If you’re frustrated with your lead generation and sales process due to lack of consistency, then you’ll love our 7-step sales process. It’s a consistent and scalable sales system that we’ve used across our multiple ideal businesses, and it works every time.
In fact, we’ve even used it to create sell high-ticket items, such as an $80k franchise, and it consistently just works. Here’s how it goes.
- Create your avatar or your target market.
- Frame up your irresistible offer
- Craft and set up a landing page where your leads land.
- Qualify the leads that you get through qualifying questions.
- Nurture the leads.
- Get them on the initial phone call.
- Get them to a video call to share more information and engage
Let’s move through the seven steps.
Step 1: Create Your Avatar or Your Target Market.
Identify Your Target Audience and Ideal Client
The first and most important thing when you’re looking at building a system for sales is to establish who you’re targeting and who your ideal client is. The mistake that I’ve seen so many businesses make is they just think everyone’s a client, which is simply not true.
Understand who you’re trying to target. The more specific you can be about who your avatar is, the more targeted you’ll be, the more successful your campaign will run, and the more qualified leads you’ll be able to generate. The worst thing you can do is just run ads saying, ‘Look, everyone’s a potential client.’
It simply doesn’t work like that. Everyone is not a potential client, and it gets down to being very granular about that process.
To learn more about this, you can skip to 1:47 of this podcast.
Create the Ideal Client Avatar
What are ways to create your ideal client avatar?
1. Look At Your Past Clients Who Were a Good Fit.
If you’ve been in business for a few years, look at your ideal clients. The ones that you would consider, ‘We just want more of these types of clients,’ and build a bit of a profile around these clients.
2. Research Your Avatar
Get into the minds of who your ideal client would be, what they’re thinking, what their fears are, and how you would motivate them. You could interview them or learn more about them through surveys and forums.
That’s the most important. If you talk to a marketing agency and they say, ‘Oh, we don’t really dWo that in detail,’ then that’s a red flag.
Why This Step Is Crucial
This step is crucial because:
- It will help you tailor your message and offer to your ideal client’s needs and desires.
- It will help you avoid wasting time and money on unqualified leads or prospects who are not a good fit for your business.
- It will help you stand out from your competitors who may not have done this step or done it well.
Step 2: Frame up Your Irresistible Offer
Here’s what usually happens in sales and marketing lead generation:
There’s a lot of effort on getting things right, setting things up, getting the images right, getting the copyright, and more.
But the reality is that if you had what we’d call a no-brainer irresistible offer, then that will do most of the heavy lifting for you.
To understand how you can make an offer irresistible, you need to define the avatar and be very clear about what their fears are, what they’re trying to move away from or towards. Without having done that first step, this is very difficult to do.
To learn more about this, you can skip to 3:35 of this podcast on effective business sales process.
Examples of Irresistible Offers
The irresistible offer may not be offer of your final product or service. It may be something to engage your clients with. An example would be:
- If you are a marketing agency, you might say, ‘Look, what I’m going to do as part of our process is do an audit.’ You know, so you might do an audit of their current assets at no cost to them. Then you’ll share with them information that will help them to understand and better improve what they’re doing. There’s no risk to them, so it’s a bit of a no-brainer offer.
- You could offer a free trial or a money-back guarantee. For example, if you are a software company or a subscription service, you might say, ‘Look, you can try our product or service for free for 30 days and see if it works for you. If not, you can cancel anytime and get your money back.’ This reduces the risk and increases the trust of your potential clients.
You can create all sorts of no-brainer, irresistible offers. The trick will be—this isn’t an offer that’s going to appeal to everyone. But it should be an offer that appeals to your ideal client avatar. The more time that you take in crafting the irresistible offer, the easier it will be, and the less work that needs to be done.
Why This Step Is Important
This step is important because:
- It will help you attract and convert more leads who are interested in your solution and value proposition.
- It will help you differentiate yourself from your competitors who may not have such an offer or have a weaker one.
- It will help you build rapport and trust with your potential clients who will see that you are willing to provide value upfront and solve their problems.
Step 3: Craft and Set up a Landing Page
Use a Landing Page to Capture Leads
It really surprises me how many businesses still send leads to their website. Never send leads from paid advertising to your website. If you do that, you’re unable to track them. They might click here, click there, wander off, or look at more information.
What you want to do is have this experience where you’re just moving someone through a funnel – and you’re defining and mapping out the experience for them. A landing page is needed for that.
A landing page is a custom page that typically only has one action on it: to complete a form.
To learn more about this, you can skip to 5:38 of this podcast on effective business sales process.
How to Create an Effective Landing Page
On this landing page, you’d have a simple form. You’d have information of why it’s important for them to engage and share information with you, so that they can actually get something that they are after.
The critical thing is:
- You must have a landing page which is targeted towards a specific avatar, that really talks about the irresistible offer that you’ve been framing up.
- When you set up a landing page, it’s imperative that you’ve got all the right pixels and tracking mechanisms on that page, so you know how it’s going, how it’s performing, and what the conversion rate is.
- You should do split testing, which is: create two versions, two slightly different versions of that landing page; direct 50% of the leads to each page; and then after a few leads hit both of them, you’ll see that one’s performing better than the other.Then, you would sort of dump the worst performer and create another version and then do the same process so you’re constantly optimizing that landing page.
Step 4: Qualify the Leads
Qualify Your Leads Further with a Second Form
Now, when you initially get a lead, you might ask for a first name, surname, email address, and phone number. From that information, you don’t really know much about that lead. It’s what I would call a very fuzzy or unfocused lead.
Because you’re not sure:
- Are they a great lead?
- Are they a lead that’s not that relevant?
So what we would do is: the next step after they complete the landing page form is not to send them to a thank you page and say: “Thank you for your inquiry. ” That’s it.
Instead, we will redirect them to a second form. And what you do on that second form is, you ask some qualifying questions. We typically have anywhere between 8 to 12 questions, which are very simple to answer, drop-down options.
We explain to them why it would be helpful if they completed this second step form. And that why would be: we’re just trying to understand if we’re a fit for them and they’re a fit for us. It’s all about fit.
To learn more about this, you can skip to 7:53 of this podcast on effective business sales process.
How to Design Your Qualifying Questions
Ask 8-12 qualifying questions that will help you identify the quality of the lead.
So it might be:
- They need what you’ve got, your product or service, now or in the next month or two.
- They have the available capital. You might ask a question about money or their budget.
- Their motivations for engaging are very high.
- They’ve got previous experience or expertise.
- They might be in a particular industry.
It’s up to you to define these questions. When you go “this is an ideal lead”, what is it about that lead that makes them an ideal?
That’s actually the sort of questions that you want to ask. So then you actually know who to focus your attentions on. Because if you’re generating a lot of leads, you want to know who you want to go to, who you want to specifically target, as opposed to just all the leads in a box.
Why This Step Is Beneficial
So step four is these qualifying questions, step two form, that happens. And that’s typically on the thank you page from the first landing page form that they’ve completed.
This step is beneficial because:
- It will help you filter out the leads who are not serious or not ready or not qualified for your solution.
- It will help you segment the leads into different categories based on their answers.
- It will help you prioritize your follow-up actions and tailor your messages accordingly.
Step 5 – Nurture the leads
Nurture Your Leads with Valuable Information
The way we do that is, we have a CRM platform that we use. As soon as anyone comes into our system, we can then nurture them by sharing vital information. We could send them emails that say – “Here’s a tip. Here’s some information. Here’s some data we’re going to share with you.”
The goal is genuinely sharing valuable information with your leads, so that they can start to understand how you operate, and what you can do for them.
To learn more about this, you can skip to 10:05 of this podcast on effective business sales process.
How to Make Your Nurturing Emails Relevant and Specific
And the more specific and relevant those emails and communications are, the more likely they are to begin to build trust and understand you’re doing. They can also get a feel of whether you’re the sort of an organization that they should be working with.
Some ways to make your nurturing emails relevant and specific are:
- Use the information that you collected from the landing page and the qualification survey to segment your leads into different groups based on their needs, goals, challenges, etc.
- Tailor your email content and tone to each group, addressing their pain points, offering solutions, and highlighting the benefits of your product or service.
- Provide social proof, testimonials, case studies, or success stories from other clients who are similar to your leads.
- Include clear and compelling calls to action that invite your leads to take the next step in the sales process, such as booking a call, scheduling a demo, or signing up for a trial.
- Track and measure the performance of your emails, such as open rates, click-through rates, conversions, etc., and optimize them accordingly.
Why This Step Is Essential
This step is essential because:
- It will help you build rapport and trust with your leads over time, by providing them with valuable information that educates them and helps them solve their problems.
- It will help you stay top of mind with your leads, by keeping in touch with them regularly and reminding them of your value proposition.
- It will help you move your leads further along the sales funnel, by creating interest, desire, and urgency for your product or service.
Step 6 – Get Them on the Initial Phone Call
Not everyone will answer your qualification questions. So we just aim for a conversion rate of about 25 to 30 percent of the leads to complete that. So the purpose of this phone call is to get more information about them.
The goal of the initial phone call is to get your front-end sales person to look at the info they’ve submitted and have a bit more of a higher-level conversation. This should only take 10 to 15 minutes.
To learn more about this, you can skip to 10:54 of this podcast on effective business sales process.
How to Conduct the Initial Phone Call
Here are some of the steps you could implement in this initial phone call:
- Gauge interest and qualify them once again before putting them in front of a more qualified sales person.
- Build rapport and trust with the lead, by showing empathy, listening actively, and addressing their pain points and goals.
- Confirm and clarify the information that they provided in the landing page and survey. Ask any additional questions that are relevant to your solution.
- Explain the value proposition and benefits of your product or service, and how it can solve their problem or help them achieve their desired outcome.
- Schedule the next step in the sales process, such as a discovery call, a demo, or a proposal presentation.
Step 7 – Get Them on a Video Call to Share More Information and Engage
Step seven involves conducting a video call, which can be done using platforms like Zoom. During this call, you will provide additional information to the prospective client and guide them through the next level of details necessary for them to consider establishing a relationship with your organization. Whether you opt for a one-step or two-step approach depends on the nature of your product or service.
In cases where you are dealing with high-value items, such as selling $80k franchises or $25k courses, we have found that the two-step process is particularly effective. This involves a Zoom call that is led by your more experienced team members. These individuals have a deeper understanding of the prospect’s needs and can provide tailored information that is relevant to them.
To learn more about this, you can skip to 11:54 of this podcast on effective business sales process.
How to Measure and Optimize Your Performance
We’ve had a lot of success with these seven steps. We’ve used it across different industries for different products and different services, and we found it works exceptionally well.
Once you’ve set this process up, remember to set metrics up for every possible step, so that you can measure its performance.
To determine the metrics and KPIs that you might want to track for each step, ask the following questions:
- How many people should land on the landing page?
- What’s the conversion rate of the landing page?
- What’s the conversion rate of the qualifying form?
- How many people should we get to the initial phone call?
- How many zoom calls or video calls should we book in a month?
- And what are these as a percentage of the overall numbers?
By having some well-defined KPIs and targets, you can measure and see where it’s working really well, and what areas need improvement.
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