This seems like a no-brainer. “I don’t have any products I could sell online so how could I possibly benefit from a sales funnel?” On the surface it would seem like you can’t. The reality is that there are many kinds of sales funnels, each catering to a different goal. If you run a service business, what kind of sales funnel to you need?
What Is the Main Goal of a Service Business Sales Funnel?
For a service business, it can’t be to sell a product online, naturally, so if not that, then what? The answer is in choosing the right kind of sales funnel to suit your needs. If you run a business where you can’t finish the transaction fully online, then you can still use a sales funnel.
“How?” you might ask. Well, the secret is in choosing a type of funnel focused not on finishing a full transaction in an automated online sales system, but rather in finding you leads to focus your personal time and efforts on.
The Lead Generation Funnel
This type of sales funnel starts out much the same way as any other sales funnel does.
- Set up an email list with an autoresponder. This is where you collect your contacts.
- Set up automated email follow ups in your autoresponder.
- Set up a page to capture visitor’s contact info (email at least).
- Place an ad to drive traffic to your email capture page.
After this point is when the goals and steps change greatly. With an e-commerce based sales funnel the next step would be to send recipients of your email follow ups to a sales page and ultimately to an order form. However for a Lead Capture funnel, you’re next step is to get a response from your list, get them asking about your services.
Those that respond are your leads who are interested in your services. This is what the automation has done for you, gotten you to the point of having an interested contact you can now manually follow up with to finish the sales process. This can cut down severely on the time needed for prospecting as the automated system does at least some, if not most, of that work for you.
The benefits of this are huge. Imagine how well your sales team can convert if they’re spending more time with people who are already interested. They don’t have to do as many calls with people who don’t need your services, so they can have fewer unproductive calls. This means more efficient use of their time to find those people who need and want your services. This means more sales from your team without having to expand it so much, or getting the same sales from a much smaller, leaner sales team.
What’s Needed To Set This Up?
Like any sales funnel, a Lead Capture page is needed. This page needs to have an irresistible offer to convince visitors to leave you their contact info. The best way is to show value, both in the form of the benefits of what you can do for them, but also in the form of a Lead Magnet.
What is a Lead Magnet? It is something you offer for free, but only to those that subscribe to your email list. It can be in the form of an ebook, a webinar, tickets to a live event your hosting, a whitepaper, a fact sheet or just about anything else you can imagine that is cheap to produce, but valuable to your subscribers.
Stats show that a good Lead Magnet offer can raise subscription rates from less then 10% to 15%, 20% or more. Some free webinar offers have been known to get as much as 65% of all visitors subscribing so they can get to see that free webinar!
Regardless of what your Lead Magnet is, it needs to provide value to your subscribers and demonstrate how your paid for services will magnify that value far in excess of the costs.
When you get into your email follow ups, they too must continue to provide value to your subscribers. That is what will get them opening your emails and reading them. That is what will get the attention and response from those potentially buyers hiding in your contact list.
I hope you found this information useful and valuable. If so, I’d love to hear what you got out of it in the comments below. If you have any questions feel free to post them in the comments below – I love answering questions and helping people out.
