You are listening to My Freedom Grove podcast with Gretchen Hernandez, episode 127.

Welcome to My Freedom Grove Podcast, your calm space for practical help to get your dream business up and running while being authentically you and taking care of your mental health. I'm your host, Gretchen Hernandez. I'm so glad you're here!

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Welcome to My Freedom Grove Podcast, your calm space for practical help to get your dream business up and running while being authentically you and taking care of your mental health. I'm your host, Gretchen Hernandez. I'm so glad you're here!

 

Hi, my strong friends. Hey, I am really excited. I'm getting really close to releasing my next full online course, which is called Smooth and Scalable. This is an introduction to sales funnels. This is a course I'm only gonna provide to my one-on-one clients and to my Unshakable business CoLab membership clients.

 

The reason why is that sales funnels. It takes a lot of coaching to get through all of the different pieces to make everything work. But I wanted to give you a little introduction as to why I would even spend my time creating a course like this.

 

When I started my entrepreneur journey, I was totally overwhelmed. There was a lot I didn't know how to do. I got really frustrated. There were times that I thought, okay, I'll do this one thing that I saw online, that this is how you're supposed to make a business happen. And I'd start doing it. And then I'd get defeated really quick.

 

It's a lot of effort, and I'm looking for the payoff, and I'm not seeing the payoff, but it's because I didn't really understand how all of the different business pieces were connected. In fact, I didn't even know what all of the different pieces were. There were skills that I had to learn. There's tech, there's how to sell to people, how to market, how do you even design the product and service? What do people even want?

 

There's so much to figure out, and I didn't have one high-level view of how everything fits together. So in fact, when I first started off, I thought, okay, the only thing I saw out there that was any kind of a high-level view was somebody's freebie on automation. And I thought, well, yeah, I want to get my business totally automated, so everything's super easy.

 

I went and I got this person's free guide, and it was over a hundred pages long, and it was so in the minutia of things. And it was so advanced that although I had an idea, I was so overwhelmed. Because I'm like, I don't even have a website yet. I didn't have a podcast. I didn't have a name for my business. I was at the very beginning. And I was looking at something that was so advanced, but it was because I needed to understand how does this stuff work? Especially if I was gonna be an online entrepreneur, I really didn't understand it all.

 

I had been working in corporate for well over 25 years. I was just used to going into work as a human in a physical location and interacting with other humans. Throw in website and marketing and all of that, and I was a complete newbie.

 

Of course, I was feeling overwhelmed because the learning curve was really big, and nobody gave me an instruction manual.

 

Behind the Curtain

 

Luckily within my first year, I got my hands on a copy of Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson. If you don't have this book, I'd highly recommend that you go get it. It shares so much about how to actually sell to people. Russell started studying how marketing worked way back when he was a kid. I think he was like 13 years old, and he starts collecting all of the junk mail. You know, all that stuff that we throw away, or we used to just scratch notes on and stuff.

 

Well, he started studying it as a kid, and he realized that there was this same kind of formula that people were using so that they could actually sell their products and services. And it all came down to a sales funnel.

 

In fact, he was so fascinated with it, and he became the guru in this that he created his own website type of platform called ClickFunnels. So he creates his own software. He has books that he explains all of this stuff. He teaches us everything about funnels. And then he has a software that goes with it. In fact, he's so honest in his book, he lets us know that he's using a book funnel to sell his software.

His main product is software, but he is using a book as a marketing thing.

 

Well, did you ever know that books were a marketing piece of material? I learned that one back in 2017 from a workshop later, I thought he made a book because he wanted to make money off of selling a book, but that wasn't it. He was using his book so that it could get in front of people that were interested in his topic. And then in his book, he's leaving little seeds about working with him in his next service offering.

 

And Russell Brunson was doing the exact same thing. Throughout his book, he's teaching us a ton of stuff, super valuable, you guys. And he's letting us know throughout he's like, look, I just planted a seed right here in this book funnel for selling my software. It's like, oh, who knew? Right?

 

So as an entrepreneur, this is a whole new world. It's almost like the Wizard of Oz.

 

We're used to being a consumer, and we're in front of the great face of Oz, but really there's this guy behind a curtain who's cranking some wheels and pushing some buttons that make it all happen.

While a sales funnel for an entrepreneur is that it's pushing buttons and cranking wheels and putting pieces together. And then the consumer on the other side, they see a totally different experience. As an entrepreneur, we have to recognize that there's been a lot of stuff happening that we weren't even aware of. And that's where sales funnels come in.

 

This is starting to take a peak behind the curtain so that we can understand how do entrepreneurs put their whole business together? How do they create this smooth machine? That's always making sure that they have planned and predictable revenue that they're always having customers coming in. That those customers are always willing to buy their products and services. And then they do an excellent job of actually delivering that product and service.

 

All of that falls under your sales funnel. This is your one critical path in your business that as long as all of that is working, your business is gonna be viable. And as long as you have the right measurements on that critical path, then you'll know if each of the pieces is working.

 

A sales funnel also is gonna help you figure out what is all of the infrastructure that you need in order to make all of this stuff work. And what kind of skills do you need? Is it something that you would develop yourself to do all of the different stuff, whether it's infrastructure or presenting things or creating the graphic arts that goes with it because there's a lot of graphics that go into any kind of selling.

 

Think about your marketing material, everything you see, there's pictures, there's words, there's different fonts. That's a skillset. So if you are an entrepreneur, that's being a solo entrepreneur, you're doing everything on your own. All of these things are skill sets that you might not realize that you have to learn.

 

If you happen to have a big amount of funding to start your business, you can just hire people to do these different pieces for you. But if you're like most of us, we're starting from scratch, we're trying to keep our expenses really low. We want to have higher profit margins so that that money can actually support our families.

 

The Four Phases of the Sales Funnel

 

I want to share with you the four phases of a sales funnel and some of the metrics that would go along with it, because this will help to guide you in knowing what do you work on first? Where should you be putting your effort?

 

A sales funnel has four different phases.

1. Traffic phase.
2. Marketing phase.
3. Sales phase.
4. Fulfillment phase.

 

Fulfillment

The fulfillment is where someone has already paid you for your product and service. And now you're actually delivering that product and service. So if it's a service, you're there working with them directly, giving them a really great experience, making sure they're getting the result that they came for. If it is a product that you've made sure that the product that you've created is high quality it's meeting exactly what their needs are. It's something that they actually want and that you're delivering it to them in a way that meets their needs.

 

Sales

Now going backwards, your sales process is how you actually sell that particular product and service to them. Your sales process may be an in person thing where you're talking to just one person and you're connecting with them, making sure that you understand what their actual pain is, their problem, and that this solution that you have, your product or service is a really good fit for them and you're offering it to them.

 

So that's in your sales process. If you're doing it in person one-to-one. You may also have a sales process where you're trying to sell to multiple people all at the same time. There's ways that you can do that in person too. There's different pitches that you could make. Sometimes that's at the end of a workshop. Sometimes that's at the end of a speech. Sometimes that's at the end of a product demonstration.

 

There's also webinars when you're online. So those are those classes that are given for free. And at the end, there's that pitch because it's all a way of selling one to many.

 

Now, usually you have to have some type of infrastructure in place for selling to people. You have to be able to collect payment. So if you're just selling to someone one-to one, then there's so many different, simple ways that you can do that.

 

They could pay you with cash. They could pay you with check, if people use checks anymore. They may want to pay you online. So you have to develop some online infrastructure for supporting that payment. That might just be simply letting them pay you through PayPal or a Zelle transfer.

 

But if you're going to be doing a higher volume, you might want to have this more integrated into a website where it's integrated with Stripe or PayPal for business or Square. And some of those, you can also go out in person, if you're doing a one to many and Square, I know has a thing that plugs into your iPhone and you can just run people's credit cards through it. But all of those things can get integrated through your website.

 

So now you're starting to go, oh, wait a minute. My website isn't just a one static page? It's like, no, your website serves a lot of purposes. And processing payments is one of them. And it could process a one time payment. It can process shipping. It can process subscriptions. There can be coupon codes. There can be trial offers. There could be an unlimited number of things that you do with your website that help in your sales process. And some of those specifics around free trial or coupon codes, things like that.

Russell Brunson also puts that into his Expert Secrets book. I'm not gonna go completely into detail on all of that. Because you can go read the book.

 

Marketing

Now, before people can even get to your sales process, they have to start first with your marketing material. That marketing material has to actually speak to them. People don't just buy things just to buy things. Unless of course they're doing retail therapy, right?!

 

But usually they have a reason for buying something. They are usually experiencing some type of a pain point or they have a dream that they're going after and they have to make sure that whatever this thing is, that's showing up. Is it even relevant to them? Is it for them? You're not gonna take something that's meant for dogs and start trying to sell it to grandma's for people use! It doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

 

Your marketing has to be really specific about who is it that you're even trying to talk to? Who is your ideal customer and what it's going on in their life that they would need a solution, what you have to offer? And that marketing there's so many different ways of doing it. That engages people. They want to be involved. It really depends on what your product is.

 

If it's something that's really expensive, your marketing might need to be a little bit more elaborate. If it's something really simple, maybe a simple marketing thing is gonna be all that it takes. But your marketing happens first before you make the offer for someone to go into your sales process.

 

Before you can even do your marketing, you have to help people to realize that your business even exists. That's where that very first part of your funnel is, which is your audience. Now, your audience, you're casting, a wide net here because you don't necessarily know where the concentrated pool is of all of your ideal customers that are actively looking for your exact solution.

 

Now there are some of those concentrated pools out there. It takes some research to find them, but once you do, it works out really well. For many businesses, they have to start first with just casting that wide net to just say, Hey, I'm a business. I exist. I do this thing.

 

And with that, there's a variety of ways of doing that. There can be just your general ad, like, you know, all that junk mail that comes in. Some of that stuff you get in, and you're like, this is totally irrelevant. But sometimes it is relevant to you.

 

In fact, sometimes you get something that today it's not relevant. But when that thing shows up in the mail again, six months from now, it's totally relevant. Because you're still the right person. It's just, you might not be experiencing that exact pain point at the moment and not actually interested in that kind of a solution.

 

So we have to market our businesses so that people even know that we exist. And the more that they see us, the more that they remember that we exist. And then when the time comes, when they need something for that particular pain point or that particular dream, and they're actively looking for a solution, they're like, oh yeah, there was this business I saw once that was something along those lines.

 

Well, that's where your traffic is. Right?! So when you think of a funnel, you want to make sure that all of this stuff that you do, how you're attracting your traffic, how you're actually marketing to people, the sales process that you use, and then ultimately your product or service that everything is aligned.

 

You want to help your people to move all the way through those four phases, hopefully as fast as possible because I mean, you are trying to make a living with this business, right? You need to pay attention to all four of those phases, make sure that they're aligned in some way and then understand what are the things that you're using in each of those phases.

 

So the things that you're gonna use in your sales process are totally different than the things that you're gonna use in your traffic phase.

 

Traffic

One thing to also note now, when I say funnel, hopefully, you're getting that image of a funnel that you'd actually use at home. So it's really big at the top and it slowly narrows down more and more and more and more. And then you see that it's really narrow at the bottom. Well, that's how business funnels work.

 

You try to get a large amount of traffic up at the top. Your marketing starts to narrow it down and concentrate the people that are in your funnel, because you want to make sure that you're only going to interact with the people that actually want your product and service. Otherwise you're gonna spend all of your time doing traffic activity and doing marketing activity. And it's never gonna result in a sale you're in business in order to generate revenue and create an income so that you can take care of yourself. So you definitely want this to start narrowing down.

 

It's kind of like when your house is full of a ton of clutter, you may like everything that's in your house, but do you actually use all of it? At some point you have to go through and purge out this stuff that's not gonna help you in this moment. That it's just taking up space and maybe, you know, slowing you down a little bit.

 

Your funnel, you're marketing, you're doing yourself a favor by starting to narrow down your traffic with your marketing so that you just have the ones that ultimately are gonna buy your product or service. And then you want to make sure that you have a sales process that goes right after that marketing.

 

When your marketing, sometimes your marketing material is just to let them know that you have a solution to the problem that they have. Sometimes you're giving a little bit more details about how that solution has helped people. Sometimes you're making a direct offer for what your product is.

 

And when you make that direct offer, it's not necessarily okay, here's my thing. Buy it. I mean, sometimes it is. It depends on what your product and service is. Sometimes that's appropriate to just say here's my thing, buy it. But sometimes there needs to be an intermediate step between your marketing activities and them actually being offered a time to come and talk to you about your product and service and then to eventually buy it.

 

AntiSleazy Sales Funnel

 

Now, for anybody who's thinking, oh, sales funnel, that sounds so complicated or it sounds sleazy any of that. So first let's address the sleazy part, because that always seems to come up first. Oh my gosh, I don't want to be salesy. Think of your sales funnel as a nurture path.

 

That's exactly the way that I've thought about it. I love my clients. I really, really do. I have the best clients on the whole world. So, of course I want to love on them all the way from when they're starting to first find out that I even exist all the way through my marketing materials. I want to help them. I want to do a lot of things to make their life better and easier.

 

I'm gonna do that because I love these people and I'm also gonna help to plant all of the seeds on why the product and service would help them even more than all of the stuff that I'm giving them in the marketing material.

 

None of that feels sleazy to me. It's just pure love and hugging on these people and helping them. Okay.

 

Avoiding Oversimplifying

 

Now, for all of the worry about it being too difficult and overcomplicated.

 

So I know that everybody thinks, oh, well just make business simple, three easy steps, make your business take off. Well, have you ever seen that picture of a person trying to climb a ladder? And let's say that they were down really, really low and they're trying to climb up an embankment, a really tall embankment. And they have a ladder. Three steps, awesome!

 

We love to just have three steps, and then we're up at the top really fast. But what if that embankment is like 50 feet high? Well, your first step is gonna be what like 17 and a half feet. Okay. I'm doing some rough math here, but 17 and a half feet tall. Okay. Well how tall is the average human? Well, I'm only five, two. So, I'd say maybe five foot six, five foot eight. I guess it depends on gender and genetics and all the good stuff.

 

But seriously, if you only have three steps to get up a 50 foot embankment, how hard is it gonna be for you to achieve that very first step?

 

It's gonna be hard, right? Like being a five-foot-two person trying to jump up to 17 and a half feet. Pretty much so impossible. But when I step back, it's like cool. Three easy steps. That to me is more complicated than anything else because how the heck am I gonna figure out how to even get to that first step? And I'm gonna get so discouraged. I'm gonna beat myself up for being short. I'm gonna think I'm not good at this. This is too hard. I'm never gonna be able to figure this out. Right. And eventually I'm just gonna quit and give up and walk away. But Hey, it was three simple steps. It's just, obviously I'm not good enough to do three simple steps, right? That's the inner critic. Okay. Inner nurture is like girlfriend love on yourself. It's 17 and a half feet tall.

 

Of course you're not gonna be able to reach something that's 17 and a half feet tall. What if instead your ladder to get up a 50 foot tall embankment had 50 steps, but each one was only one foot tall. Would you be able to get to that first step? Well, yeah, I can do one step even with a knee that had reconstructive ACL surgery. I can make it up one step. Okay, cool.

 

So then once I get up there, I feel pretty good. It's like, okay. I made some progress. I can see that. Okay. Well, can I get up that second step? Yep. I can. And after a while I'm halfway there. And then I look over at that other ladder going well. Yeah, it was three simple steps, but I quit because it was too hard.

 

But the one that has these tiny little steps, I was able to do it. I'm halfway there. And because I have some kind of a measuring system, I know there's 50 steps. I know how much progress I've made. So that's the other thing with sales funnels is that you can break each of those phases out into little microsteps.

 

You can also make sure that you're not putting 20 ladders up against the same embankment because that's what a lot of us are doing. We're trying to climb the same embankment, but we keep switching our ladders. We only need one.

 

When we break out each of those phases into these little tiny microsteps, we can see if we're using more than one ladder and we can pick which ladder is the best one and the one that's easiest for us.

 

So when you're seeing all of those different online courses about learn how to do this, learn how to do that, develop this skill or hire someone to do this part of your business for you.

 

When you have those four different phases of your funnel, your traffic, your marketing, your sales, your fulfillment, you can step back and go, okay, wait. What part of this whole thing is this training addressing? Because sometimes we're grabbing a whole bunch of training and a whole lot of extra activities, all for just one phase.

 

When we already had more than enough to make us get enough people in that one phase and that it was time to go work on another phase. Okay.

 

So being able to see it super helpful, breaking it down into microsteps. So you know, the business process, coaching me is loving this. This is all process steps. It's figuring out what are the smallest number of process steps that you can take in order to get the biggest bang for your buck. Okay.

 

Measurement

 

So how do you know if you're getting your biggest bang for your buck?

 

You're measuring stuff. So in each of those phases, you need to know how many people you have in each one. And what is that conversion? What's the percentage that go from one phase to the next phase?

 

Breaking it all down, looking at what are your traffic numbers, and you can have that from multiple sources. It could be from your online social media business pages, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, like any of those, how much traffic are you actually building up there? And how much of that are you getting to your website?

 

The website part is only relevant. If the rest of your funnel requires a website. If it doesn't, then maybe you don't even have to worry about that. Maybe you're just looking at the traffic that's coming onto your social media profile. If you're doing something like referrals, to try to build up all of your traffic, then you're looking at how many different people have you connected with in order to develop a referral network. So you're counting that number instead.

 

And then, then as we're moving from our traffic phase into our marketing phase, we're looking at the percentage that the marketing is actually attracting. How much of that are people engaging with this is letting us know the quality of our traffic.

 

Again, if we're casting a wide net out to big general public, our percentage of people that are actually interested in our marketing material is probably gonna be pretty low. But if we're finding traffic sources where it's more concentrated to the people that we actually help and especially if they already have that pain point or that dream that we help people with, then the conversion percentage of that marketing material being applicable to them and pulling them in is gonna be a lot higher. So even with your referral networks, with people that don't interact with the traffic that you want, you're spending a lot of extra time there.

 

That's not actually moving anybody into the right marketing phase for you. Okay?

 

Once you know your traffic numbers, now you're looking at your marketing numbers, what are the different activities that you're doing there? And how would you be able to look at numbers to know are they actually engaging with you?

 

For some people we're looking at just like social media posts in general and are people starting to click on it? Are they reading it?

 

A lot of us will start realizing that doing some interaction with people works so much better. If we're doing workshops or webinars, we can look at how many people are signing up for that and how many people are showing up to it. Because as soon as we get to actually talk with them, especially if it's a two-way conversation, we can really find out what they need and we can assess if what we're offering is a good fit for them.

 

We can also tell if they're a good fit to work with us. We don't have to take everybody that comes our way. And then they're also making sure that we are a good fit for them. So it's a two-way thing.

 

Now, if your marketing activity doesn't allow for that, two-way interaction makes it a little bit harder, but it's still possible. One of the ways that we do marketing is by offering free samples of things. And especially if we can get their contact information in exchange.

 

We might have some type of a freebie that we're offering a PDF or a meditation or something like that. Something that's actually gonna help people on their journey, whatever pain point or dream that they have and that whatever we're offering them is helping them in some way. They're getting some kind of a result from it. That's valuable. So they're willing to pay you with their email address and then you have a chance for that back and forth interaction.

 

If that's the case, then you know that you need to have some type of a website so that you can create a freebie opt-in page and that you have some type of an email system so that it's capturing their email.

 

If you're not gonna use it that way, maybe you don't even need an email system, right? Everything is optional. There's so many different combinations of how to do things at each of these phases. You can pick and choose things based on what you want to invest, your time and money and effort on. For many of us, this is all new stuff, so there's a learning curve involved with everything.

 

Think about all of the stuff that you're already good at that you already know how to do. Can you repurpose that in some way so that you can let people know that your business exists and then to be able to interact with them in marketing in some way so that you're making sure that you're a good fit for each other. And again, I went over a couple of examples in the beginning about what happens in the sales process.

 

Customer Experience

 

I'm not gonna go over it again. You can go back, listen to the beginning part. And then of course, once someone actually does buy something from you, you want to make sure that they're having a really great experience. So spend some time making sure that your product and service is actually something that can help them.

 

So many times, and I was guilty of this too, I think, oh my gosh, here's this thing that helped me so much. I'm gonna go, and I'm gonna create this thing, and then I'm gonna go out, and I'm gonna try to sell it to people.

 

Well, unfortunately what happens with that is that we make the marketing and sales so much harder. If we spend some time upfront, when we're looking at overall sales funnel, we want to pick something that people actually would want. So that's why we spend a little bit of time going out, doing market research to see is this pain point or is this, this problem actually something that people have that they're willing to pay for help to have someone help them with?

 

Now, if you have a product or service that you haven't even identified what pain point it's helping to solve or what dream you're helping someone to achieve it's really, really gonna be hard for you to market it and to sell it. Because people will have to spend some time with you to explain why they would even use this.

 

It's like they see it. It's like, oh, that's kind of cool. What would I do with that? That's so much harder to sell instead of already knowing, hey, there's a whole bunch of people out in the world that are suffering with this one thing or that they have this dream, but they haven't figured out how they're gonna be able to fulfill it.

 

And you're there like, hey, you know why you have that pain point? It's because of this. And I have a solution to resolve that root cause of what that pain point is, so that all of a sudden you're not gonna suffer anymore.

 

And if you already know what kind of dream they have, then you have it very tailored of, oh, here's this dream. I already know the steps you're gonna have to go through in order to achieve that dream. Maybe I don't help you with all of it to achieve the dream, but I help you with this one part.

 

And all of a sudden they're like, oh my gosh, that's great. I haven't addressed that one part yet. Or maybe they don't even know all of the different parts and you're the person that's like, you know what, first I'm gonna tell you everything that's involved in achieving that dream. And then I'm gonna tell you which part I can help you with.

 

If you haven't already done that market research to make sure that people want this, then you're making it so much harder on yourself. So do your market research. I know it's not fun. You have to get out there and talk to people. You might think that you're bothering them or that they're not gonna want to help you. But remember, we're helping them. We're finding out what is it in their life that they're having a hard time with that they could use a little bit of help.

 

And then once you do that, it's like, Hmm, okay. What are all of the different skill sets that I have? The different knowledge that I have and what can I create that's gonna help them. Once you do that, then the rest of your funnel is a lot easier to figure out because at each part of your funnel, you're giving them a little bit of that all the way through.

 

You're planting seeds, you're nurturing, you're watering, you're helping them a little bit at a time and don't try to give something to a person like you're a fire hydrant. You have all of the answers to the world. And you're just like, here's everything. I did that in so many of my freebies. I can't even tell you. It's just, I was so excited to help people, and I was so comprehensive. It was way too much. And it overwhelmed them.

 

Think about that, too as you're creating something for your ideal customers, how can you give it to them in bite-size pieces? What amount of it are they ready for right now and hold some of that back. And even in your product and service, if you try to pack too much into it all at once, that can be overwhelming too. You might need to break that up into a couple of different products and services and say, do product one first, then do product two, then do product three.

 

And it takes a while to figure out exactly what that sequence of products is and all of the features of the products, but it's so worth it. It makes it so much easier on your clients. It makes it easier on you. It makes your business run a lot easier because now you have something that people want.

 

You can tell where they are at each phase of your funnel, your traffic, your marketing, your sales, your fulfillment. You can measure how many people are at each one. You can adjust your activities. Look at those processes, make sure you're not doing too much, but make sure that the quality of the step you're doing is giving you the numbers that you need. And it's also helping to convert enough people from one phase to the next. So that it's really easy for you to do your business.

 

Overwhelm Sucks!

 

The final piece that I want to share with you is how do you make this calm? Right? Overwhelm sucks. It really, really sucks. And there's gonna be two ways that you can make this a calm process.

 

One is to start creating a funnel map for yourself first. So funnel map is just a high level of those four different phases. And what are the things that you're doing in each one. Having your numbers, figuring out what kind of infrastructure you would need in order to support that, what kind of skills you would need? What exactly are those process steps? And then once you have those process steps and you're like, okay, here's this, break it down into small manageable pieces. And then you start scheduling that on your calendar.

 

And so this is where having a work schedule is really helpful. You already know what days of the week, you're planning on working, what hours you're planning on working. So once you know end-to-end, here's all the stuff you can start plugging in the activities in your calendar at those different places.

 

One thing to recognize when you're starting to build up your calendar is that you're gonna have different versions of that calendar depending on where you are in your business.

 

In the very beginning, you're gonna have a lot of stuff to learn. You're gonna have a lot of stuff to build. I know that it's hard because you really want to just make some sales because you need to make an income. You've got yourself and probably a family you need to take care of, but that's why picking the right funnel is gonna be essential for you.

 

Pick the one that has the smallest learning curve. And if tech is a huge obstacle for you, pick a funnel that doesn't require much tech. Or if it does require a lot of tech and you're on a tight timeline, you're gonna have to figure out how you can pay people to help you because it takes time to learn everything. Everything is learnable, but know with all of the tech stuff that there's gonna be some obstacles that pop up because tech doesn't always work.

 

We can create a lot of mistakes as we're building tech. Especially if we're trying to build a lot of the different pieces together, we might have to go back and clean up some of our mistakes. That cleaning up process, you can get stuck pretty quick. You get to something you don't know how to clean it up. You're trying to get to tech support. They're not there to help you. You get frustrated. And then you're like, oh my business, isn't working and you want to quit. Anticipate that. There's gonna be times that you're gonna run into the hard stuff.

 

It sucks. I know. Been there a lot and you just want to go in bed and cry. At least I did. I can't, I can't say that for sure about you, but I know for me there were times that I just wanted to go cry. I wanted to throw a tantrum like a three year old. If I could, you know, yell, scream, cry, pound my fists on the ground. Tech stuff is just never fun, but it all depends on what your final vision is. You don't have to have all of the tech stuff. You can hire people to do that. Or you can pick funnels that don't need any of that.

 

So that's where my course comes in. I saw that this was a huge pain point. Not only for me three years ago, but almost every client that comes through my door, whether they're a one-on-one client or they're in my Unshakable Business CoLab membership, they're seeing all of the small pieces and getting overwhelmed and not knowing what piece do you do when the learning curve is frustrating. Like we kind of get mad thinking we should just know how to do this, but it's like, no, there really is a learning curve.

 

So that's why I put together the Smooth and Scalable course. I wanted to give an overview of all of the different parts of the funnel. We get into a lot of the different process steps and stuff, the metrics like I show a lot of the stuff, try to make it as easy as possible. But the best part is I give you 10 different examples of funnels. And I give you the full funnel map so that you can see everything that's included in the funnel, all of the pieces. And then I give extra support with it as far as sheets, that show, what kind of skills would you need to know in order to do a funnel like this? What kind of infrastructure like we're talking is this in person stuff? Is this low tech? Is this some of the higher tech? And if it is what specific tech do I need to have?

 

And then sometimes because maps are kind of hard to read, I give you a breakdown of all of the steps, like step one and some words and step two and some words.

 

And then I also give you some example metrics. And I think that this is really helpful because if we don't know what our targets are for each of those sections, it's really easy to get defeated quickly. Like it would be nice if we could all have that fantasy funnel where we don't need to be very visible at all. We don't need much traffic. We don't have to do much marketing, but everybody comes to our sales process and we have a hundred percent of people buy stuff from us. That would be great. That's what I'm calling the fantasy funnel.

 

I know I want it. I know a lot of other people want it, but we don't really see it that much. So knowing what kind of numbers represent actual funnels so that we can see how many do we actually have to get in each of those phases? What kind of percentage, how does that all equal a sale at the end? How many sales would we actually have? And then you can start worrying about the price of your products and services.

 

I also break down some of the other metrics so that you're making sure that you stay profitable, that you're not overworking and that you're making it really easy and enjoyable.

 

That course I'm so excited, almost done with it. I'm targeting having this out actually the day that I publish this podcast. We'll see, it might be a day or two late, but I'm really striving to get that done as soon as possible. And again, that's only gonna be available to my one-on-one clients and to my Unshakable Business Co-Lab membership.

 

And that's because there's so much coaching that goes along with it because there's a lot of emotions that come up in business. So I want to be there to help you resolve your emotional triggers, help keep you calm, help you to figure out which of these pieces do you need to work on first. And sometimes that's not always easy to figure out, especially when you're hitting a hard spot.

 

But I'm there to help you through all of this. And then of course, to experiment with all of the different pieces. So it takes a while. So in a one-on-one, I work with people three months at a time. I never know at what point they are in their business, like they might already have a funnel. Maybe they're just trying to optimize it.

 

Maybe they're trying to document all of the different process steps in it and maybe even get it in a system because they're getting ready to delegate, have some employees, they want to start scaling and getting a large number of clients into their products and services and they need to have everything completely optimized and take all the waste out of the process before they do that. So I help those people too.

 

So when I do the one-on-ones, it's really easy to adapt, no matter what part of their business they're in, everybody gets this course. And this course helps them no matter what phase of their business they're in.

 

And then when people are in the Unshakable Business CoLab Membership, they get this course plus a whole bunch of other courses because everybody's at a different phase in their business. We don't know how long the journey's gonna be.

 

The membership gives an affordable way for people to have the same access to me and a Facebook group, plus social calls and all of these courses so that they have the support that they need for as long as it takes for them to figure out all of these pieces and to keep them calm. That's the biggest thing.

 

We're trying to stay calm because if we get overwhelmed, then simple tasks can take much longer to do, or we just don't even get to the task because the overwhelm feelings can then start anxiety, attacks, panic attacks. It creates all of this fear and we just want to go hide and then we don't do anything.

 

So I'm there to help you through all of it. And it everything's gonna be okay. You are gonna have a Smooth and Scalable business, but having a very high level sales funnel is the backbone of your business. It's what gives it all of the structure. You can see how everybody flows into your business. You'll know exactly what to do, and you'll be able to cut out all the stuff that you don't need to do.

 

I do have a couple of one-on-one spots that are available. So if that's something that you'd like some help with and you're like, yes, give me this course, then feel free to go to my website, set up a consultation with me. I'm more than happy to give you some pointers on your sales funnel, give you some different ideas. And even we can talk about your products and services too.

 

The membership right now is still closed. I'm developing more courses. And I want to make sure that the people that are in there, that they can already get this course going. It also has the Connection Factor course in there. So if they're doing in person funnels, Connection Factor helps them to be able to do that. I'll let you know when that membership is gonna be open again, if someone already was a one-on-one client with me and they're like, I just want continuation of that. Then I might make an exception for them.

 

But for now the membership is closed to new clients, but one-on-ones still available and I would love to help you out. So I hope that this talk a little introduction on sales funnel was helpful. If you want to learn a lot more in depth about sales funnels, and it starts to feel a little salesy, but you can go check out Russell Brunson's book called Expert Secrets. It really gets into the, the nitty gritty.

 

It takes a lot of the love and the nurture out of it. It definitely feels salesy when you're reading it, but at least it's letting you know just about every funnel under the sun and all of the different sales tactics that you can use. It's helpful. I just want to see your business succeed. I want to see you do well, but having that high-level vision is gonna help you to figure out how all the pieces go together and make some choices for yourself so that you don't overwhelm yourself. You can sequence out your activities.

 

All right, my friends, I hope you have a great week and I will talk with you next week. Bye-bye.

 

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 Thank you for listening to My Freedom Grove Podcast. When you are ready to make your dream business a reality and take care of your mental health, I invite you to join the Unshakable Business Co-Lab. This is the mastermind membership you've been waiting for. There's no limits on your imagination, nor your timeline. We're with you every step of the way. To learn more, please visit www.myfreedomgrove.com/join. I'll see you there!