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In This Episode…
What do you think having the perfect sales funnel would be worth to your business?
At Thinkplus, we have learnt from our years of digital marketing experience that increasing the number of leads your business gets is not a guarantee that these leads will generate any additional business for your company unless you have a well-defined and well-structured sales process in place.
We’ll share tips on how to create perfect website sales funnel to not only increase leads for your business but to increase the chance of turning those leads into customers.
What is a Website Sales Funnel?
A website sales funnel refers to the whole process of purchase a customer goes through before buying your product or service.
The sales funnel ranges from the early research phases, which is when a potential customer is aware of what service or product you provide, to the final phases, referring to when they are ready to take the leap and purchase from you, not to mention all the phases in between.
Why Do You Need the Perfect Sales Funnel?
It is highly likely that your website is the first step in the sales process for your business. If you want to be able to generate conversions from your website, you need to be able to take people on a journey that results in them buying from you.
Having the perfect sales funnel would mean you could drive traffic to your website that would convert into leads. Those leads would then go through a repeatable, scalable process where you had a defined, predictable outcome, likely to be a certain volume of new sales to your business.
In other words, getting your website’s funnel right will result in a reliable, repeatable and scalable way of getting new customers, growing your business, decreasing your marketing spend and building brand visibility. Who wouldn’t want that?
Let’s explore the three characteristics of the perfect sales funnel and how you can apply them to your business.
Characteristic One: It Meets Your Visitors Where They Are
The vast majority of websites, even well-optimised ones, only offer content and calls-to-action that result in the customer purchasing immediately. For example, ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Book a Test Drive’ buttons. While this approach does work, it only targets customers who are in the final stages of the sales funnel and are ready to purchase from you.
For the other customers, those who are just browsing and getting to know your brand, this approach might be too much too soon. They don’t have the commercial intent to buy from you just yet and so are unlikely to turn into leads as your content and call-to-actions don’t meet their needs. You need to make sure your website gives all potential customers something relevant for the stage of purchase they are at.
There are two main benefits to taking this approach:
- There is a much higher volume of people in the early stages of the sales funnel than in the later stages, so targeting them could result in a lot more leads, and eventually more business for you.
- You get the chance to influence potential customers’ buying decisions, by building up a relationship with them over time.
The perfect sales funnel operates to target people at different stages of their buying journey and points them in the right direction to make a purchase.
Action item: Think about different stages of intent your customers go to from their initial awareness to point of purchase. What would be suitable call-to-actions and content at each stage of their purchase journey in order to get them to become a lead?
Characteristic Two: It’s a Slippery Slide
If you want to maximise your sales, you need to reduce friction at every step in the sales journey, making the action of making a purchase as easy as possible, hence the term ‘slippery slide’.
The first step in the sales funnel should feel easy, attractive and low risk for your customers. For example, requesting a quote or downloading a guide.
Every step after in the process should also feel the same way, and meet your customers’ needs.
Action item: For every step on your sales process, consider the benefits and how you can sell taking the next step to your customers. Think about why they should want to do it and how you can make taking that action easier for them.
Characteristic Three: It Can Be Systemised and Is Scalable
If you’re dealing with a small number of leads, it is okay to have an ad hoc sales process.
However, as soon as you get bigger lead volumes, your business needs to have a systemised and scalable sales process to deal with that. In other words, you need to design every single interaction to work from a template to identify what perfect looks like at each stage as a starting point.
These templates could consist of call scripts or sales pitch emails to identify what perfect looks like at each stage as a starting point.
The perfect website sales funnel is one that keeps evolving and improving. In order to achieve this, your sales funnel needs to have clearly defined processes which can then be optimised and measured for the corresponding conversion rate increases.
Action item: For your business map out the necessary sales templates your team require. Consider target outcomes and key customer objections within your sales process and how your team can handle them to ensure the customer gets to the next stage fo the sales funnel.
Find Out More
Watch or listen to the video or podcast to gain further insight into how you can create the perfect website sales funnel and if you want more suggestions and advice, then request a free review of your website via this link: https://exposureninja.com/review/
Timestamps
00:00 — Introduction
02:18 — What is a Website Sales Funnel?
02:49 — First Characteristic of the Perfect Sales Funnel
11:23 — Second Characteristic of the Perfect Sales Funnel
14:53 — Third Characteristic of the Perfect Sales Funnel
