This article was inspired by a great email newsletter from Brennan Dunn from Create & Sell. A lot of the concepts I riff on below came from that.

Passive income, growth loops, flywheels and product-led growth. Great if you can make them work. But not applicable for most.

For most businesses, prospects need to talk to someone before they’re willing to buy.

Sales still matters. And that means sales funnels still matter too.

Below are six funnel optimisations that most businesses could use. Optimising your sales funnel is probably the highest ROI task you can undertake, because the same amount of leads magically turns into a higher number of sales.

Forget the funnel at your peril.

The standard sales approach

When somebody hits your website you’ve solved one key problem - awareness. They know now that you exist! Pat yourself on the back, step 1 is complete.

Now it’s time to get them on a call and convert them into sweet sweet revenue. Here’s the standard approach most businesses take to do that:

• They put a ‘Book a Demo’ or ‘Schedule a Call’ call-to-action on their website. -This leads to a Calendly page where the prospect can schedule a call.
• They book a time and you capture some basic info on them. Name, email, maybe a phone number (which they’ll probably fake, because who wants to be called anymore?!).
• If they show up to the call, the salesperson spends the first half finding out about them and answering basic questions about the business.
• After the call, the salesperson manually follows up a couple times depending on how much time they have.

At first glance, this seems like a solid approach. It’s easy to set-up and low friction for the prospect. In a couple clicks and minimal form-filling, they can speak to someone almost immediately. That means more conversions, no?

But, unfortunately, no bueno.

Why this approach ain’t it

There are a few reasons why this isn’t optimal:

• Most prospects are not high-intent. A person might have literally just found out you existed. They don’t trust you yet! Why would they want to jump on a call there and then?
• They know they’re being sold to. As Matt Lerner says, “everyone knows book a demo” really means “talk to a salesperson,” and who would want to do that?” Nobody, that’s who.
• High no-shows rates. Low-friction also means low commitment, which means a higher likelihood of not turning up. You might think a high no-show rate is worth it if it leads to more absolute conversions, but it’s highly disruptive
• Sales calls end up focused on info-gathering. If half a sales call is spent finding out who this person is and explaining how your product / service works, less time is spent on figuring out what their problem is and handling their objections.

Low booking rates, high number of no-shows and low deals closed.

There’s a better way.

The better way

Every business has unique services, positioning, customers and use cases that will inform the nuances of how to design their sales funnel.

But there are some best practices to building a good one. Are these applicable for 100% of businesses? No. But they work for a lot of them.

1. Add a pre-call funnel step

Brennan Dunn refers to this as ‘separating interest from booking’. It means adding a funnel step to capture an email before pushing people to a call booking page.

Yes it’s more steps and more friction.

But high-intent prospects will book a call anyway. And now you have the chance to nurture the lower-intent prospects and convince them to give up some of their time (using emails with thought leadership, case studies, social proof or whatever else you might have that could persuade them).

2. Reframe the sales call

People don’t want to feel like they’re sold to, even if they’re interested in buying.

A CTA like ‘speak to sales’, ‘schedule a call’, ‘book a demo’ - even if that’s what they’re literally doing - puts people off.

A better CTA is framed in a way that makes the prospect feel like they’re making progress or getting value.

At Acapela, a B2B SaaS company, we positioned the sales call as a ‘White Glove Onboarding’. Onboarding == progress, white glove == high value. Yeah, corny. But it worked.

At Digital Mums, where we sold cohort-based courses, we offered a ‘Free session with our Admissions Team’. No sales person in sight.

These converted a hell of a lot better than booking a demo or speaking to sales.

3. Segment and profile everyone in the call booking form

Counterintuitively, a great sales call is not focused on hard selling. It’s focused on listening to the customer’s pain points and helping them understand how you can help solve them.

Using a sales call to uncover a prospect’s challenges is inefficient for two reasons:

The salesperson has to do it on the fly and react in real-time.

This takes up precious call time.

A better way is to capture the data in your call booking form. Free-form questions like:

• “Please share a bit about your company, your audience, and what you sell”
• “What are you looking for our help with?”
• “How have you already tried to solve the above problem?”
• “How is this holding you back?” …are a good starting point.

Now the salesperson arrives at the call with a detailed understanding of the prospect’s profile and pain points, making it easier for them to sell.

And even better, data can be used to personalise nurture emails that prep the prospect for the call, making it more likely they’ll convert.

4. Arm prospects with more info

Most businesses take for granted that a prospect knows anything about them.

At tiney, we had a lot of success using Google Ads to drive high-intent prospects to our website. We had amazing channel / offer fit.

But the problem was that they were jumping on a sales call after literally just finding out about us for the first time. They might scan our landing page for 15 seconds, fill in their details and book a call. They’d then hit the call without any real idea about what we actually did. Our sales team was spending the majority of the call delivering information, rather than persuading.

We fixed this by arming them with information before the sales call. We created a short explainer video that delivered core info about us. We put it on the confirmation page where they gave their initial details, in the Calendly booking link, in the confirmation email and reminder emails.

We made it clear that to get the most out of the call they needed to watch it. We also included links to longer-form content they could dive into in greater detail if they wished.

Prospects arrived better informed so the sales team could focus on their pain points, and we converted more of them.

5. Cover everything in social proof

Social proof works. And there’s no such thing as too much of it.

Doubly so if you sell high-ticket items like services or an expensive product.

Most businesses put a few logos and testimonials on their home page and call it a day.

But social proof is about allaying concerns. And in a funnel, there is so much more real estate than just your homepage. You have the:

• interest / lead magnet page.
• sales booking page
• call confirmation pages
• reminder emails (which if you’ve captured info about their profile, use case, or challenge, you can personalise to match).

This is such low-hanging fruit that basically every business should be doing.

6. Automate your follow-ups

Most prospects are not ready to buy there and then. And most salespeople don’t have the time or headspace to manually follow-up with all prospects in the most persuasive way possible.

To get around this, you use automated slow-drip campaigns segmented by specific objections. Brennan suggests a neat way of doing this:

• If the prospect is a good fit, have a status field in your CRM that maps to potential blockers they might have e.g. “Comparing Us With Other Options”.
• Trigger automated emails for each segment that help unblock them over the long-term e.g. if they are comparing you against competitors, send them competitor comparisons.

These help you stay top of mind and persuade prospects to become customers, while not relying purely on your sales team.

Summary

The funnel ain’t going nowhere. Every funnel might be different, but there are common optimisations most businesses miss out on.

It’s not sexy. But it works.

So if you need any help with yours, feel free to reach out.