63 The Sales Funnel Framework That Turns Leads into Loyal Clients

This is the Empowering Healthy Business Podcast, and I'm your host, Cal Wilder. Each episode, we'll dive into topics important to folks who want to run businesses that are both nicely profitable, sustainable, and scalable, and who want to achieve balance in their lives and realize their potential inside and outside of work. The show is sponsored by SmartBooks, provider of bookkeeping and accounting for businesses. Let's get started.

But I think the most important thing to start with is defining your audience and defining um uh like how your audience is going to be buying your product or hearing about your product. There's tons of digital marketing. Like, for instance, like we specialize in search engine optimization, we do tons of Google AdWords, we also do social advertising on every social channel, whether it's um you know Facebook, Insta, TikTok, um, LinkedIn, apps, whatever they want to call it. We do display advertising, we do geofencing and geotargeting.

Um and some clients will call and say, We want to just do this. Um, and the first question we ask them is who is your audience and who do you want to sell to and what's your product? And I think that is very, very important to define because that will lead into which marketing medium is gonna work best for you. So uh it's if you have a product or service that people are actively looking for and they know how to define it.

Um so let's say uh tax saving accounting tips. People are actively Google like that. Um so if you if you have one of those, then it's search engine optimization or Google AdWords or both. The biggest misconception of most is that they equate lead generation with client acquisition.

They are not one and the same. Just because you can get leads does not mean that you're going to acquire ideal clients. On top of it, you mentioned something like this, right? Like before, we've had a sales team, we've had tried different lead generation strategies, we've tried different marketing strategies.

The issue above and beyond lead generation is that somebody has to follow up with it. So I always ask this question, right? What would the company look like if lead generation works? Who fields all the calls or the meetings, right?

Who qualifies and disqualifies all of these? Oftentimes, lead generation will bury companies, not because they're the fact that they're not getting leads, it's that they're getting too many bad leads and can't even manage it properly, paying in an exorbitant amount just to manage bad leads. Owners, founders, everything else, right? While they're very passionate, they tend to be the ones that do not follow rules.

So, in other words, they because they rely so heavily on the fact that they can get in front of people because others want to talk to somebody that actually owns the business, it makes it easier to get those discovery calls. But the problem is if you really don't exercise the skill sets and follow your messaging and your sales process, right? You're never going to be able to maximize it. You're never going to be able to create a system and process.

And guess what? There's no way to bring on another sales rep and have them follow your system. Instead, they rely on following you, which is destined to fail. Why?

Because they're never going to be the owner of the company and you they don't have the luxury, right, of doing what you can do and haphazardly selling things. You need to have a holistic strategy of your business and of your marketing in order to make sure that you're not leaking leads. So for us, we do this with a framework that we call the marketing domination framework. And with that, there's three parts of that.

The first thing is, is it all revolves around the concept of a sales funnel. And so for us, a sales funnel is not a software tool, a style of landing page. Like it got super popular with the software click funnels or high level and some of these other software automation tools. A funnel is not one of those platforms.

A funnel is a customer relationship journey where you take someone from not knowing who you are to a super fan customer for life. And there's several different aspects of your marketing to build out this sales funnel from the words that you use in your branding, your website, having some type of a lead generator or a way to capture somebody's information, follow-up email sales sequences, and just a CRM tool to put all that stuff in. What I mean is how you do business is exactly how your clients do business.

So if you are looking for a plumber or a roofer or a general contractor, you're probably going to Google and you're typing in plumber near me, best plumber near me, top plumber near me, plumbing service near me. You're typing something in, then whatever pulls up on the top of the map, you're probably just going to hit dial. Call the number. Do they pick up?

And then if not, cool, go to the next one, dial, call it. So what you want is if you are busy, if you are a one man or one woman shop and you don't have a full-time like CSR customer service rep that's handling all your fill phone calls and booking appointments and stuff for you, you want to schedule or you want to create an automation that's called a missed call text pack. This is the first thing that we set up for these local service-based clients. So what that does, when somebody calls your number, if you don't answer, the automation is set to fire off a text to where it might be like, um, hey, uh uh, this is Cal from Smartbook.

Sorry, I missed your call. Uh, how can I help? And so it instantly starts that conversation with the client. So now they've stopped for a second and hopefully they've stopped going down the Google dialing list, and now they're responding to you because what they're looking for is somebody to fix their problem.

Another episode in the books. Thank you so much for tuning in. For show notes and more, visit empoweringhealthy business.com.

If you would like to have a one-on-one discussion with me, or possibly engage smart books to help with your business, you can reach me at Cal C A L at Empowering Healthy Business dot com or message me on LinkedIn where I am easy to find. Until next time, this is Empowering Healthy Business, the podcast for business owners, signing off.