SFM EP 33: Structuring Your Sales Funnel Based On What Growth Stage You're In

In episode #33 we discuss how to structure your funnel based on what stage of growth you're currently in. You should be focusing on different sales funnels and strategies based on your strategic goals, and in this episode we break them down into the "profitability" and "maximization" stages. You'll even get to hear my upcoming plans for a new business I'm partnering in, how I just made a client $70,000 in a week doing a tiny launch to his own list, and so much more!

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Transcript

Hello, everybody. This is Jeremy Reeves and I'm back today with another episode of The Sales Funnel Mastery Podcast. So today this is going to be another fairly short episode. I'm actually flying in one of my employees from Italy this weekend, actually might do a podcast with him, maybe we'll go out and have a few drinks and we'll come back and do a podcast I think that'll be fun, actually.

So one of the things that we're doing is strategizing a whole bunch of stuff for the growth of business and kind of the direction we're headed, the vision, all that kind of stuff that makes really, really big changes. If you've been following me, you know that this year has been I've made more huge changes that I've ever have and we're make even more. And the cool thing is all of them have to do with getting better results for our clients which is kind of awesome.

So when is think that we're going to be doing is putting some systems in place get guest podcasts, guest interviews on the podcast. So that's one thing coming up to the podcast. We're going to be doing it a little bit more frequently -- that kind of thing.

So with that said, what we're going to be talking about today, a lot of people get kind of stuck -- they don't really know what to do with a business, they don't know how to structure, what they should do first, what does she do second -- that kind of thing. I just brought in a new client and me and him are actually doing a revenue share deal which is basically -- I get them to send me basically an upfront fee for the initial (01:59) and then instead of doing a flat fee, so you know, I'm going to be doing A, B, and C for you, you're going to send me X dollars. We do upfront fee plus revenue share.

So I'm just kind of struggling to strategize what were gonna do for you in -- that kind of thing. It made me realize that a lot of people kind of don't know how to build their funnel in stages and this idea also came because a lot of clients come to me and I don't know if we should kind of do a mini funnel first, get that profitable and into a bigger one or if we should just do it all at once -- you know, that kind of thing.

So basically, there are two different ways of doing it. The step that I recommend, or the stages, you can call it, number one is the first thing you should do, you should be (02:52) about this, basically profitability and then maximization. When I'm talking with clients, if you come to me you should know that I don't push giant funnels right from the beginning if it doesn't make sense for the client.

What I usually do is kind of the stage 1 profitability funnel and the stage 2 maximization funnel. And that's because. I mean, number one, I want case studies -- that's why I have a million and a half case studies and get the results that we do is because we do it in steps that make it kind of easy wins.

The first stage is getting to profitability. Most businesses that I've come in contact with are already profitable what is just like taking it from whatever it is to essentially more profitability and the first thing that I always look at is you have all these different leverage points in your business you have all these key levers and what I look at is where are all the opportunities that you're not taking advantage of?

For example, this new client that came on, his name is Nick. One of the first things that I'm going to do for neck is that he get tons and tons and tons of visitors to website and people that come on to his list -- he has almost like a cult-like following, so people that come on to his list tend to buy in pretty large percentages. So the problem with that is that he has a hard time getting people on his list -- he's not doing very much to get people on to his list.

So step number one is going to be get people on his list. Another thing is that his prices -- he's getting a 70 to 80% close rate on his packages that he sells (I'm not going to get into too much information about it just for, you know, right privileges) just say 70% of client which is too high. If you're selling basically over 50-60% of people, it means your prices aren't low enough. So the first thing is that we're going to be implementing new packages for him to sell. That are probably going to be 50-100% bigger from then they are right now.

I don't know exactly how I'm going to structure that you know it might just be "it was this and now it's this". More than likely, I'm going to give him choices. So instead of "okay, it's for coaching sessions for for whatever thousand dollars or whatever it is" -- I don't even... I forget the prices on top of my head. I'm going to do something like 4 packages for $1,000 or you can buy 8 for $2,000 or whatever it is so kindly give them tiered approaches and then there's all kinds of things will do with that. We'll have some decoy offers in there. We'll make it so that if they go for the higher end package, it's this complete no-brainer badass offer -- that kind of thing.

Those are just two -- there's a lot more that I'm going to do with them and I may able to do a future podcast about it but for now, that's just kind of two examples of easy wins that we're going to go after so that's the type of stuff that I'd like to do with clients first. You know, sometimes, depending on the client that I'm working with, I actually do a little promotion for them in the beginning.

For one example, actually a promotion that I just did 2 weeks ago, the client came on (and I like to get client's an ROIs as fast as we can) so what we did was we just did a promotion to his list, he had a monthly membership, and I said "hey, why don't we just do a quick promotion, get you some money in the bank", (and I actually got a percentage of that too), so I said "instead of me charging you, I'll just just take a percent of the sales", and it was actually a pretty large percent in that case.

So what we did was we did a promotion and took his monthly subscribers -- he had them on a monthly, like 37 bucks a month, and we really made a good offer for them to upgrade to the yearly that's all we did. So it's nothing complicated, it's nothing fancy. In fact, we could have done a way better job just in terms of what the offer was but that was his easy opportunity. He he was able to get basically 12 months of revenue from the subscribers at least not even close to his 12 months of revenue but we were able to kind of pull that in in a week so I made a little over $70,000 in a week. It was actually a 60000, rough numbers, 60 grand from people that upgraded and another 20 in potential people from people who took a trial offers that we did and 50% of them, roughly, they (07:55) with the trial.

That could've been better but we had some PayPal issues and some random credit card issues -- things like that. So bottom line is that I made him $70,000 in a week before any other thing was done. So whatever he does, we're kind of figuring out what the next steps are now, but that gives him a big cash influx to then put towards more copy or better strategy for building whatever funnel we're going to do. So that's what I mean by getting profitable.

Basically, what you want to do is, regardless of where you're at, if you're not doing as well as you should be and you're having a hard time getting paid traffic to work, you're just kind of struggling, you're floundering, sometimes things work, sometimes it doesn't, it's not consistent. If you're in any kind of service or really, product business too, you're having that roller coaster income -- where your income is kind of like it dips down, and then the next month it's high, it dips down, next month it's high, dips down -- you know, that kind of thing.

What you want to do is get the funnel in place just to get it profitable, get it? So that it can sustain you. Don't worry about getting this complicated, fancy funnels and survey funnels and really advanced segmentation -- and that kind of thing.

I actually have a new webinar about taking to the second level, the next level, you know the maximization. But if you're struggling a little bit right now, don't worry about that because what happens is -- and its not that I don't work because it obviously works but that's the second level -- what happens is -- and I see this over and over and over and over again -- people get stuck they see it and it's like "oh my god, that's just too much I can't do it", and mentally, it just paralyzes you. You can't figure out how to get everything done, if you're coming to someone like me, it's too expensive -- you know, that kind of thing. And then it just never gets done and then a year goes by and you're at the exact same place that you are right now.

When people come to me, I try to not get them to fall into that indecision trap. What I'll typically say is that "okay, let's just get a simple funneled out", and that differs a lot between various businesses but let's just say it's just like a typical landing page and you have a retargeting coming back to that and then you have a sales letter with a free trial exit pop-up, you have some prospect emails, you have some buyer emails and a couple of upsells -- like that's a pretty typical upsell funnel. If you're offline, maybe you add in some radio ads or newspaper ad or direct mail or you know, that kind of thing.

If you're some kind of service, you add what I call ' Pre-engagement Framing Sequence' which is basically before people talk to you, you're kind of like pre-selling them on the call to talk to them like for a free consultation or whatever so it looks different from between the different businesses but the thing is if you are not already doing really, really well, we want to focus on that is just getting to that point where are you can sustain your self, you have a little bit of cash to invest back in the business, you can buy paied traffic -- that kind of thing.

So you just get it to that point first and then what you do is you move on to -- you look at it again and say "okay, now that we're here, what are the new opportunities?" because when every time you change something, new opportunities are going to pop up. So now, maybe you realize that you have a very specific segment of the market that is willing to pay you more, like, you can kind of break down what you do and give a service to a very specific segment of your market.

So what you do in that point, now we're in stage 2, the maximization part, is, well, maybe you have a really high-end coaching program, so let's just say you have the coaching program, just for example, for 2,000 hours, what are the parts of stage 2 might be looking at the opportunity that you have a segment of that market that is willing to pay you 4 to 5 times more money for a very much more specific service that gets them really fast, really good results.

And you might be able to not with a coaching program that's instead of 2 or 3 grand, maybe its 8 or 10 grand I need you a launch for them -- so you're basically splitting them up and then maybe move on and you segment people in the beginning of the funnel based on their interests and then that increases not only your front end conversion rates, but it also increases your lead rate ratio. So if you're closing just say 2% of people before, maybe you'll get that up to 3% or whatever the case is.

And then you can add in you know things like behavioral emails and that's a thing I do a lot, you can add in a different automated webinar, usually that's kind of step number 1 for service businesses at least. You can add in higher-end services, you can add in direct mail, you can add in doing phone calls two people who just bought, to new customers. You can add in different upsell packages interplay what you're doing is finding smaller and smaller -- you're getting more segmented as you go.

So that's kind of the big thing with step number 2 -- it's segmentation and just looking and it comes with a lot more strategy now that you're kind of moving up to like and upper echelon of business and instead of just trying to make it work, now you're trying to kind of sky rockets the business and really take it to scale. So you're doing all these things, maybe add in more upsells depending on what pages they buy or they go to -- you know, they're getting emails, they're getting different sequences and that there's a lot more that you can do with that. I have the kind of breaks it down for you.

So again, kind of a summary of everything is that if you're in this phase right now where you're doing okay -- you know, you're doing well but you're not doing great, then we want to do is really hone in just get your funnel in place. Spend somewhere between like 5 to 8 to, like, $15,000 for sale getting your funnel in place now as a stage 1 funnel. You know, those are the prices that I would charge for, something in that range, again, it differs tremendously but then once you go past that, what I do with clients is that once we see the results, is like "okay, now you're doing really well", why don't we take that to the next level?"

So then we go back and we say "okay, what does stage number 2 look like for you?" and then we go back and we restructure the funnel and say "okay, we're going to add in -- we're going to do a survey up here -- we're going to split them into three segments for autoresponder series, we're going to redo the sales letters, we're going to split the sales letters up so instead of having one general sales letter, you have one for each of those segments that we found out on the back and also we're going add in a high-end service so we're going to do a webinar for that, for all the buyers and then also all the prospects who don't buy and we retarget them into that webinar, we'll do a postcard campaign for all buyers that sends them to that webinar and then we'll reach out maybe to specific people based on their behaviors, what they're doing in the website" -- so all that stuff.

And then we kind of retool it so you go from where you are now to stage 1 which is doing well, you're sustaining yourself, you're growing but not quite at the piece that you want to, and then you move on to stage 2. And that's when things really fun because then you start looking a lot more at your Analytics, you start breaking things down into hyperresponsive segments and all that stuff and you really start honing in on your back end and then once in that stage you kind of focus from -- most businesses want to be profitable on the front end and it's a giant mistake.

It's okay in the beginning if you're just trying to get into that sustainability, that's stage 1 -- you know, a lot of businesses are at, but if you really want you scale it, we want to do is get to break even on the front end and then let your back end take care of all your profits and I know it all sounds kind of counter-intuitive but it's pretty much what every giant company in the world does whether you want to believe it or not but yeah it allows you when you break even on the front end, allows you to go after a more broad audience and then you use all the automation tools and all the different segmentation tools and things like that break it down so that you can go after a broad audience that you're still talking to them in a very specific way that allows you to attract, acquire the most amount of customers I'm trying for less than your competitors are or you're basically spending more money to acquire each customer because you have the backend to them, make up for it that's basically how you go from stage 1 to stage 2.

Okay? So I thought that was pretty long-winded, I hope that helps and if you were -- you know, a lot of people on this podcast I get tons of people who listen to this and they get in touch with me because they want me help them build their sales funnel so if you are a little bit confused -- you know, kind of what funds you need the started going from where you are from point A to point B or if you just didn't know, if you're trying to do this all on your own and you just didn't know how to structure it cuz there's a million and a half different ways to structure a sales funnel -- I hope that gives you a little bit of clarity.

If you're getting a lot out of this podcast, I have two requests actually, cuz I never really ask, but if you're enjoying this podcast, I just wanted to ask you to leave me a review. You just go to iTunes or whatever you listen to and leave a review for the podcast and then shoot me an email I'll find something to give to you for free I don't even know what it is right now but I'll send you something I'll look through my files, maybe if I have an old product in there but I don't sell anymore -- something like that -- I'll shoot you something for free, kind of like a surprise thank you gift.

So again, go on iTunes and leave a review on how the podcast has helped you. That's going to help me -- again, I want to do a bigger push two kind of grows a podcast so that's pretty much the biggest thing that's going to help -- so again, if you getting value out of this, which I know a lot of you do because I get emails all the time, then I would really appreciate if you would go in -- it only takes 30 seconds to leave a review.

And the reason actually why I'm saying this is because I actually left review for somebody else. So go ahead and do that and also if you are interested in building a funnel, just shoot me an email. It's [email protected], let me know that you're a podcast listener that always helps, I always like to know what parts of my marketing are working well and that kind of thing.

So just get in touch with me, let me know where your business is at right now, where you're looking to take it, that kind of thing and will hop on the phone and see if me and you are a fit and yeah we'll go from there and I know I'm doing a lot of exciting things for clients and then after this week we're actually -- one of the things on our list is creating an unforgettable experience for clients so it's going to be pretty badass.

So anyway, I hope you enjoyed this, look forward to another podcast episode -- probably in the next week or so. Again, I'm probably gonna end up doing a kind of a drinking podcast with one of my employees, Shaun. So that's going to be pretty interesting. So yeah, I will see you and make sure you tune in and also, by the way, I got a question a couple of days ago about somebody -- he wanted to know how to get updates of the podcast when I do new podcast episodes and one of the ways to do that is just go and get on my list cuz I always send that on broadcast email, when I have a new podcast out.

So just do that and I have a lot of cool stuff on the site. I have webinars, I have free reports, and stuff like that. So just kind of get on my list somehow and whatever sounds cool to you and then you can go ahead and you'll get emails when I have a new podcast. And and then also if you have a podcast player on your phone, then it should update automatically, okay?

so that's it for me today, I will talk to you soon and again, number one - leave a review, number two - get in touch if you want help building your funnel, and then number three - go to our website www.JeremyReeves.com and sign up for everything if you want to get updates from when I launch a new podcast. Alright! I will talk to you soon. Bye!