Building a sales pipeline management system and creating a business that has customers flock to you is the point of all marketing.  Whether it’s online or offline, you want to attract, engage, and sell people all day long – forever!

Here, in this video and blog post, we’re going to give you a behind-the-scenes look at building a converting sales funnel.

Now, a sales funnel is a helluva lot more than just individual pages (ie. landing pages and sales pages).

A sales funnel requires that email marketing campaigns and marketing automation be set up, that you have traffic campaigns going, that people are being moved, and pushed through the sales funnel from piece to piece.  So when they enter the sales pipeline, they learn about you and your company on autopilot.  And then, they go through the entire sales process, also on autopilot!

 

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Three Pieces To Your Sales Pipeline Management

In setting up sales funnels, there are three pieces to any sales process...  And part of your sales pipeline management should be to create reporting on:

  • Traffic
  • Offer
  • Followup.

We've actually got an entire book about it - Convert.

What often happens when business owners are marketers start out - they begin with traffic.  Then they back-end into their offer and their follow-up. It's one of the biggest mistakes you can make because, at the end of the day, you're spending money on traffic without necessarily having a clear path to make that money back, to generate revenue, from your offers.

Where To Start

When we do done for you sales funnels for clients, we start the project by creating the offer.

Your offer can take lots of different shapes. It can be:

  • A consulting offer
  • A coaching offer
  • A digital product
  • A membership course
  • Physical products
  • Mastermind Programs
  • Live events

You name it. There are so many different ways to generate revenue online and so many different kinds of offers that you can make to the world. Really, that's what business is!

When To Have A VSL In Your Sales Pipeline

Now, depending on your offer, you need your sales material. That's the point in your sales pipeline management that will get your prospects to purchase something from you.

If you have an offer that is under $1,000, then you can usually sell it with a video sales letter (VSL), or a multi-video launch process. If you have a video sales letter, you need an upsell and downsell process. You can take a $100 sale and then pitch something that's $300 on the confirmation page.  After that first upsell, you can then create a second upsell.

That, my friend, is how you increase the average customer lifetime value of your buyers!

What About Webinars?

If your offer is over $1,000, you need either an automated webinar that has some webinar marketing behind it. If you are selling something above $2,000, you'll need a consultative sales call in your pipeline.  The call to action you make on your webinar will be, "Click the button to sign up for a call." The sales call will be the thing that does your selling.

Do Long Form Sales Letters Still Work?

The short answer?  No.  Unless you also combine them with a video sales letter or some sort of a video.

Long form works when it's a heavily graphical page, with lots of images, and you see it selling a lot of SAAS software.  But for the most part, video sales letters and webinars are going to be your two main pieces of sales pipeline management.

Getting Your Marketing Pages Set Up

Once those are up, then, of course, you need the marketing pages.  Those are the pages that CONTAIN your sales collateral.

Think landing pages, sales pages, confirmation pages, strategy session pages...  Those kinds of things.

Anymore, they're quite easy to build with page builder software.  There are lots of options to choose from including our Axis Page Builder.

Creating Your Followup Campaigns

Once the pages and sales material are done, then you get into the follow-up.  Your follow-up is going to take the shape of marketing automation campaigns for outbound email marketing, text messages, your CRM, etc.

That's going to handle the marketing automation piece of the sales pipeline.

  • You need an email copy for your auto-responders.
  • You'll need sales calls if you're selling something high ticket.
  • You need fulfillment sequences when somebody is buying something digitally, at least.
  • You'll need shopping cart abandonment sequences
  • ... And bonding sequences.

There are probably 25 to 35 emails that you are going to need, all pre-done, ready for when you launch your sales funnel and sales pipeline management initiatives to general traffic.

... Then You Can Start Driving Traffic

Then, and only then, can you start going after traffic?

And your traffic takes lots of different forms depending on the networks that your customers hang out on!

It can be:

There are tons of different ways of getting traffic.

You Need Your Sales Pipeline Management Set Up First

Here's my point. All  you need to have the foundation and the infrastructure set up for your business before you can really go out and start finding traffic.

  1. You need the sales copy.
  2. You need the marketing automation part nailed.
  3. You'll need the email copy.
  4. You need content, like blog content and videos.
  5. You'll need a good nurture campaign, so that when somebody opts-in they'll learn more about you.

All of this is so your potential buyers start to know, like, and trust you.

They need to know that if they invest the time in getting to know you better, exploring the idea of giving you money for your products and services, then they will be making a good decision.

At the end of the day, that's what it is. It's a lot of work to get built and set up originally. Way more than it was even two or three years ago when all you needed was a landing page or a webinar registration page and a couple of emails...  Then boom, you could start getting $10,000+ clients.

It's a lot more work than it used to be.

But, it's what's required now. You have to be able to put all of this together, then go and launch it, and re-invest your profits back into more advertising!

If you want some help putting this stuff together, click the button below this to sign up for an action plan call with my team and I. We'll talk about your business, your offers, your follow-up, your automation campaigns, your sales pipeline management, and all of that stuff.

Whatever you don't have, we can build for you. I like to think of us as like the glue that brings your sales pipeline together. We will build whatever you don't have. But first, we need to have a conversation. So, click the button below and watch the short video on sales funnels...

Watch The Video >>

GSDdaily Episode 50

This is GSD daily, episode 50. We are halfway to 100, which is fantastic. I just saw this morning that we broke 100 members in our group, in our DFY Funnels group, which is fantastic. I'll drop the link here, actually, which I'm pretty excited about. I think that is pretty awesome.

Let's see, dropping the link. All right. Here's the link to our funnel group. So make sure to sign up for that and the stuff we're going to talk about today is how to build a sales pipeline. So, this is the original post that we wrote a while ago.

We're going to just talk about some tools, some strategies, all that stuff.

First of all, for those of you who don't know who I am, my name is Jason Drohn, creator of doneforyou.com. I've been building funnels for a very, very long time for a lot of different niches and categories and everything. We specialize in creating offers, automating sales funnels, and kind of clarifying messages. Then also set up marketing automation and run traffic. Creating offers and building the sales system that powers the rest of it, is what we are good at, so what we do.

We're kind of capping off the high ticket week. Earlier this week, we talked about selling high ticket offers. We talked about selling on Zoom presentations and we were joined by my friend named Patch. We talked about selling.

Yesterday, we talked about doing conditional logic forms so that you are only working with the people and only basically pitching the people who make the most sense for you and your offer. And what you're able to do then is based on how they answer certain questions. They will see a certain result like maybe they see a calendar booking, or if they answer a question a little bit differently then they go off down a different rabbit hole. So, that's kind of the power behind the applications and stuff.

What we're going to do is we're going to talk about the tricks to effective sales pipeline management. Now, I know that sounds like a mouthful, but basically what it is, is there are some rules that I follow when we're looking at putting sales funnels in place and putting sales pipelines in place for clients.

There are three pieces in every Sales Pipeline.

Those rules, what it comes down to is that there are three pieces to every sales pipeline out there. The pipeline itself, the funnel itself, the system itself, whatever you want to call your sales system, you boil it down to traffic, your offer, and your follow-up. Your offer is the thing you are pitching. Whether it's a coaching service or consulting or a digital product or whatever.

What offer requires pipeline that involves follow-ups?

For purposes of this week, our offer is above $1,000, because if you're charging something that is more than $1,000, chances are you're going to be getting on a sales call with this person at some point unless there are tremendous bonding and relationship that has happened for a long time through email. Or throughout a long live stream or a multi-day event. So, there's a tremendous relationship that needs to be built whenever you're selling something over $1,000. So, that is one of the things about the sales pipeline management piece is, the offer is crucial, and if the offer is above $1,000 you're going to have a certain kind of pipeline. That pipeline involves certain follow-ups.

Where to start?

Basically, when we're looking at how to put together this pipeline, we're looking first at the offer.

  • Is it coaching?
  • What is it are we selling?
  • What are the pieces and components of it?
  • Is it consulting?
  • Is it a digital product, membership site?
  • What are the live pieces of it?
  • What does our client or the client's team, or whatever have to fulfill one-on-one like if it's a live event?

Which we don't have too many, we don't have any live events now. Live physical events, we have of course life digital events. If it's a live event, having the creative business owner put on that live event, and then it needs to be big enough room that it makes sense for them and so on.

Offer is lower than $1,000

If your thing is lower than $1,000 or you're pitching like a strategy session or a consultative sales call, which is what we've talked about this entire week, then you can have a little application that shows up under a sales page. You saw an example of that. We went through this application system, we call these the fully qualified lead video sales letters. We go through this kind of application system for all of our services. Yesterday, we talked about this conditional.

Do people leave your site without buying at an alarming rate?

That autoplay, we found that out a couple of times yesterday. But we walked through how this conditional logic application works to qualify our prospects for us. And then we added a couple of variables here. You could see a couple of different scenarios.

1. Add an application below your sales page

If you go back to yesterday's live stream, you'll see all that. Basically, we have a sales video, a VSL with an application below it. They fill out the application, they get sent to our calendar and they can book a time on our calendar, so they can schedule a call with us. Now, of course, you have a different version of this, which is rather than a sales video, you can put them on a webinar, an automated webinar.

The call to action on that automated webinar to get them into a consultative sales call is going to click the button below to sign up for strategy sessions. So, it's very much the same thing. They're going to go and apply. They're going to click the button below or type a URL into their browser and then they're going to go and apply on a page.

2. Add a software to tie into the CRM

Sometimes, we talked about some of the software yesterday for that too. Typeform, jotform, but ideally we want to tie that into the CRM, and then that kicks over into your pipeline. So, that's where it all comes back around.

You have your sales piece, your sales piece is set up upfront and you have your offer, but then the pipeline is all of it.

The pipeline is how people are moving through, getting to know you.

They're signing up for a call, then they're scheduling a call, then they're getting on the call and then they're leaving, or they're being pitched or they're being proposed. So that's the idea behind this sales pipeline management piece.

Pages of the Sales Funnel

Now your pages, the pages of the sales funnel. There are all kinds of ways to set up pages for the sales funnel. Our preferred way is using WordPress and a plugin, a theme engine, I guess, templates system, I guess, called an optimized press. That's how most of our clients are set up. There are lots of other ways to do it.

There are lead pages and click funnels. Everybody and their brother has some sort of a page builder or a template builder a funnel builder. It just depends on whether you want to pay monthly for it or not. Or what kind of proficiency you have in it. But the pages, the marketing pages themselves they're inconsequential. You just have to have them and they have to convert. So, some pages convert better than others.

We have our own set of pages that we always use for controls, and they always work well. It's just something you got to think about.

Follow-up Campaigns

Now, the follow-up campaigns that go after. Again, a very important piece of the sales pipeline management is they come in, they schedule a call with you, what happens after the call? So, what happens after they receive the proposal? What happens after they don't receive a proposal? Like they set up a call and they're not a great fit.

What happens then? Do they get emails in your nurture campaign and you try to bring them back at a later date when they are probably more qualified or do you just let them go? So, you have to think about all the scenarios of follow-up too. Your sales guy or if you are pitching this person in your pipeline, then what happens next?

Do they have template emails that go out to this person? Do they drop them in a CRM and then it goes out afterward with some blog posts or whatever or do you just kind of let the lead die?

1. Continue sending blog posts, podcasts and videos

So, like for us in our pipelines or sales funnels, we continue sending them blog posts and podcasts and like videos like this. The occasional book offer, the occasional offer, but we don't ever stop. There are times that people will come back and do business with us six years later. So, you shouldn't stop once you start building the list and once you start cultivating the relationship with those prospects, and once you start setting up the sales pipeline that works. Then that's how it should go about. You just keep doing it.

2. Start Sending Traffic

Once all that is set up, once you have your sales funnel, your webinar, and your VSL in the mix of your offer and your system, then you can start sending traffic.

Some of the best ways you know, you've heard of them. Facebook ads, fantastic traffic drivers, Google ads. LinkedIn we've gotten into it a little bit. It's more expensive but the quality of prospects is just astronomical for a B2B list.

You can do email solo drops, you can do SEO, which we've been doing quite a bit of SEO lately. Just in terms of having basically transcribing these GSD dailies and then dropping them as blog posts and then ranking for a bunch more keyword phrases.

You need to have the sales pipeline built first.

So, that's kind of the mix of the traffic coming in, but the thing is, you need to have the sales pipeline built first. You got to have the website and the sales funnel and all of that built to build the marketing on to the front side. You got to have the sales funnel building, you build marketing on, and then leads start flowing out of the back. Your sales pipeline lights up off out of the backside. So, you need the copy, the sales copy, and all that stuff.

Tools for your Sales Management Pipeline

Now, some tools make the pipeline piece easy. I'm going to show you some of those. So, basically when somebody comes and they fill out a form and they start the relationship. Oftentimes they kind of hit a sales page, and then they come to this page and then they fill out this form or whatever.

1. Zapier

There's a couple of things that we do. The first is whenever somebody fills out this form, we use Zapier to trigger a message to our Slack channel. I'm just going to log in real quick. I just want to show you this because it's super cool. If we go into my Zaps, there are two different kinds of things that happen. The first is whenever somebody hits this page and we know their information, then it triggers a message to Slack that says, this person is on our page right now.

This is marketing like Ninja level shit right here. So, hopefully, nobody's watching. Yeah, there's a couple of people watching. So, these are some of my best tricks. So, inside Zapier, basically how it works is Ontraport... When a lead comes in on this page into Ontraport, then a Slack message fires.

This person is on a page in Slack, then it adds it to a spreadsheet in Google drive, which is super cool because not only does that let us know A, who is on the page and when they are on the page, but B it also lets us know... It tabulates them in a spreadsheet. So, we can see all of our leads, and then we can scroll down through and say, okay, cool. Now, let's look at how this is set up. There are three pieces to this. Basically when a form is submitted and we went through this yesterday. So when we were kicking through the conditional logic of this form, when this form is submitted, then... So new form submission and that new form submission is, that's my Ontraport account.

Then that form, the title of that form is FQL VSL, for Fully Qualified Lead Video Sales Letter, Ad Management Application. Then, what it does is sends the data. That's just some example form data. It sends all that data right over to Slack, and then inside Slack a message, it sends a private channel message to Slack. And then there are my accounts here. And then the private channel is this. The message that I received is new FQL lead ad management. And then I get a readout of the first name, last name, email, and SMS number.

As soon as that lead hits, I don't even need to wait for the text message that goes out. I don't need to wait for the email that goes out. I don't need to wait for tomorrow's reporting. It pops up in Slack and I can pick up the phone, which I probably just screwed up my clarity. But I can pick up the phone and call that person and say, what's up? So, this is the next level of marketing automation 101 level stuff. You know what I mean, so this is Ninja shit.

I haven't seen anybody who does this, maybe some Fortune 500 companies or whatever, but I tell people this and they're like, that's nuts, that's crazy, so. Then after it sends Slack a message, it tabulates that as a spreadsheet, it sends it to Google spreadsheet and adds another row and then boom, that entire contact history is there. And then we can take notes on that call. So that's how our pipeline works. So, if you remember on this form, once they submit this form, then it goes off to Pipedrive.

2. Pipedrive

Pipedrive is the next tool in this mix. Pipedrive.com and this tool have calendaring, it also has different stages. So, stage one, stage two, stage three, stage four. So, you can see somebody moving through the stages of your sales guys and everybody's on the same page about where that person is inside the sales pipeline.

Are they in the lead stage or did they schedule a call or did they have a call and they're not ready or are they ready and have been proposed, and we're just waiting on feedback? It also has email marketing in there so you can fire emails off to these leads.

3. Pipeline Pro

It's pretty cool stuff. There is another one called Pipeline pro, which is... I have some of my friends. So, Pipeline pro, which is a very similar tool. Pipeline pro, there we go.

Pipeline pro, another similar tool that can be used from a sales letter standpoint or a sales pipeline standpoint. Now, the other thing I wanted to show you was, not only does it show leads when somebody is coming in. I have this other folder called VSL page visits. And what this folder does is, if I have data about somebody, if they have signed up as an email address inside my CRM and we have that person.

4. Ontraport

Ontraport tracks, it keeps hold of... So, when somebody comes to doneforyou.com and then they enter their email address it creates a customer record, that customer record then is tagged to them. So, if they come back a day later or a week later and they haven't cleared their cookies, then Ontraport knows that they came back. And the reason they do that is for recency.

After somebody doesn't do anything with us for... I think it's 60 days, it might be 90 days. But if they don't open an email, they haven't been to the website, they haven't done anything then they go in an inactive list. So, they don't receive our general emails. What that does is it means our sender score and our deliverability is always pretty high. It's higher than the industry average because we kind of cut everybody who hasn't engaged with us.

The new leads are on and they're on until they spend 60 or 90 days, like I said, where they haven't done anything. They haven't opened an email, they haven't come to the website, they haven't interacted with us in any way. So, at that point, they just go on like a... Not a blacklist, but on a cold list. Every once in a while, we'll send them an email and kind of try to open them up, get them to open back up, and reengage with us. And sometimes that works, but if they're on the cold list, then they're probably going to be deleted before long.

Being that Ontraport tracks and Infusionsoft tracks and most of the major CRM track recency. Being that Ontraport recency, when somebody comes to doneforyou.com or any page on doneforyou.com, it fires every time a page loads. If somebody comes to this retargeted sales page and we have their information, then this page is going to load, Ontraport is going to know that this page-load in the who did it because we already have their information.

What I do is I have that information is sent to Slack, so I can see who was on the site, on the main pages of our site. And if they're coming back a lot, then I can send them an email. If we have their phone number, I could also call them. I've done that a couple of times, where somebody keeps coming back to the same page over and over and over and it pings. It'll ping inside Slack like this guy was here two days ago, or this guy was here a day ago.

Some email addresses you can just tell, so then I'll pick up the phone and say, "Hey, you're on the sales funnel page." And they're like, "Well, you're spying on me." Well, we're kind of a marketing automation company. It's kind of what we do, kind of. If you've ever gotten a call from me, from just being on the website, that's how.

This is just some kind of marketing automation stuff that we end up getting into. Pipeline pro, Pipedrive, great sales tools. You can easily do sales pipeline management without them, but they make it very, very easy to keep track of your leads. Who's coming in, who's been pitched? And it becomes crucial when you have more than one sales rep. If you are the only person and you're doing three or four calls a week, then it's probably not all that big of a deal, but you start growing to the point where you're doing 10, 15, 20 calls, it's easy to forget who you talked to, what you covered and then where they are in the process.

That is how we do sales pipeline management. Now, it's Friday, and we are 20 minutes in.

For Questions and Guide

I think we're just going to wrap up the shop. If you have any questions at all, go to doneforyou.com/blog and we will get them answered. If you want to go through and have an action plan done up, where we go through your business, talk about your business, we talk about your traffic sources, we talk about your automation, then go to doneforyou.com/start. We will get that up and running and I will see you soon.

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