What is a Sales Funnel and Why You Should Have One

Hi there!

Let me start off by saying Happy New Year! I truly hope that this will be an amazing year for us all 🙂

It’s been a while since my last blog post and something great has happened in the meantime! I had my very first HIGH TICKET SALE!!! My commission was almost $ 1000,- What a way to end the year on a high note!

And the best thing is, I didn’t even really do anything to make this happen. It happened when I’d already taken a break (although I couldn’t resist checking if I’d had any sales right before Christmas).

So you might be wondering how it’s possible that I made a high ticket sale without trying to sell anything at the time. Well, it’s all because of Dean’s Ultimate Sales Funnel that I’m allowed to use 🙂

Let me tell you more about it.

The Ultimate Sales Funnel

First of all, what is a sales funnel? A sales funnel is a marketing concept that maps out the journey a customer goes through when making any kind of purchase. The model uses a funnel because a large number of potential customers may begin at the top-end of the sales process, but only a fraction of these people actually end up making a high ticket purchase.

A sales funnel is something that you send (potential) customers through to introduce them to yourself, your business and your products. It consists of multiple stages, all of which have its own desired outcome. The goal is to turn persons into prospects (potential customers), your prospects into customers, and your customers in repeat customers.

Some of these stages occur at the frontend (first offer and upsells) of your business while others occur at the backend (later offers once you’ve already acquired the customer).

The Ultimate Sales Funnel has five stages:
1. Lead Capture
2. Customer Acquisition
3. Value Maximization
4. Recurring Revenue
5. Premium Products

As a prospect passes through each stage of the funnel, it signifies a deeper commitment to the purchase goal. Let me explain the five stages.

1. Lead Capture

In this first stage of the Ultimate Sales Funnel, the goal is to build an email list of potential customers (also known as leads). This is done by offering something of value in return for someone’s email address. This can, for example, be an informative PDF or video.

It’s important that the thing you’re offering attracts the kind of person that would be the ideal customer for the products that you eventually wish to promote to them, that it’s highly desirable and people would want to opt-in to receive it, and that the ‘bribe’ you’re offering them is completely free.

2. Customer Acquisition

Now that leads are captured on an email list, it’s time to convert these leads into customers! This is done by regularly emailing them and presenting the details of an initial frontend offer (in my case this is The Iceberg Effect book).
A frontend offer is usually low priced.

Because this is such a low priced product (in my case people only need to pay a very small shipping & handling fee and the book itself is completely free), it’s also a very low-risk product. This means that people will purchase such a product pretty quickly without having to think much about their decision.

3. Value Maximisation

In this stage, the goal is to make additional sales to your customers at the point of sale. These types of sales are known as upsells.

The value for each customer is maximised by giving them more of what they want and/or need from you. At the same time, the value is also maximised for yourself because your new customer also spends more money at this first point of sale.

These kinds of upsells are usually complementary products to your initial offer that would benefit your customer even more and usually have a higher price than the initial offer (but not so high that they would really need to think about the offer first). The goal is to get your customer to say ‘yes’ then and there to your upsells.

4. Recurring Income

Recurring Income is, as the name suggests, income that keeps coming back. Usually, this is achieved by offering a membership subscription-based product. These memberships can be for many different things that have something to do with your product.

You can, for example, offer memberships for specific software access or for training and coaching videos/sessions. These coaching sessions are what InternetProfits offers all its members as a monthly or yearly membership subscription.

Customers are made aware of these membership subscriptions because you keep sending them emails regularly.

5. Premium Products

The final stage of the funnel are the premium products. At some point in the email follow up the customers receive offers for these premium products. And because you’ve sent regular emails to your customers, they begin to know, like and trust you. Making them more likely to buy these premium products from you.

These premium products are usually high-priced and offer lots and lots of value that will make it actually worth that much money. The Accelerator and Accelerator Pro programs that I’m part of are two great examples of Premium Products which are offered at InternetProfits.

The Accelerator program is a great (relatively) high-priced educational program which helps starting affiliate marketers to reach their goals by offering them a step by step blueprint which they can follow. (But trust me, it’s worth every penny!).

An even higher priced educational program is the Accelerator Pro program. While it has a higher price it also has a lot of advantages and extras compared to the normal one. For example, there are a lot more things done for you so that you don’t need to do that yourself (my email list for instance) and there are 5-hour long coaching sessions included every month!

Selling these premium products and, thus, making high ticket sales is the fastest way to make big money and reach your dream life.

My First High Ticket Sale

So, I got my first High Ticket sale because of the Sales Funnel I just described (however, I actually started in stage 2 with this particular customer)! I first captured a person on my email list after he bought the book and even bought some upsells. This customer was, thus, also a great example that the value maximisation step works very well 🙂

Then he kept receiving regular emails from me with offers and other informational things. With this particular customer, I actually had some actual conversations through email as well, so I think that also really helped to make him know, like, and trust me!

In the end, it took about 2 months from the moment he bought The Iceberg Effect book until he decided to join the Accelerator program (so don’t worry if it takes some time!). This is why you should have a sales funnel.

I’m so very happy to see that the Sales Funnel finally did its work for me and that I now know for sure that it works! 🙂

Now that I know that, I can’t wait to see what beautiful things await for this coming year!

Let me know what you think about this Ultimate Sales Funnel.

Until next time!

Sandra