SFM Ep19: The Biggest Sales Funnel Mistakes To Avoid

Visit http://www.JeremyReeves.com for more information.

In episode #19 I'm going to show you exactly what mistakes to avoid that MOST people are making.

These are strategy mistakes that can completely ruin your sales funnel if you're making them. Listen in and discover if you're making any of the 7 I discuss in the episode.

Transcript:

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Sales Funnel Mastery podcast. This is your host, Jeremy Reeves and today is October 1st, we're getting into the last quarter of the year.

 

I'm actually starting to plan 2015. My goals for next year - I already have them set - is to double gross revenue and increase personal income by 50%, which I think is achievable because I'm going to start scaling my business a lot more and doing a couple things that I'm really excited about next year that I'm starting to implement now.

 

So I'm excited. I'm starting to plan October. I hope you are too. In fact, by the time this podcast comes out, it's probably going to be either Wednesday or Thursday, so the 1st or 2nd, so you should have your monthly plan in place.

 

Anyway, what we're going to talk about today is sales funnel mistakes. I talk to a lot of people, I've done sales funnels for people, and the reason that I'm doing this podcast today about sales funnel mistakes is that I'm about to do a critique of an entire sales funnel for a student and a client/student of mine. I really don't do critiques that much but he's a cool dude and he knows me in my other business, so I'm kind of doing it as a favor for him.

 

So that kind of got me thinking about all the mistakes that people make in their sales funnel. we're not going to get in too much of the specific copying mistakes or anything like that. But these are going to be just overall strategy mistakes that you're making in your sales funnel.

 

Maybe not you. Hopefully, you're not making these but you probably are. If you are, it should definitely help you. You can go back and look at your sales funnel. See what's off, see what's wrong, see what you have to fix, and what you have to change.

 

So let's get right into it.

 

Mistake no. 1 is making it too hard to buy which is funny because I can't tell you how many people over the years - let's just say the last five years or so - I've probably talked to a couple hundred people over the phone who wanted to hire as a Copywriter, a Sales Funnel Specialist, that kind of thing, probably at least 20% of the people have an objection at some point that related to them being aggressive about whatever that they're selling.

 

And that always strikes me as a little bit odd. Because here you are, you put your entire life into your business and then your afraid to tell people what you're selling - your product, your service, whatever it is? I just don't get that.

 

The problem is, if you have something that's valuable and you're helping the person, your customer, your shouldn't be afraid of selling your product or service because in the end, you're providing value (I apologize for the sounds going off), a service or a product for a specific price.

 

It's like if you go and buy a car. Some cars, you can buy for $15,000 and they're crappy, little cars. Other cars, you can buy for $200,000 and they provide a lot more value to that person. When you're getting up in that price range, it's more of a prestige kind of thing, but there's always a value versus money transfer kind of thing going on there.

 

You have to understand that whatever you're selling, you're giving value to people. You want to make sure that you're helping that person. If you're in business to help people, which entrepreneurs are, you want to really be putting everything you possibly can to make sure that that person is making the right decision to buy your product. If you're not doing that, you're doing a disservice to that person.

 

So make sure that throughout your sales funnel, you're not holding back. Make sure that you really are giving it your best effort and putting everything in place that needs to be in place to increase your sales. Because increasing your sales is going to provide the most value to people.

 

Mistake no. 2 is not making a balanced front end and back end. This is kind of funny because if you ask two people which is more important?

 

Getting more front leads or building out the back end of the business? One person's going to say the front end, one person's going to say the back end. The truth, though, is that both people are wrong because when it really comes down to it, you can't establish a proper back end without enough front end customers.

 

If you're getting one customer a day, there's no point in building out your back end because you're not going to have enough customers to really take advantage of your back end. It's not going to do that much because there's not enough volume in the front end. And on the other side, you can't generate enough front end customers without an established back end. So it's a little bit of a conundrum.

 

what you have to do is just spend your time equally between your front end and your back end. Come out with a front end product. What I typically do is, say you're starting a new business or a new division of your business or whatever the case may be, if you have a front end product - product A - start selling that and get it to the point where it's starting to ramp up using the smallest amount of money as possible.

 

So maybe you do joint ventures with people, maybe you get some affiliates to sell it, maybe you focus on some free traffic methods like SEO and doing whatever, any kind of free traffic. But I would really focus on doing ventures with people and kind of just figure out who your best audience is  and find other people who have that similar audience but aren't competitors and then get your product in front of those people.

 

And once you start building up and you're getting enough front end customers, then you start building out your back end, and then once you have a good, solid back end in place, then go back to your front end, put a little bit more attention to your front end to ramp that up.

 

Start going into paid traffic, start some Google campaigns, Facebook, retargeting, all that kind of stuff, and then once you do that, then go back to your back end and fill in that. Once you start getting more volume, you could increase your highest-priced product or service.

 

I was talking to someone the other day who's thinking about doing a funnel day and one of the things that he was saying is that they have $20,000 packages that they sell and they were getting 20% of the people, and that number might be wrong, it was a big percentage of people to actually take that package.

 

So I was like, "My God, if you're getting 20% of people to take that package, you need something that's double, triple, quadruple that." Basically, if you get 5% taking just say $100,000, it's 4x the price and you get one-fourth the amount of people, that doubles your back end sales. so it's so important to go up and up and up in the amount of value you can provide.

 

I essentially tell people, when they get to a point where nobody's buying your highest-priced product, then you're done. But someone will always buy but you're not going to be able to sell that many if you don't have enough volume on the front end. Hopefully, that makes sense.

 

The third mistake is incongruent products and services. When people are going through your funnel, you want to start them in something that's easy, something that's specific to their needs. When you're selling your back end, you want to really think about three key factors and it's easier, faster, and better.

 

Depending on what you're selling, you either want to get that person easier results, like a done-for-you, they get the same result, but it's easier for them. Faster results, they're getting the same results, but in a faster amount of time. Or better results, maybe it takes longer but they're getting results. So instead of losing 3 lbs. a week, they're losing 6 lbs. a week or whatever. And that could be similar to faster too, it kind of depends.

 

So an example of this is let's say that a weight loss company is selling an information product. Let's just say "How to get shredded in six weeks" so it's a weight loss course. An example of a congruent offer would be something like Personal Coaching. The coach should be their one-on-one mentor, gets them to their goals 2x faster, it's easier, that kind of thing.

 

It's really congruent. It gets faster, easier results and it fits perfectly into the reason you bought the original product, which in this case, wanting to get shredded.

 

Now, an example of an incongruent offer and going along the same example, would be selling a course on how to get jacked, and by the way, 'jacked' is gaining more muscle - that's kind of like the bodybuilder lingo. So they buy the first product which is losing weight and then the second product is how to get bigger. They're kind of different results for most people. It also depends on where your audience is.

 

But in kind of the general population, those are very different things because as you lose weight, you're going to get less muscle, usually. Unless you're just starting then you can do both at the same time but in most cases, you're going to lose a bit of muscle because your body starts to burn a little muscle when you're losing weight. It's really hard to both at the same time.

 

So it's just a little bit of an incongruency between what you're selling. What you would want to do is just make sure that throughout your entire funnel, you're taking them. Think of your lowest-priced product and that's the very starting point of where that person is in their journey to get to the end point. Think of where your client is starting and where they want to get to.

 

Your first lowest end product should be right at that beginning starting point and then the highest-priced product should be getting them the absolute best results possible and then just plug in products along the way that take them from point A to point B.

 

Mistake no. 4 is failing to sell high-end products or services. Every single person listening to this should have a very, very, very high-end product and a very high-end service. If you're currently selling products, say you're selling weight loss products, an information product or a software or whatever it is, whatever product that you're selling, you should have that.

 

and then you should also add high-end service which in most cases is coaching. That's just a really, really easy, basic. general one. Put some coaching in there somewhere.

 

I'm working with someone now and he sets up entities for people, so he starts corporations and stuff. So he has that side of the business, but his high-end product is setting up a Nevada Trust, I think it's called. It's a really, really expensive thing. It's roughly 10x the price of a normal service that he does and he gets a percentage of people that take him up on that.

 

If you're selling something 10x the price, all you need is 10% on people and you're going to double your sales. You can check if the Math was wrong. Anyway, you should have high-end products or high-end services. So if you're selling services, make sure that you have information products in and if you're selling  products. make sure that you have services to go along with that.

 

I could give you the Math on that but it's really hard to do a podcast so get in touch with me if you want to see a little Math on how that works and I can send you a calculator that you can do, to figure out what you would have to sell your product or service at and how many of them and that kind of thing. It's really cool, though. It's definitely something. That should be a starting point that everybody listening to this should start doing.

 

Mistake no. 5 is using online marketing only. This is another one that most people do. They don't do anything offline. Direct mail is really, really powerful. It takes the conversation from something very surface-level, to something a lot more intimate.

 

Doing offline marketing, there's all kind of ways of doing a hybrid marketing approach. Ontraport, the CRM that I use, you can schedule automated post cards - so that's a way. You can do direct mail letters, you can do handwritten thank you notes, that's a really good one to do.

 

I just sent my recent Funnel Day client a gift basket. It's not something that gets a new job immediately but it makes a good impression and guess what? When it comes time for referral, who's he going to think of? The guy that gave him a gift basket. The guy that showed him that he cared. You can do things like, this is one that I had a lot of people do, depending on the business, setting up a call center might be a really, really good thing for you to do.

 

So make sure that if people are coming in and say, you have a coaching service, anybody that buys your product, can get funneled into a conversation with a consultant - and really, if you're going to call him a consultant, they really should be a consultant, they shouldn't just be a salesman - but you can have somebody call them and make sure that that person is doing good with what they just bought and see if they'd be interested in your services and you're going to get a lot higher percentage of sales  and closing rate by doing that.

 

So make sure that you're going offline. There's a lot of ways to do it. There's all kinds of thing you can do. Using offline is actually good for a lead generation strategy. So you could try that. You could start offline and take them online to a video. Send them a post card revealing a free video or webinar or whatever the case may be. It's just something different. It stands out. It's going to make a big difference.

 

Mistake no. 6 is lack of segmentation. There's a lot times, there's a lot of different places that you can put segmentation into your business.  By segmenting your list, you are so much able to speak directly to that person and their desires, their fears, their frustrations, and all that kind of stuff while delivering offers that make sense to that specific person dealing with that specific problem.

 

There's a lot of different ways that you can segment your audience.

 

Number one is you can segment prospects based on specific interests. So let's say, in the gold niche, maybe somebody's interested in learning how to put whereas somebody's learning how to be a better driver, they want to drive the ball farther. You can segment prospects and buyers, which is I recommend that for every single person, you can segment based on those who show an active interest in your site.

 

For example, I'm starting to put together my sales funnel for Funnel Days which is my in-person consultation day because I'm putting a much bigger focus on that because for me, it attracts a much better buyer, it attracts a much better client. People who want to do Funnel Days rather than just "Get a quote" are just better entrepreneurs, they seem like. They're a lot more serious about moving forward, they're not going to take delays, they want to start the relationship the right way.

 

It's just something that I'm doing. It just makes for a much better relation and every single one that I've done, people were absolutely blown away and it's worth every penny times a hundred. So one of the things that I'm doing is people who go to my Funnel Day page that are already on my list, I'm going to segment them in a separate auto-responder campaign specifically trying to get them to go into the Funnel Day funnel that I have. It's basically called 'Behavioral Email Targeting'.

 

The fourth one is segmenting based on whether that person is a cold or warm lead. This is something that a lot of sales forces do. They talk to a person based on whether or not they're cold or warm. For example, somebody downloads a white paper. That's a cold lead. If someone gets in touch with you and fills out a form in your website for you to call them, that's a very warm lead because they're asking you to call them.

 

So you can segment based on that and you're going to write your auto-responders a lot differently based on whether they're a cold or a warm lead.

 

And another one is you can also segment based on demographics. If people are men, women, certain ages, from certain countries or regions, areas within a country, there's a million demographics. Based on your market place, the demographics that you're going to be focused on are going to be a lot different. But that's another way to segment  and you can do that right on your opt-in forms.

 

Let's just say that going back to the weight loss offer. I use the weight loss offers as examples really frequently because it's easier to understand and it's a lot easier to kind of say, "Okay. they're doing this so that I can do this." One way to do that is let's just say you have a free report, '7 Mistakes for losing weight', on the opt-in form, instead of asking for first name and email or just email, you can say, "Are you a male of a female?" and then just click a radio button and they go into a list based on that. That's another way to segment your list.

 

The 7th mistake is failure to introduce continuity offers. Continuities are really good for any business because it gives you a lot of security and freedom, knowing that you're going to have enough money in the bank at the beginning of every month to pay your rent, employees, all that kind of stuff. One of the things it does, you have to see in your business if this is the case, but a lot of the times, it adds profit to your business.

 

Let's just say you have a product for $97 but you want to turn it into a continuity product. You have to figure out, "Okay, what can I charge per month and how long do they have to stay to make up that $97?" So in that case, let's just that you were going to charge $27 a month or $25 to make it easy and the first product was $100. You would need them to stay on average for four months to break even with having just a normal one-time price.

 

If you do a test, and you find out that people are staying for five months, you just increased your overall profit by 12% because you went from $100, the one-time payment, to $125 over five months and then you have figure out, "Okay, is it worth it to get that money over a five-month period rather than just upfront. So that's just decisions you have to make.

 

But the other thing that it does is works wonders for your mental realm. It kind of just takes away that fear off the table because every entrepreneur goes through, you wake up, "Today's October 1st so it's okay. Am I going to be able to survive October?" And once you get past the certain point that fear kind of goes away.

 

But especially if you're just starting out or if you have a huge payroll or anything like that, it's really good because it kind of just frees your mind up and it lets you get more creative  and clear in your thinking because you don't have that constant worry about how much money is going to come in that month.

 

Let's just say your payroll is $20,000 a month, if you have a continuity program that brings in $20,000 a month, anything after that is profit and you can put your time and attention onto that and not worry if you're going to be able to make payroll this month.

 

So those are the top 7 sales funnel mistakes that I see in a lot of people that I work with. It's a lot of stuff that I go over my clients, make sure they're not doing it. I really it helped you.

 

If you want to check the new website, by the way, I just recently re-did JeremyReeves.com so go there and just check it out even if you're not interested in buying a product or signing up for a service or anything like that, go and check it out because it kind of shows you my current thinking on what a website should look like.

 

The way it's set up now is what I think is going to work best for my website, for my website. Yours might be different and it probably is because you're selling something different than I am. But you can go and reverse engineer a few things, and I can pretty much guarantee you'll come out away with a few things because I did some pretty cool stuff on the new design and layout and how I have things set up and all that.

 

So go check it out. If you're interested in services, again, one of the things that I'm focusing on the rest of this year, 2015 and until whenever is doing a lot more Funnel Days with people. They're really cool because we get to meet in person. If you live in a different country or we can't figure out traveling arrangements, because I do charge extra for traveling, obviously, we can do a Skype video or whatever.

 

But they're extremely beneficial because the blocks that we get past are incredible and it's awesome the funnels that we come up with? Let's just say they're funnels that nobody in your industry is going to have. You're absolutely going to have the best sales funnel in your industry. We do a lot of stuff that I don't even talk about in the podcast so it's a really cool thing.

 

If you're above roughly 500,000 or so in your business, I definitely recommend you check out Funnel Day. There's just a lead capture form so even if you just want to learn a little bit about it, just get in touch. Feel free to email me. If you to JeremyReeves.com to check out the new layout, just click 'Services' and then it'll give you two options.

 

One is either having me just do the funnel or the other one is starting with Funnel Day which I usually recommend for anybody about 500,000 or so. Anyway, I hope that helps. I hope it gave you a couple implementable strategies that you can start working on. Shoot me an email. Let me know if it helped you and make sure that you share this with your friends.

 

I'm actually doing a Funnel Day next Wednesday and it was a referral from a podcast listener so he listened to the podcast, read articles of mine and then he had a friend who he thought I could help and I'm happy to give you some kind of commission or whatever for doing that. So if you know anybody, that's very cool. I hope this helps you and I will talk to you soon.