Welcome to today’s Get Shit Done Daily. We’re going to talk about sales funnel management and basically optimizing sales funnels and optimizing sales flows and kind of unleashing the workflows, so that people are able to move through them more effectively. This is all pretty well kind of ripped out of our new free report, master guide actually. It’s 274 pages, so it is a monster of a PDF. Download this, I’m dropping this in the chat there, or in the comments, I should say.
If you are watching this on my profile, then you’re going to want to either get to one of the Facebook groups that we just kind of started. Well, it really kind of officially kicked off this morning. One of them is the DFY Funnels Group. This is a Facebook group. It is entirely dedicated to sales funnel management and building and optimizing and deploying and creating automated sales systems, so these live streams are being streamed to this group every day. Then, what we’re going to do is we’ll kind of follow up with some additional tutorials or some additional tips or tricks or posts or conversation or whatever, so that is there.
You’re going to want to make sure to… It looks like YouTube rejected your comment because it was a Facebook link, which is fine, but everywhere else should be able to get that. I just added this here. Oh, that’s kind of a cool little feature. That is kind of the state of the union.
Today, what we’re going to talk about is sales funnel management. In order to understand sales funnel management and optimizing sales funnels, the first thing we need to do is talk about micro-actions. Micro-actions are the things that you get people to do through your sales funnel. A micro-action, for example, is opening an email or clicking a link inside of an email or clicking an ad or watching a video.
When you’re building a sales funnel, you don’t go from one to sale. You don’t go from zero, which is somebody brand new, somebody learning about you and somebody becoming aware of your brand, to fully qualified, pull the credit card out a buyer in the blink of an eye. There’s a warm-up process that has to happen. The warmup process is when prospects, when customers, go through this step of micro-actions.
Your micro-actions start where somebody first learns about you. They start way, way, way up here in whatever traffic channel you are living in or you’re running from. This might be Google Search, it might be YouTube Ads, it might be Facebook Ads, wherever, whatever vertical this is in.
Basically, the goal of advertising is to get somebody to take some sort of action. In this case, we’re going to be posting ads or advertising to prospects that we think fit our demographic based on their interests, based on their search phrases, based on all of the things that we do as marketers to kind of connect an offer to an ad. We do our best to kind of make sure that as many people there as possible, we get some sort of action from. Now, they don’t go from zero over here all the way to purchase in the blink of an eye. It just doesn’t work that way. What they do is they go through steps.
They’re going to end up going from being cold to warm up a little bit to doing something else, to watching a video, to maybe booking a call or clicking the add to cart button, and then ultimately putting their credit card in an order form. Then, they go to the fulfillment page, which is where you make your money. Now, all in all, there ends up usually being 14 or 15 steps in between learning about you and putting your credit card in at a minimum.
Now, here’s what I mean. Let’s say we’re running YouTube Ads and those YouTube Ads are… They click on the YouTube Ad and then they go to the page. Now, so this is going to be a lander. Now that lander, there are actually quite a few little micro-actions in that lander that have to be met and fulfilled in order for anything to happen.
First of all, they need to wait for the page to load, which is three, four seconds. Ideally, the page loads in under two seconds, but they need to wait for the page to load. Then, they need to usually click play on a video or they need to enable audio, so they need to do something else so they have to wait for the page load. Then, they need to click play and actually watch the video.
Now, let’s say, then they need to stay on the video. I mean they actually need to be on the video and consume the video up until the point where they actually see a call to action usually. Sometimes there’s a call to action below the page or in the copy or whatever. Then, the next step is they need to hit a button for an opt-in. Then, they actually need to enter their email address.
Now, this might be belaboring the point of what it takes to get somebody to opt-in, but still, every single one of these micro-actions, every single one of these things is a conscious choice by the prospect to actually do what you want them to do. Then, if and when they opt-in, then they go to a confirmation page. They need to wait for the page to load or the video to load and hit the play button. Also, they need to hit the add to cart button that is underneath that video. Then, they need to go up to an order form.
On that order form, they need to enter all of their information, which is sometimes a pain in the ass, their address, their phone number, all of that stuff, which is why the fewer fields you’ve included in your order form the better. They need to enter their info, they need to find their credit card, they need to enter their credit card. Then, they need to hit the submit button. Then, and only then, do you get paid?
Is this a worthwhile discussion? I mean because what happens is, as advertisers, we love to think that we go from YouTube Ads to making money like that. The simple fact is we don’t. Anyone of these bottlenecks, whether it’s a lander, whether it’s a page load, whether it’s the video, whether it’s the button, a wrong button color if the opt-in box isn’t working correctly, each one of these things is a potential bottleneck that needs to be released in order for them to move from here all the way through to here. Makes sense? Cool.
In thinking about sales funnel management and thinking about optimizing sales funnels, you need to understand that the optimization process is action by action by action by action, page by page by page by page. Sales funnel management, we finally get to it. I’m just going to switch back over here to the live stream. Does anybody have any questions so far? We’re pretty good with this?
We’ve got some folks coming in. Hello. How are you doing? Very nice to see you here. All right, so micro-actions, good? Good? Okay? When it comes to optimizing and working through sales funnel management, what we have to do is we have to consider that each of these micro-actions that somebody is taking as they’re moving through the process is a voluntary action.
They are literally, every time they do something that we want them to do, they are raising their hand and saying, “Yes, I’m invested. Yes, I’m interested. Yes, I want more.” We try to remove as much risk as possible in each of those actions, so we try to make it as easy to opt-in. We try to make it as easy for the video to play, like by triggering autoplay. Also, we try to help them get as far as they can by making a few decisions on their own as possible.
We try to alleviate all of those burdens along the way. That’s one of the reasons why automated video sales letters worked so well back in the day. Then, the browsers have lately been getting smarter, so they don’t necessarily have any… They don’t let you play audio anymore, or some of them don’t.
There’s some general weirdness as it comes to how technology is helping us move through this process. Again, retargeting even so they come to a page and then they leave without buying, then we can retarget. We can trigger CRM marketing rules, which is what we talked about yesterday. There are lots of things we can do to kind of bring them back into the fold when they don’t do that micro-action, that thing that we want them to do.
In every instance, what we’re trying to do is optimize this process, so we take as few decisions. We take a few of the bottlenecks away from this sales funnel system, this process as possible. We’re going to kick back over to the iPad here and then I’m going to walk through what sales funnel management looks like, and then we’re going to talk about some of the bottlenecks as we go through. The first thing I want to do is I want to cover a piece of software that I really, really like. This is the Sales Funnel Management Group. If you haven’t asked or if you haven’t joined yet, make sure you do.
I’m just going to drop this link in here again for our new folks, so here we go. All right, boom. All right, so that is being posted too. Wow, that’s a great face right there, but anyway. This is a piece of software that I have found and I really, really, really like it, Inspectlet.com.
Now Inspectlet, there are two primary things that it does. I first kind of learning of Inspectlet probably four years ago and they do these screen recordings, which is really, really interesting stuff. Basically you can watch… It takes a screen recording of somebody going through your sales funnel, so you can see where their mouse is and you actually see the recording of them moving through your funnel.
Now, this has been really interesting because… So Inspectlet, it was always pretty good, but they just added split testing, A/B testing, into the mix and it has become a phenomenal tool. Not only do you get this screen captures, which is super cool, but now with so much mobile traffic and stuff going on, there was actually… Just a week ago, we put this on a client campaign.
What we saw was that they were getting a lot of iPhone traffic. The iPhone traffic, because of the bigger resolution on the Pro, the 11 Pro, what was happening was it was pushing the call to action button all the way down past the bottom so there was actually no call to action on the first swipe. Below the fold, which would be on the mobile device, it was pushed down quite a ways.
What we did was we saw that on these other screens, and we were able to correct it by shortening up the subtitle and some of the padding and we were able to start getting some conversions that way. Plus, we were able to split test between two different versions, two with video, one without. It even does some multivariate, not multivariate testing, but HTML embeds kind of testing, which is super, super cool. It’s literally free for, I think, 30 sessions a day or something, so really, really, really nice software. I highly, highly recommend it for seeing how people are interacting with your sales funnel.
Then, what you’re able to do is you’re able to start spinning off tests and start seeing how people are interacting with your pages so you’re not guessing, which is a huge deal. Now, we’re going to go back to the iPad here, so going to stop this screen. We’re going to share the next screen.
All right, so you should be seeing this. Okay, cool. Right now, we are going to talk about sales funnel management. I’m going to go through and diagram some of the sales, we don’t want the highlighter, what do we want? We want the pen, sales funnel management, all right. Now, when it comes to sales funnel management, we talked about the micro-actions here. At every step, we’re moving somebody through the process. Now, for sales funnel management, again, we start over here with our traffic and then we get into our landers. Then, we get into our confirmation pages, and then we get into our order forms.
The way this whole thing kind of unfolds is we’re trying to get from here, where somebody is becoming aware of us, all the way through to increase their interest and then increasing their desire and then actually making an optimization or making some sort of a buying choice with us.
This is the age-old acronym, AIDA, which stands for attracting, interest, desire, and action. Now, the attraction phase, this is going to be most typically anymore your Facebook video ads. We have been using a lot of Facebook video ads at least. If it’s on Google, it’s going to be a keyword-based ad that fires when there’s a keyword phrase that is being triggered. Otherwise, there is something that fires when a certain interest is met.
Google, we’re going to end up having text-based contextual ads based. Facebook, we’re going to have most likely video ads, and we usually start with Facebook. The video ads are typically 45 seconds to 90 seconds long. Then, they kick over into some sort of a landing page and the landing page, the goal of that landing page is to get the opt-in.
Sometimes there’s a video, sometimes there’s not. What we want to do is, from here, the primary metrics that we’re looking for are cost per click. How much is it per click? Then, if the cost per click is too high, then it is an ad problem because they don’t know what’s on the landing page. It’s an ad problem, in that the ad itself is not resonating with the prospect.
It’s not triggering them to click through, to explore, to discover, any of that stuff. Now, if it is a landing page problem… So let’s say the cost per click is good and we’re happy with the cost per click. Then, the next thing we’re looking at is our opt-ins, so this is the number of leads.
Now, if we’re unhappy with the number of leads, then it is a landing page problem. The landing page problem can be addressed with split testing, so this is the A/B split testing, and also the screen record and heat maps. Those are the three issues.
Sometimes you need to add a video for the landing page, like a welcome webinar video or something like that. There’s usually some stuff like that that you can kind of add. All of that stuff, you’re going to want to end up split testing and it’s helpful to be able to see the screen as people are going through. It’s helpful to see the heat maps and seeing where they are coming through.
Forgot some of the colors I was adding, this one’s going to be purple. Once the leads are coming through okay, then the next thing we want to do is we have our confirmation pages.
The confirmation pages take a number of different kinds of forms. We have our webinars, which is a sort of confirmation page because they’re opting in and then they are seeing the webinar, whether it’s on-demand or live or in 15 minutes or whatever. There is also the thank you page, so that is like a straight-up confirmation. Thanks so much for downloading the report. While I have you here, there’s something I want to run by you or there’s a question that we often get asked, that kind of thing. It’s like literally a straight-up confirmation page.
In both cases, we’re trying to flip them into a sale of some sort. Sometimes that sale is booking a sales call, booking a consultative strategy session kind of thing. Sometimes it is clicking the button, add this thing to the order form and then go buy it. That is going to be your CTA. Now, your CTA, you don’t have enough people hitting your CTA button, your call to action, it is a confirmation page problem or a sales problem.
You are going to be looking at A/B splits, recordings, heat maps, any of those kinds of things. However, there’s one additional element here that is probably a much, much bigger determinant of how well it’s going to be converting and that is your sales copy. Your sales copy is going to be responsible for how many people are hitting the CTA.
Now, sales copy, again, it might be a thank you video, it might be the webinar, it could be a straight-up sales video. By and large, all of this stuff drives to the CTA. That CTA, we haven’t done the hard work yet. I mean we’ve done a lot of the hard work, but we haven’t done the thing that kind of pushes people over the edge. The thing that pushes people over the edge is when they add that offer to their shopping cart and they go to make the order.
Now, typically 80% of people are going to bounce off of your shopping cart. Sometimes it’s 70%, sometimes it’s 95%, it really just depends. Every order form has a very, very high abandonment, which is why there are things like shopping cart abandonment sequences and which is why you have retargeting and retargeting ends up…
Retargeting banner ads end up dropping people back into the order form based on kind of where they left. There are lots of ways to up that shopping cart abandonment or lower the shopping cart abandonment percentage and increase sales. At the end of the day, we have the revenue here. If there is a revenue problem, it is a problem with the order form and there are lots… So order forms are order forms.
By and large, there are lots of different versions. I mean you have like an Infusionsoft order form, which is ugly by nature, which is why you can use third-party software to pretty it up. We use Ontraport, we use SamCart. SamCart has great features and functionality in terms of shopping cart abandonment.
Shopify has great features and functionality in terms of shopping cart abandonment, especially when you tie it through a Zapier integration in your CRM. There are lots of different ways to play this shopping cart order form deal. If you’re getting great click-through rates but you’re not getting great dollars, then it is an order form problem or it is an abandonment problem.
What we’ve seen happen in the past is people click the order form. When the sales copy doesn’t disclose the price, what happens is is people then click through, then they jump over to the order form and then they don’t buy because they don’t know what the price is. When you see on Target, they say price revealed in the shopping cart, things like that, there’s going to be…
How many times have you done it? I know I’ve done it. You see a TV at Best Buy and you’re like, “Oh shit, that looks pretty cool. Okay, cool. We’re going to add it to shopping cart to see how much it is,” and then realize that it’s not a great deal. Then, you just delete it out. That’s shopping cart abandonment, that’s what that is. Your customers are doing it when you’re selling something online.
Now, the other side of the call to action is if they don’t necessarily go to the order form, they go to a consultative call. Oops, I got my pen again. They go to the consultative sales call. Then, you have some other situations. Your consultative sales call, again, you want money, you want to sell something on that call. Here, there’s the human factor of it all. We have human intervention, which means sales reps on the phone, are they good? Are they bad? There’s something in play there.
Then, there are processes. Do they send out proposals? What is the language in the proposals? Do they send out invoices? What is the language in the invoices? Do they send out order form links? In which case, it kind of pushes them back up into this side after a call. There are lots of things to think about and kind of bottlenecks that should end up easing once you identify where the hurdle is.
That is how you will unlock and optimize your sales funnel as it pertains to the sales funnel. Now, webinars, sales videos, fully qualified lead sales funnels, affiliate funnels, all of them have these barriers that unlock based on micro-actions. Sometimes it takes a trained eye to kind of look through this and says, “Okay. Were you good up? What happens when they hit this stage and then why aren’t they moving any further?”
If you have any questions at all, go to doneforyou.com/start. This is foryou.com/start, and then we can go through an action plan with you. I’m going to jump back over here to the live stream.
Jeez, we’ve talked about that thing for 30 minutes. Wow. All right, I got a bunch of likes. That’s awesome. Thank you. I appreciate that. Then, we got… Looks like my camera went walkie in the middle of that little riff, oh well, whatever. We’re almost done anyway. Did you guys like that? Andy jumped in. What’s up, Andy? Yeah, Andy has been in this office. Yes, he has. Yeah.
First of all, thank you so much for joining me today. Really, the sales funnel management piece and the optimization of a sales funnel, really it’s about unlocking the bottleneck, from bottleneck to bottleneck to bottleneck. The truth is you don’t know what’s kind of broken down the way until you unlock the first one. That’s one of the biggest kind of hurdles you got to get through.
Once they’re unlocked, literally the traffic just flows through and then you’re able to generate revenue. You’re generating sales calls, you’re generating everything as they go on the fly. If you have any questions at all, go to… Any questions, if you want us to go through and put together an action plan for you, for your traffic, for your sales funnels, whatever, go to doneforyou.com. Or if you want to just go ahead and book a call, go to doneforyou.com/start and we will get you all taken care of there.
For tomorrow, if you have any questions that you want us to kind of get through, then, by all means, go to doneforyou.com/GSD. That’s where you’re going to be able to ask questions for tomorrow’s show. We do these Monday through Friday at 10:00 AM Eastern.
If it’s waking up a little early for you, then you can catch the replay. Also, where we’re going to be delivering a lot of this sales funnel like material, where we’re going to follow up after these live streams and all of that stuff, is going to be on our Facebook group. If you go to, I just threw that in the comments, so DFY Funnels Facebook Group.
This is going to be streamed there. We also are sending… I’m posting articles and stuff that I see, kind of things going around. Right now, traffic is really cheap because advertisers are pulling out so CPM, CPA, everything is dropping really, really quickly. Stuff like that, anything that is pertinent to sales, funnels, traffic, all of that, so if you have any questions at all, let me know. Happy to help. Happy to answer. I will see you tomorrow at 10:00 AM Eastern.
If you’d like to dig deeper into building and optimizing a sales funnel, make sure you check out the ProAccelerator!
