, You need to direct them on what to do next to become an insider and don’t make them guess at what they should do. Don’t let them just like follow you forever without taking a next step and building that relationship with you.

The people who join your community are much more likely to be qualified leads because they are opting in to get more information from you. They’re raising their hand metaphorically and saying, I need what you have to offer, help me. And my absolute favorite marketing strategy for building community is email marketing.

Not only does an email list to give you direct access to this potential qualified lead and like full access to their undivided attention, it opens up so many more doors to engage and connect with them. Any business owner will also tell you that social media is a party. There’s a lot of hype, but when it comes to making sales or booking calls, most people are more willing to take action through email when they’re on their desktop, ready to click that button and check out, or are actually in the mindset to think about making decisions for their life and for their business or book a discovery call or something like that, rather than when they’re on social media.

Plus, you can schedule all of your email content in advance without having to show up live anywhere, which is another bonus and why it’s my favorite tactic for the stage. But there’s a lot of other ways to build community in your business. Email lists and email marketing is just my favorite way.

The third stage of the funnel is leads. Once someone is in your insider club, they’re in your community, they’re getting value from you. They’re. growing to trust you. The next step you want them to take is to fill out your contact form or your application form. And a little side note here, if you’re showing up on social media and getting frustrated by the number of leads you’re getting, it might be because you’re skipping the community stage.

Again, it’s hard to jump from the awareness stage directly into the lead stage without bridging that gap and building community and building that relationship.

My favorite marketing tactic at this stage for generating leads, are automated sales sequences and sales emails, like nurturing, engaging sales emails, not sales emails. And if you have an active, engaged community that you’re serving and providing value to regularly, they’ve already raised their hand again to say, I want what you have to offer, help me.

Then you really shouldn’t hesitate to ask for the sale or that call the action to say, and if you want more of this, fill out my contact form or fill out my application, whatever that next step in the process looks like for you to generate the lead. There are so many ways to sell through email that don’t feel salesy, which is another reason why it’s my favorite strategy for building community as a business owner.

But again, if you’re building community on a different platform or with a different method. Generally the strategy here is to just have that call to action that asks them to fill out your application that educates them on your services and how you can help them in a deeper way to get them better results and to ask them to apply or contact you or sign up now, whatever that call to action is, that is the best way to generate leads.

And again, it’s a lot easier to do that for your community than to do that for people who have just discovered you online, especially if you’re selling higher ticket services. I had a coaching client last year who just started her email list. I think she started it in the summer and she’s a family photographer. So she was doing fall mini sessions, but throughout the summer she was working on building her email list. And by the time fall came around, she was able to book out all of her mini sessions just using emails.

And I think she maybe sent four emails total and booked out four days of mini sessions. And that’s the power of building community and getting like your insiders together because when you do have those calls to action or offers that you need to book, it’s a lot easier for you to do that rather than posting a million times on social media or using some of those tactics that only really work for the top of the funnel.

And she was actually able to triple her income last year, which is super exciting. So the longer that you’re investing in the sales funnel and building it out at every single stage, the easier it’s going to be for you to like, generate sales when you need to, or to plan successful launches when you need to, and to hit your sales metrics, whatever that looks like month by month, easier because you’re already building that foundation and getting people ready for the sale.

Okay. The fourth stage of the funnel is clients. So at this point, you’ve closed the sale. Your lead has officially signed the dotted line and they paid the deposit and they’re officially your client. Many people think that the sales funnel ends as soon as someone buys, but that is very short term thinking. I don’t want you to fall into that trap, and it’s a really unsustainable way to run your business, honestly.

I’m sure that we’ve all had those experiences where we have signed the dotted line and signed up to work with somebody or buy a product or a service, whatever that would look like. And then as soon as we buy it, realize like, wow, this experience is horrible. Everything that they promised on the front end is no more.

And that’s why focusing on clients and even marketing tactics within this stage is so important for building a sustainable business. The prime example that I have of this, which I tell everybody about is my QuickBooks story. And, oh my gosh, it was horrible. I switched to QuickBooks probably two and a half years ago and had a phenomenal experience through their sales funnel up until the moment where I signed up and I was going to have a like QuickBooks bookkeeper as well.

And after two months of signing up, nobody had done a single thing to set up my bookkeeping or do my monthly bookkeeping even though I was paying for it. And I was on the phone with support for like hours trying to figure out what was going on and they were unreachable. I don’t know if anyone has QuickBooks and has had similar experiences with QuickBooks support.

Everyone I’ve talked to has kind of said the same thing that their client experience is terrible and getting help when you need it is very time consuming and nearly Impossible. And long story short, I ended up cancelling that. Obviously, it took me a long time to get a refund because again, nobody was available or able to solve my problem. I kept being promised like, yeah, we’re going to escalate this and we submitted your ticket and you should get a refund and then it wouldn’t happen. And anyway, I ended up hiring a bookkeeper, not from QuickBooks and still just had a terrible experience with the platform, even though I was barely interacting with it.

And recently, they made a mistake, like it was a software issue and they charged me fees that I technically didn’t need to pay because it was their mistake and same thing. It has been probably six months of going back and forth with support and being promised over and over again. Oh yeah, we’ll solve this issue. It’s totally not your fault. I’ll make sure this gets resolved. And then a month later, the fee is still there and I have to call again and spend more time and now I am no longer a QuickBooks customer and it is the best feeling in the world to be separated from them because it was just a horrible client experience.

And that’s from the perspective of a software program. But the same thing applies when it comes to your services, the way that you treat and serve your clients at this stage is so important. There’s a famous study that was done by Zendesk on this, that shows that people are more likely to share negative customer experiences than positive ones. And they also found that 54 percent of people share their bad experiences with more than five people. And they were also more likely to share their bad experiences on social media. This is so true. I see it all the time now that I know the statistic and I’ve told so many people about this horrible QuickBooks story.

I might have even shared it on the podcast in the past, but make sure that you’re not sabotaging your sales funnel at this stage of the process, because this is like arguably the most important stage.

So diving into marketing tactics for this stage. When you think of the term marketing tactics, you’re probably not thinking about serving your clients or like the simple strategy of doing what you say you’re going to do for your clients. But that is huge. I would define marketing as any strategy or process that helps you sell your services and showing up to over deliver for your clients is the number one marketing strategy in my book.

If you serve them well, they will most likely come back and be a repeat client and tell other people about their great experience and tell people they should hire you. And again, as far as like building that trust for people who are ready to buy from you, this is not only free marketing, it’s the most effective form of marketing. So don’t skip out on this stage and make sure that you’re focusing on this stage and making sure that it leads into the next stage, which is the last stage, the fifth stage, which is repeat clients and referrals.

So if you’re continually bringing clients full circle through all five stages of this funnel, it’s a good sign that you have a healthy and sustainable business. And you can refer back to last week’s episode, episode 72, Building A Scalable Offer Suite, which is another kind of tactic at this stage for generating repeat clients, making sure that you’re able to serve them after they’re done working with you and there is a next way for them to continue working with you.

But some of my other favorite strategies for booking repeat clients and generating referrals are first focusing on building that world class client experience that naturally leads into them. Hiring you again, or telling people that they should work with you. But second would be to create a more formal referral program and giving them an excuse to tell other people about why it was amazing to work with you and why everyone should like go fill out your contact form, your application, or join your community.

And I use Thrivecart to sell all of my courses and all of my offers. And one of the reasons why I switched that platform was because it automates my referral program and makes my life. Really easy. It automates sending referral bonuses to past clients who are referring new clients to me. And I also have a referral program set up for my course that organize your business course, which also incentivizes my students to share their experience and their referral link with other people, because they can make a little bit of money from sharing that link. So again, it just incentivizes them to share the good experience. And you can check out episode 54 if you want to learn more about why I quit Dubsado and how I moved everything from Dubsado as a service provider to Thrivecart and ClickUp instead, I go much more in depth there of why I love Thrivecart, but ultimately the tactic is building a referral program and you can do that even if it’s not automated, but simply asking your clients and having a step in your process that asks them to share their testimonial or giving them something that they can post on social media about working with you or you yourself sharing in your stories and tagging them so that they have an even easier excuse to share what their experience was like working with you.

All of those small things can add up to more referrals and then as far as the client workflow goes and giving that great experience, that is what generates repeat clients.

The very last thing I want to touch on on this episode before we go is how to track your sales funnel. So when it comes to tracking your marketing metrics, I would recommend being really clear about which stage of the funnel each metric is measuring. So in my coaching program, I give my clients a template, a spreadsheet for this that helps them track their metrics for each stage of their funnel.

And this is really helpful because if you’re not booking clients regularly, you can go to your metric spreadsheet and see exactly. where the problem is and where you need to focus your efforts in order to like bridge that gap and get people moving through your funnel. So for example, if you have a huge community, but nobody is submitting your contact form, then you know that you need to focus on nurturing and selling to your community.

If you have a tiny audience and nobody is opting into your community, then you know that you either have an audience problem. The right people aren’t there. Or you need to do a better job at inviting people into your community and making that look a little bit more enticing and valuable to them.

So in my coaching program, The Business Edit, I help my clients build a sales funnel that sells within their first couple months of the program. And this includes a workbook that lists all of the goals, strategies, tactics, and calls to action, and also step by step guidance on how to actually implement all of those strategies and tactics to turn your audience into paying clients on autopilot.

And that also includes a step by step training and templates for creating that world class client experience and ways to up level that experience so that you are creating the best possible experience possible that leads to repeat clients and to referrals. So if this is a concept that you’ve been struggling with or want more one on one support and guidance and coaching to build, definitely check out the business edit coaching program and you can learn more and apply at the link in the show notes.

We can make sure that this is a good fit for you and your business. And even talk a little bit about your sales funnel and what’s working and not working for you on your discovery call. So. Overall, I hope that you’ve gotten value from this episode and it’s helped you think about sales funnels in a way that’s more approachable and not as overwhelming.

And until next time, business minimalists, take what you learned today and get 1 percent better this week.