HOW TO CREATE HIGH CONVERTING SALES FUNNELS
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How to create a high converting sales funnel with Joel Louis
- An activation sales funnel is a great place to start. Once getting ROI could focus on lower value ladder items like an ebook or quiz.
- If you’re driving traffic, meaning you’re paying money or you’re doing specific Facebook Live’s or specific posts and you’re driving them to your website you’re literally driving them to a brick wall because your website has a lot of distractions, there’s a lot of noise what I like to call it.
- It comes down to did you do your work? Did you look at the red ocean, so what market are you trying to serve? Hey, I’m in a red ocean, and then from that red ocean did you create a blue ocean offer? Did you create something that differentiates?
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SHARE THIS EPISODE: HOW TO CREATE A HIGH CONVERTING SALES FUNNEL
HOW TO CREATE A HIGH CONVERTING SALES FUNNEL
An activation sales funnel is a great place to start. Once getting ROI could focus on lower value ladder items like an ebook or quiz.
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Doug: Well welcome back to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today’s guest in the studio is Joel Louis. He is the founder CEO of a company called Integrator and Co. They are a digital marketing agency based out of the Boston area that helps experts reach more people, scale their business, and increase online sales. Joel and his team specialize in funnel strategy, funnel design, funnel repair, and funnel building. In addition to generating millions of dollars and thousands of leads for his clients, Joel is the father of three, he is very passionate about the intersection of fatherhood and entrepreneurship and I also see he is a fellow crossfitter. Today we’re going to start off our conversation with the five reasons your website is killing your marketing efforts. Let’s welcome Joel to the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast today.
Doug: Well hey Joel, super excited to have you on the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast today so welcome to the show.
Joel Louis: Thanks Doug, so happy to be on your show today.
Doug: I was super excited when I was looking at your bio and background because you have so many things that I’m deeply interested, I know our audience is, in terms of building a business, scaling a business, and as we got to the end of our conversation pre-recording talked about a couple of other things that you spend time with. One is your family and I’ve noticed that you’re also a crossfitter. I can feel your pain, I’m in the box three days a week and then do a day of Olympic lifting as well.
Joel Louis: Wow, awesome.
Doug: Why don’t we start with the meaty thing right upfront. I think one of the talking points I saw that was interesting and maybe a bit shocking is it says five reasons why your website is killing your marketing efforts.
Joel Louis: Yes.
Doug: Do you want to walk us through what that is and why people probably don’t realize it and they’re ignoring it?
Joel Louis: Yeah absolutely Doug and thank you for having me and thank you for bringing up the family. For my family first and I forget who said this quote but it goes, “The things that matter most should never come at the mercy of the things that matter least.” I always love to lead with the family because that’s really important and that’s really why I’m doing what I’m doing and I’m sure probably a lot of your listeners do what they do as well.
Joel Louis: In terms of the five reasons your website is killing you, so we all have been told, “Hey you have to have a website. It’s absolutely needed.” I still think a website is needed. It’s that digital business card, it’s your digital footprint, it’s where you’re going to have your blog, your podcasts, and all that stuff. The thing with a website is that, as you are aware and we’ve been hearing it with social media, the rise of social media, people’s attention span and everything like that.
If you’re driving traffic, meaning you’re paying money or you’re doing specific Facebook Live’s or specific posts and you’re driving them to your website you’re literally driving them to a brick wall because your website has a lot of distractions, there’s a lot of noise what I like to call it. What I mean by that is everything that they could click on on your website, think about your home page. If you take a second and look at the above the fold. Even before you scroll down on your home page just above the fold, how many things can they click on on your website?
Doug: Well I’m glad this is a podcast and this isn’t a visual because I’d get a big failing mark there, it would be an F.
Joel Louis: Exactly, so the way I look at it is each one of those things is a call to action, why not? Because it’s something they could click on and it’s going to take them somewhere. Hopefully, most of them will keep them on your site but it’s going to take them to the about, it’s going to take them to contact, it’s going to take them to all these variables. From each one of those, if they go to the about, then they could go to contact, or they could go to the podcast. If you tried to wire map it out, if you looked at your Google Analytics and try to look at the paths that people follow, there’s no way to figure out what’s the most optimal path.
Joel Louis: That’s why I say each one of them is a call to action. Not to mention when you see sites that have the social media stuff above the fold, which that takes them completely out of your website, they land… I can’t tell you how many times I go to do something on Facebook, I try not to be on Facebook too much, it’s like I need to reach out to someone on Facebook. I click on it and before you know it I see a post or someone messages me and I start to interact with something and 10 minutes later I completely forget why did I go to Facebook to begin with? It’s a distraction, so each one of those is a call to action. If you’re spending money driving traffic to your website, even if it’s a lead magnet page, but where there’s still the header bars and that kind of things are still there or maybe it’s a blog post and stuff like that, there are too many distractions.
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SHARE THIS EPISODE: HOW TO CREATE A HIGH CONVERTING SALES FUNNEL
HOW TO CREATE A HIGH CONVERTING SALES FUNNEL
An activation sales funnel is a great place to start. Once getting ROI could focus on lower value ladder items like an ebook or quiz.
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Joel Louis: Whereas if you have a funnel, which I don’t know, does your audience know what a funnel is?
Doug: Yep, they’ll know what a sales funnel is and I was counting mine, by the way, so I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven distractions above the fold.
Joel Louis: Above the fold, exactly. Before I go into the funnel, there is a masterful way to still have your website and not have to direct the attention. One great example is Pat Flynn. If you go to Smart Passive Income, his Smart Passive Income website masterful. If you look on his Smart Passive Income you’ll see his logo is nice and tiny on the upper left-hand side. Then his tabs, the home and the about and stuff like that, they’re there but they’re very narrow. That whole header bar is very narrow and the font for the about and those things it’s not black, it’s not dark. It’s grayish. Then if you look toward the center of the screen, you’ll see a big hook, you’ll see that hook statement which talks about something about building an online business I believe.
Joel Louis: Even though he has an image of him and his team on the right-hand side, even if your eyes were drawn to that image, he has dotted lines coming from the image back to that hook statement. He’s trying to focus our attention on the hook statement. The analogy I like to use I call it the above the fold hamburger, and if you think about a hamburger it has the top bunk, the bottom bun, and then the stuff in between depending on your preference. The top bun is your hook statement, it’s that statement that’s going to grab their attention, it’s going to stop them in their tracks, it’s going to either tug at their heart, it’s going to speak to their benefit, it’s going to drive curiosity, it’s going to be something that’s going to stop them in their track. Because remember, they’re coming from social media or from somewhere, maybe organically they found you, how do you get their attention right away? You have a powerful hook statement and he is brilliant because it’s five words and it’s a really good hook statement.
Joel Louis: That’s the bun, the top of the bun. Then inside you should answer these questions. What is it? What’s this website about? Who’s it for? Why do I need it? Then how do I get it? Again, if you look at Pat’s you could answer all those questions, and as a nice clean green button, which in contrast to the white background, it really pops and it’s the color that really stands out above the fold, except for his logo again which is small. It matches his branding color of the logo but it really pops and stands out with that white contrast.
Joel Louis: Then the last part is the bottom of the bun. That is social proof. Again you look at his above the fold, right at the bottom you can see New York Times and Forbes and those things, and those are graded out, they’re muted because he doesn’t want your attention to go there, he wants your attention to go to his hook and then the how do I get it, which is I think it says get started or something like that.
Doug: Well that makes sense. I mean if everything is screaming for attention people will be confused about what to do. As you said, you want to make it a very simple call to action. I think the other big advantage for having a landing page with no distractions, so it’s either book an appointment or sign up for an email list or basically go away, is that when you’re doing that and tying that to either social or you’re tying that to advertising, you can tailor that message to the social post or you can tailor it to… Well for Google, for example, as you know you get bonus points for having the same relevant content on the landing page as the ad. If you’re running Google Ads to your webpage you’re being penalized.
Joel Louis: You are.
Doug: Yeah.
Joel Louis: Exactly, so that’s one of the main reasons why your website is killing you. If you’re spending that energy, effort, and money to drive the traffic and some of the stuff that you talked about as well, now again there’s a masterful way to do it where your site is designed better. But even with that design like Pat Flynn’s, I would still not encourage someone to run paid traffic to your website. This is where the other problem is tracking Google Analytics, looking at all the different paths that they end up taking. Again if you’re investing in driving traffic to something you want to be able to see the numbers clearly. How many people landed? What did they click on? Did they take the action that I wanted them to take?
Joel Louis: Another aspect of it is… I’m forgetting the other two right now, but let me talk about the funnel side of it. The advantage of the funnel, as opposed to a landing page, so I think a lot of times people associate a funnel to a landing page, which the first page of a funnel yes it’s absolutely a landing page. It looks like a landing page. The advantages are everything on that page is clear. Everything on that page is directing the visitor to take one of two options. Either one they take the call to action that you desire, register, opt-in, buy now, or they leave. It’s very, very clear.
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SHARE THIS EPISODE: HOW TO CREATE A HIGH CONVERTING SALES FUNNEL
HOW TO CREATE A HIGH CONVERTING SALES FUNNEL
An activation sales funnel is a great place to start. Once getting ROI could focus on lower value ladder items like an ebook or quiz.
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Doug: Makes it simple, yep. Either you’re in or you’re out goodbye.
Joel Louis: You’re in or you’re out. You can see the numbers, you can see how many people click from your ad, landed onto the page, and then how many people took action and how many people did not take action. You can see your conversion rates when you have a funnel. The other great thing, one of the advantages between the website is easy to split test. If you’re using a platform like ClickFunnels you could easily create a version B. You have your control page and then you have your variation page to see the difference in terms of your conversion. Then you could change your hook, you could change certain aspects to see what’s getting you better results.
Joel Louis: The other advantage of a funnel versus a website is that once someone completes the call to action that you set up on your funnel, whether it’s opt-in, register, whatever, you could continue that conversation. If you follow Digital Marketer one of their big things is do a tripwire, so if you have someone opt-in for ebook or something of value, if we think about someone was out doing something online, they were on Facebook, they were on YouTube, they were doing something. You grab their attention, kudos to you. They stopped, they looked at your ad, they looked at your Facebook Live, they looked at your YouTube. They decided to click. They don’t know you from anything, they don’t know you from Adam unless you’re doing retargeting. If it’s cold traffic they don’t know you at all. They saw your thing, they clicked on it, that’s amazing to have someone do that. Just that alone is a huge win.
Joel Louis: Sometimes as entrepreneurs we really beat ourselves up, but to get someone to grab their attention and get them to read your thing and then click to your page is awesome. Then not only that, you got them to take action, whether it’s registered for your webinar, which means they’re committing to an hour of their time or opting in to read your ebook, let alone buying something from cold traffic, those are all huge wins.
Doug: Sure they are, yeah.
Joel Louis: Right, so at that point, you’ve already, for whatever reason, the wordings you’ve used, you agitated the pain, your content, your copy has struck a chord that it was enough for them to say, “Hello,” or to give you their email address or email and phone number. Why not continue the conversation? Why not see what else you could help them with at that point? Instead of taking them to a thank you page, this is where a funnel comes into play. If you know your audience well enough, it appears you do because you were able to get them to take action, then think through what else would they need beyond this ebook? What else would they need beyond this webinar? That’s where a funnel becomes really powerful because you could continue that conversation after they take that first action.
Doug: Yeah, and I think one of the best… I can’t remember which marketer did it, but one of the marketers in their sales funnel they actually after you signed up there were several steps through the funnel but they began adding value right away. It wasn’t a promise of hey sign up for more stuff, they started building value and adding value to you as a user immediately. I’m not an expert on running webinars, but I’m assuming that that really helps to keep people involved because it’s like, “Wow, I signed up and then I went to this page and they offered me some more value and some more value and some more value all before I even got to the webinar.”
Joel Louis: Yes.
Doug: Opposed to hey, pull out your credit card and buy a bunch of stuff. There were actually actionable stuff and immediate wins.
Joel Louis: Yeah, we call it the indoctrination sequence. Once someone registers for the webinar, on the thank you confirmation page we often give something like a freebie on the thank you confirmation page, again value. Not just any piece of… Sometimes people smack something together and think that it’s valuable. No, actually give them something of value because if they consume that thing and they’re able to get some result, and the result could be in terms of something tangible or it could be something like… I’m sure you and I read tons of books, and sometimes it’s one thing in a book that shifts the way that you think. It’s not something tangible but it shifts the way that you think and that is huge. Because the way you’ve been thinking maybe held you in a box and then now someone gives you a different way of looking at it and it’s like wow.
Joel Louis: That’s why I try to tell my clients it doesn’t have to be something tangible but it has to be something of value, whether it’s going to be something that they could take action on and get some results right away before the webinar or something that’s going to start to change their thinking, any false beliefs that they have with regards to something.
Doug: Well it’s funny because I had read Russell Brunson’s book and that was the one thing that he talked about was what’s the one thing? He said the quickest way to kill your webinar, if I remember it correctly, correct me if I’m wrong.
Joel Louis: The big domino.
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SHARE THIS EPISODE: HOW TO CREATE A HIGH CONVERTING SALES FUNNEL
HOW TO CREATE A HIGH CONVERTING SALES FUNNEL
An activation sales funnel is a great place to start. Once getting ROI could focus on lower value ladder items like an ebook or quiz.
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Doug: Is to start teaching people, he said because you start teaching them to solve their problem and they might not realize what the one big thing is.
Joel Louis: Exactly.
Doug: Like you said.
Joel Louis: Yeah, he calls it the big domino.
Doug: Okay, yep.
Joel Louis: Yeah, and then from the confirmation page then you have your email sequences, which would continue to deliver value prior to them showing up for the webinar. I mean I’m sure your audience has heard this before, but giving value prior to the webinar, as much value as you can, because what you’re doing, again you’re taking someone who doesn’t know you at all, so how can I give as much value as possible before they get onto this webinar so that by the time they get onto the webinar they’re predisposed to listen to you because you want them to listen for that 45 minutes before you eventually you’re going to get to a pitch if you’re doing a sales webinar.
Doug: Yeah, I mean the first thing is let’s hope that they show up.
Joel Louis: Right, exactly.
Doug: How can we make… to build a relationship as quickly as we can so they see the value and trust us to show up and give up 45 minutes of their time.
Joel Louis: Absolutely, and the indoctrination sequence, I mean we had a client recently who just did a webinar. He didn’t want to drive pay traffic to it, which I completely understand and sometimes I recommend not going primetime on your first webinar, and he ended up having 50 people on the webinar. I mean 50 people registered, he had 28 people show up live.
Doug: Yep.
Joel Louis: Which is huge.
Doug: That’s a good number, yeah.
Joel Louis: Yeah, I mean out of the 50 it’s huge. Very engaged, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, you have to have that indoctrination sequence, you have to give that value so that people do end up showing up live.
Doug: I think you’ve done a great job explaining the obvious opportunity for our listeners to why setting up a funnel and directing people there opposed to your home page makes a lot of sense.
Joel Louis: Yes.
Doug: Where the low hanging fruit? When people come to you and they say, “Hey, I want to scale my business. I’m doing whatever, fill in the blank. I’m doing a couple hundred thousand dollars a year and my goal is to get to seven figures.” What are they typically missing to move from where they are to there?
Joel Louis: Yeah great question, and I always want to make sure that I summarize everything because I have a teaching background, so I want to make sure before we move onto that. Just to list out those five things in terms of why your website is killing you, no more too many distractions, so no focus. There are so many things going on. Too many calls to actions, which we talked about. Decision fatigue, they’re clicking all over the place. The stats are hard to track or harder to track versus a funnel. Too hard to change, sometimes you may have had someone build your website or you use a template and you want to make some changes to split test, not split test but to test something different and it may be too hard to make those changes depending on whether you’re using WordPress or whatever. Then the last one impossible for to AB test. It may be impossible to AB test depending on what platform you’re on. I just wanted to put those five things out there and summarize them.
Doug: No and that’s good, I mean that’s true. Obviously there are platforms that will allow you to do AB testing and serve unique content, but now we’re getting to more advanced content management systems. Yeah, so I would rather do the easy thing first, get some win and then when buckets of money start coming in then say well what could I do next to improve on that? Get some money in the door first and I’ll spend a year building it.
Joel Louis: Exactly, so the low hanging fruit, for those that don’t have a website right now, just so you know I started my business… I was the person when I had a podcast, I started with a podcast, it’s called Startup Dad Headquarters. It’s still available. I put it on pause because it wasn’t the income generator so you’ve got to focus on what’s generating revenue. I did 140 interviews because I was working at Intel Corporation at the time, I was a senior manager at Intel, and I was trying to figure out how do you leave a corporate job with a family. I had a wife and three kids, and how do you leave a corporate job to become an entrepreneur? I was listening to all these podcasts, Pat Flynn and John Lee Dumas, and they’re interviewing parents, clearly, they’re parents but they never really went deep into that how do you do that and how do you balance that without sacrificing the family?
Joel Louis: I went and I said, “Well I’m going to start my own podcast,” and I started one Startup Dad Headquarters focusing on dads and I interviewed 140 dads all over the world asking them how do you balance family and business. I spent all this time because on the DiSC profile I’m a CD. For those who don’t know what DiSC profile is, it’s one of those personality assessments. CD is someone who’s very detailed, very organized, perfectionist, could get into that realm. It took me forever to launch my podcast, I got all the fancy equipment, all the lighting. I was making no money. I got all the fancy stuff, I built a whole website, I had someone build a website, I invested in the website, it looked beautiful, everything was great.
Joel Louis: Now remember I said at the beginning I had to put it on pause because it wasn’t an income generator. I did all these things, it was a year and a half of work and I was like, “Okay,” and then I tried to monetize it after the fact, which is a big no-no. You start a podcast after you have a business, not before, not all of us can be John Lee Dumas and monetize a podcast. Then I was like, “Okay, what am I going to do?” I did this assessment, I read the 48 Days to the Work you Love by Dan Miller and I realized that I was a CD and I was like, “Oh, this is what’s killing me. It’s the fact that I’m allowing my C, which is the perfectionist, to drive me versus my D, which is the entrepreneur, the leader, the go-getter.” I had to shut down my C, allow my D to thrive, and I said, “You know what? What do people need?” I realized that I was doing some work for Jaime Masters whose Eventual Millionaire is her podcast, and I realized that entrepreneurs needed… They were struggling with the technology side of things.
Joel Louis: They needed to do webinars, but all the stuff that you need to put in place to get a webinar to run and during the webinar, you don’t have to worry about it, so I put together a webinar, I created a webinar production agency. This time around I did no website. I had just a mine map, a visual of what the service would look like and I started cold outreaching to people on Facebook. I started searching on Facebook. Facebook is an amazing search tool if people don’t know, and I started typing webinars and then I would click on post. People are always advertising their webinars, and I would find people who either did a webinar already or are going to do a webinar. This was three and a half years, four years ago when it was easier to direct message people on Facebook. I would direct message them with one question. Hey, I see you did a webinar are you planning on doing more?
Joel Louis: Instantly people started replying back and I started the conversation. From there I told them I have this service, I send them the mind map, we got on a call and I started selling people. Within two months of that, I was already at five figures. I had no website.
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SHARE THIS EPISODE: HOW TO CREATE A HIGH CONVERTING SALES FUNNEL
HOW TO CREATE A HIGH CONVERTING SALES FUNNEL
An activation sales funnel is a great place to start. Once getting ROI could focus on lower value ladder items like an ebook or quiz.
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Doug: That’s really cool.
Joel Louis: I had no website at all. I didn’t build a website until about a year and a half later when some of my clients started saying, “Hey, when I refer people to you it’d be great to have something to send them to.” That’s when I finally put together a website, actually, it wasn’t even a website. I used ClickFunnels and I built a one-page website where it’s just the scrolling page website, so I guess really a landing page if you will.
Doug: Well it’s interesting that you did both. I mean you came in the first time super analytical, no proof of concept, spent a bunch of time and money, didn’t work, which is what I think a lot of people do. I’ve definitely gone into projects like that myself. Then you stepped back and go, “Hmm, that doesn’t work.” You tried a different approach, which is hey let’s go have some sales conversations and see if the market wants what I have.
Joel Louis: Exactly.
Doug: Very quickly, very easily you put that together, got some results, went, “Oh well maybe now I need a website so people can refer me some more business.”
Joel Louis: Exactly, and even now our Integrator and Co. website is a ClickFunnels page, it’s just a ClickFunnels page. Now we’re multiple six-figure businesses. In terms of low hanging fruit, don’t waste time on your website. Stop wasting time on tweaking and tweaking and tweaking. Spend your time doing the sales, spend your time doing the thing that you feel resistant and maybe you’re a little afraid to do, it feels a little bit harder. It’s less sexy, it’s what’s going to get you the result.
Joel Louis: In terms of low hanging fruit from a funnel standpoint, let’s say you’re making over $100,000 or making six-figures or what have you, there are three types of funnels to think about. There’s an acquisition funnel, which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s like do I need more leads? There are prospects and then there are leads. Do I need more leads? Do I need to grow my email list? Because email is still king, regardless of what anyone tells you, webinars are not dead, stop listening to people who are saying webinars are dead. Webinars are still great and as you said, Doug, a webinar is a great way to show your authority, teach someone, give value. Maybe they don’t buy off of that first webinar, but I’ve seen for clients where people, the same person will watch multiple webinars over and over again before they finally decide to buy. Webinars are not dead. You can dial in your webinar, put it on automated, and have it run.
Joel Louis: There’s an acquisition funnel, which is basically to acquire leads, to grow your list. Right, because if you feel like you’re constantly trying to cold outreach, cold outreach, then you need to grow your list so that’s one. If you’re in that place and you need to grow your list, you need more leads so you can potentially turn them into customers, then you need acquisition funnels. I could go into the types of acquisition funnels. The next one is an activation funnel, which again is exactly what it sounds like. I have these leads, how do I get them to become customers? How do I get them to take that first step? How do I change that relationship from a relationship of them getting free stuff from me to a relationship with them now investing and actually paying, whether it’s $1, $50, $100, what have you?
Joel Louis: Again Digital Marketer is a great example of this. They do this splinter offers where it’s like for $95 you could get this one program and your activation funnel could be a free plus shipping book funnel which those are great. Those work great. There are certain funnels that work great for acquiring, so the acquisition and activation. A free plus shipping book funnel is one of those funnels, it works really, really great, especially if you’re using a two-step order form.
Doug: Yeah I’ve seen them work really well, like you said, for both acquisition and well I’d call it conversion activation. You get people to pull out their credit cards multiple times in the same instance.
Joel Louis: Yes, and then the last one is your ascension funnel, which is basically those are your higher ticket. If you’re in that space where you’ve been doing one on one coaching, maybe you’ve been doing the group coaching, maybe you want to take it to the next level where you have weekend retreat, you want to do a live event, or maybe you want your one on one coaching to become a higher ticket thing. Maybe you’re at the point where you want to start doing sales, you want to raise your prices and you want to do sales calls to make sure you qualify those leads, that’s when you have your activation funnels, those would be your high ticket.
Joel Louis: If you could visualize all three of those and then put them under an umbrella, I consider and it’s probably not my term, but it’s probably something I learned from all of my years of training, is the umbrella is conversion funnel. You have your conversion funnel, which is the umbrella and then under the conversion funnel you have those three, your acquisition, your activation, and your ascension and they link together via your email nurturing sequences. Your email nurturing sequences takes that person from being an acquisition, a lead, to an activation buying a low ticket thing, and then you’re giving them more value, more value, more value, and then from that activation to the ascension, which now they’re buying your higher ticket thing.
Joel Louis: If you really think about one person you followed maybe for a very long time, for me it’s Russell Brunson. I followed ClickFunnels for a very long time. I’ve purchased almost everything in Russell’s value ladder, if you will, from being acquired all the way to his high ticket offers.
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SHARE THIS EPISODE: HOW TO CREATE A HIGH CONVERTING SALES FUNNEL
HOW TO CREATE A HIGH CONVERTING SALES FUNNEL
An activation sales funnel is a great place to start. Once getting ROI could focus on lower value ladder items like an ebook or quiz.
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Doug: Looking at the three funnels and I understand them, I mean it makes sense. You need to build a relationship with people, so that’s the dating before you get married stuff.
Joel Louis: Yes.
Doug: Out of the three where do you generally see people fail the most? You got acquisition, activation, ascension, so obviously the people that still have the lights on are doing some things right. Out of those three, where do you think most people fail? I mean you’ve done, I don’t know how many funnels you’ve built, hundreds.
Joel Louis: Yeah hundreds, yeah and it’s a great question. It goes back to the resistance. What people tend to do is go towards the activation. In a way it makes sense. I need to get more leads, I need to get more leads, let me put together these lead magnets and all this stuff. If you need to run a business, what is a business need? You need cash flow, you need revenue, you need money coming in. That’s why spending money on a website, spending time on a website doesn’t make sense. Spending time on a lead magnet, in the beginning, doesn’t make sense as well. You want to start at your activation funnel, at the very least at your activation funnel.
Joel Louis: An activation funnel I talked about the tripwire, the splinter offer which is the low ticket. The activation funnel could be from $10 to $1,500, $2,000. It depends on how good you are, whether or not you have to do a sales call. Industry-standard anything over $2,000 you have to do a sales call, you can’t sell it outright. There are people if you do the right targeting, if you have the right message, you can do a webinar or have an activation funnel that will take someone from practically almost cold to buying something that’s $1,500, $2,000, maybe $597, anywhere in between there. It is absolutely possible. We have clients who have webinars, live webinars and then we convert them to automated webinars and they’re turning out.
Joel Louis: I mean we have one client she gets so much traffic to her website that she doesn’t even run ads. We did the webinar three times and then from there we automated it, and then on her website, we have the hello bar, and then from the hello bar they click on it and it takes them to the webinar, and then they watch the webinar and then she’s selling a $597 offer. It’s converting organically.
An activation funnel is a great place to start and then once you have that revenue coming in and you’re getting the ROI from your investment then you could turn around and focus on those lower value ladder items, the ebooks, and the quiz’, and those kinds of things. Or you could do the opposite and go higher on your value ladder if you choose to. Where it’s like, “Okay I’m going to build my high ticket thing now.” Then eventually come back and do your podcasts and all these front ends of the funnel offers.
Doug: Let’s go down to the question that no one really likes. They don’t want the truthful answer. If I relate it to fitness, for example, so you’re a CrossFit guy.
Joel Louis: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Doug: I’m new to CrossFit or relatively new, so I’m not doing bar muscle-ups yet. If I ask my coach how long’s it going to take me to do that? What I’d like to hear as an answer it’ll take me about three or four weeks and I’ll learn how to do that, and the reality is that it takes lots of people multiple years to get there. In terms of timing, for our audience that’s listening going, “Okay, hey that sounds really cool. Yeah, I understand, it makes sense, I should probably do this.” How long’s it take to put this into a place where you’ve actually got new dollars coming in the door? I mean every business is different so I’m not trying to paint you into a corner, but people need to know. When people ask me to help them with marketing and advertising I tell them this isn’t a two-week fix. If we’re going to run ads we’re going to need to test, test, test, test, test, test, and once we test and figure out what converts then we’ll scale. We might test for six weeks before we spend all your budget. Over to you.
Joel Louis: Yeah, and that’s a great question. I just came back from the ClickFunnels conference, Funnel Hacking Live. One of the main themes that came out of that conference, which was a great conference to go to. If you haven’t been Doug I highly recommend it. It’s not just about the application, you think it’s a SaaS company and it’s going to be a conference about the application. No, they focused a lot on marketing and they talk about a lot of this stuff that we’re talking about today, and the trends, and what’s coming out, and all this stuff. It’s a really great conference.
Joel Louis: One of the themes, because whenever I go to conferences it’s like I could take a bazillion pages of notes and I’ve done that in the past, and then I walk away and it’s like, “I can’t implement any of this. I don’t have time to implement all of this.” What I’ve been focusing on doing is each speaker finding a theme, try to find a theme. A key thing that they’re saying and then as I listen to each speaker I find the common thread. One of the common threads that came out of this conference was that if we think back to 30 years, 40 years, 50 years ago, maybe even further back. I mean there was one speaker who talked about the circus Ringling Bros., and I think what was it called? The mermaid hoax. You could Google it and look at the mermaid hoax. It was this whole thing that I think it was the museum or the Ringling Bros., something like that. This whole thing that they put together was a campaign basically.
Joel Louis: They built a campaign in preparation to announce the grand opening, the thing. They put a lot of energy, effort, time, it wasn’t one thing, it wasn’t one ad, it wasn’t a one-time silver bullet. It was a lot of creativity, a lot of resourcefulness. Tony Robbins says you don’t have the lack of resources, it’s a lack of resourcefulness. They put a lot of things behind it prior to that launch. Nowadays we feel like… Maybe because of Amazon and everything needs to be fast and Prime and it arrives on your doorstep the same day, we feel like we can put one ad up and we can do one webinar and we’re going to get results. It doesn’t work that way.
Joel Louis: I mean Russell, I keep bringing up Russell because he’s an amazing marketer, he built ClickFunnels to $100 million business in about four years and he did his webinar every single week for an entire year. This guy is a guy who’s an expert in marketing and been studying this stuff for years and years and years. He had to dial his webinar in until it was converting really well and then he finally automated it and it’s been automated for the last four years. After he did it every single week for a year, now he’s automated it and for the last four years, it’s been generating leads and business for people buying his SaaS software.
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SHARE THIS EPISODE: HOW TO CREATE A HIGH CONVERTING SALES FUNNEL
HOW TO CREATE A HIGH CONVERTING SALES FUNNEL
An activation sales funnel is a great place to start. Once getting ROI could focus on lower value ladder items like an ebook or quiz.
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Doug: Yeah, I thought it was interesting when I heard him say that and I’ve often seen people who want to go from idea to hey let’s monetize our list into an evergreen webinar. That’s like when you started your first business and businesses that I’ve started that didn’t work or products that didn’t work because there was no testing and we had no market data. I said to them, “Well how are you going to get any feedback?” “What do you mean?” We’re going to drive people to an evergreen webinar, you’re going to miss all the good stuff. You’re going to miss the questions, the interaction, and the learning and people’s pain points.
Joel Louis: Exactly. Exactly, so to answer your question it depends on the business you’re running. In my story, I said within two months I was at five figures. It was like, “Hey Joel you said you did it in two months.” I’m a service-based business. If you’re someone trying to start a business start with service because it’s an easy exchange. I’m going to do this for you and you’re going to pay me. If you’re trying to do digital sell a course, sell a program, DIY, these type of things it’s a different story, it’s a whole different story because obviously there’s a lot of competition and everything like that.
Joel Louis: It comes down to did you do your work? Did you look at the red ocean, so what market are you trying to serve? Hey, I’m in a red ocean, and then from that red ocean did you create a blue ocean offer? Did you create something that differentiates? One of the examples from the conference is these two young ladies who are sisters, they made $10 million in six months doing mobile home flipping. They carried a program on how to flip mobile homes. Okay, so let’s say that’s in the real estate market, that’s a red ocean. They took that and then they said, “Hey, we know how to do mobile home flipping.” I don’t even know what that looks like. The only thing I could imagine in my head, I’m originally from New York and I’m like, “Okay, maybe they buy a mobile home for $300 and then they renovate it like it’s a New York City studio.” You know how you watch those where the stove becomes a bed at night. They renovate it and then… What’s the word? Flip it out? Not flip it out but they deck it out and everything and then they sell it for $30,000. That’s the only thing I could imagine.
Doug: That’s funny.
Joel Louis: Right, but they created this amazing unique offer from a red ocean to a blue ocean and it stood out. I mean the fact that they’re women stands out, in the real estate niche stands out, mobile home flipping what? You see a website or an ad that says mobile, you’re going to stop. I don’t care who you are. It’s like, “What? People do this?” You’re going to stop and look at it. They were able to do that kind of revenue in a short period of time. I know I’m not giving a definitive answer. Last thing I’ll say I think if you did your homework, the red ocean to the blue ocean, and you understand your audience, there’s always the early adapters. There’s always the people who want to stand in the iPhone line waiting for the new iPhone the night before, the two nights before. There are always those people that are ready. I’m a serial beta tester. Sometimes it bites me, sometimes it works out really well.
Joel Louis: I’m a person I’m always… If something’s beta test I’m going to jump on it. Lead Pages I beta test, ClickFunnels I beta test. Then I get locked in into these grandfather deals which is super sweet. If you find the right niche, you find those early adapters, yeah you could do one webinar and get some sales. There’s the possibility that that could happen, but I would not count on that. I would count on doing the work, figure out the red ocean, blue ocean, what’s the market that you’re in, find out that unique position and create an offer. We could probably have a whole conversation about the offer piece, and then create a campaign around your webinar. Maybe don’t go primetime on the first one, try to not have a bazillion people-
Doug: Work the bugs out, make your mistakes with a small audience.
Joel Louis: Make your mistakes with a small audience. If you have a list it’s always great to drive your list to a set… The client that I talked about who now her webinar’s on autopilot. Her list was 18,000. The first webinar we did we only drove 500 people to it. I mean we only emailed 500 people, which means maybe 100 people registered. I can’t remember right now. As she got better and better and better-
Doug: Got to scale it up.
Joel Louis: Yeah, you scale up. I think that’s the best way I could answer that question.
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SHARE THIS EPISODE: HOW TO CREATE A HIGH CONVERTING SALES FUNNEL
HOW TO CREATE A HIGH CONVERTING SALES FUNNEL
An activation sales funnel is a great place to start. Once getting ROI could focus on lower value ladder items like an ebook or quiz.
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Doug: From start to finish to build out a funnel. So if someone’s going to work with you-
Joel Louis: Oh yes I see.
Doug: That’s where I was going.
Joel Louis: Yeah.
Doug: I know a lot depends on the client. Clients hold things up, they get delayed, they don’t edit copy, they don’t approve stuff, they don’t get back to you, they have bigger projects, they have cash clients come in. The client delaying the project aside, so your perfect client shows up and does everything you ask, how long does it typically take you to work somebody through the process so they have a funnel they can start testing?
Joel Louis: Okay, so we had a client who deals in the depression, suicide niche. She became a client and a week, two weeks later Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade committed suicide. I reached out to her and I said… We had already known what funnels we were going to be building but she was still being onboarded. Usually, the onboarding is a week to two weeks and I said, “Hey if they had gotten your book,” because one of the funnels we were going to build was free plus shipping book funnel. It was like, “If they had gotten your book do you think that your book would have helped them?” She’s like, “Absolutely.” This client is more mature, a lot more mature in age and she was like, “I’ve never had any of my past clients ever commit suicide.” I was like, “You know what?” I didn’t-
Doug: Yeah the timing.
Joel Louis: Yeah the timing.
Doug: I got it, yeah.
Joel Louis: Yeah you get me.
Doug: Yeah I mean there’s one side you don’t want to profit off of the fact of somebody’s taken their life, but on the other side the media are going to be more receptive to the message because it’s a huge issue in America.
Joel Louis: Right, and the big thing like Tony Robbins and a lot of people say, “It’s your moral obligation to get your thing to them.”
Doug: Yes it is, yep.
Joel Louis: If we delay then you have more suicides and depression and stuff. I told the client, “We need to get this funnel up now.” We built it in 14 days and it’s on my website, it’s actually one of the case studies on the website and we built it in 14 days and that’s the funnel, organically it is driving tons of traffic, it’s selling her book and the book is three years old. Now this client was already… She’d been on Oprah, she had a website, she had content, so this client was already well stacked in terms of we almost had everything that we needed in order to build out the marketing and sales funnel, it was creating the offers for the offer bump and the upsells and everything like that. On average what I tell people four to six weeks. If we’re building out free plus shipping funnel, if we’re building out webinars it’s about four to six weeks. We deal with a lot of doctors, healthcare professionals, to get around that whole piece of client delay there’s a number of things we do.
Joel Louis: In your previous conversation with the OBM absolutely on point, we use a project management tool called ClickUp, which is amazing. We went from… What was it called? We went from Trello to Redbooth and from Redbooth to ClickUp. ClickUp, no one’s talking about it, it’s an absolutely amazing tool and it’s next level from Redbooth. We have everything systematized for onboarding a client. All the things that we need right there. We invite the client into their own private workspace, and they see everything. I record videos explaining every… Because we get into our jargon.
Doug: That’s right.
Joel Louis: We become the geek speak.
Doug: The geek speaks, sits in the corner.
Joel Louis: Exactly, so I try to, again because of my teaching background, I try to break things down to the simplest level and I record videos and I use Loom. If anyone hasn’t heard about Loom it’s an absolutely amazing tool to create screen share videos.
Doug: Yep, I use it for my team as well, yep.
Joel Louis: Absolutely, especially for training videos for your team it’s absolutely great. I use it for my clients as well, and you could embed the Loom inside a ClickUp and we have the tasks and the sub-tasks and everything is really nice there out for the client. That’s one way to [crosstalk 00:47:26].
Doug: Shorten up the timeframe.
Joel Louis: Yeah, the other thing is I meet with my client every single week. From the first time, we have our first call I said, “Hey, when can we lock in a weekly call?” We find whatever time that works best and then we meet every single week. It’s very rare that a client’s like, “Oh I don’t know if I can find a thing.” In those cases it’s like, “Okay, well give us your login, give us your link to your scheduling, and then I’ll have my admin every single week find an opening and then we’ll book a time.”
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SHARE THIS EPISODE: HOW TO CREATE A HIGH CONVERTING SALES FUNNEL
HOW TO CREATE A HIGH CONVERTING SALES FUNNEL
An activation sales funnel is a great place to start. Once getting ROI could focus on lower value ladder items like an ebook or quiz.
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Doug: Well aren’t you guys smart, there you go. Make it easy for the client instead of making it difficult and making them do all the work.
Joel Louis: Right, exactly. That’s the way we get around that. If everything goes according to plan it’s about four to six weeks to get the marketing and sales funnel up and running, traffic is driving to it, and then we provide another 30 days of support to tweak it, do funnel audibles, to increase the conversions, and those kinds of things.
Doug: Well that’s really cool. I want to say thanks so much for sharing with us today. We’re running to the end of the show. We probably could do another episode and talk about how we, as men, don’t bury ourselves in our work and forget that we’ve got a wife and kids that we need to look after and it’s more important then the clients are.
Joel Louis: So important.
Doug: My clients listen to this so they understand why I don’t take their phone calls in the evenings or at the weekends. Who’s one guest Joel, that you think I absolutely have to have on my podcast?
Joel Louis: Oh man there’s so many good ones. Okay, so I would say Mary Kathryn. Have you had anyone on your podcast that talks about bots yet?
Doug: I have not.
Joel Louis: Messenger bots?
Doug: No.
Joel Louis: Okay, Mary Kathryn’s absolutely… Because of Messenger bots in terms of leading-edge and where things are going and she’s speaking at, I think this is her second year speaking at Social Media Marketing World. Mary Kathryn is one that I would absolutely recommend. I think her site is bottom, something like that.
Doug: Yeah, I think I’ve seen her before. If you wouldn’t mind making an introduction that would be amazing.
Joel Louis: Oh yeah, no problem absolutely.
Doug: Most important question, so for our listeners who enjoyed our conversation today and would like to connect with you on a deeper level and learn more about what you’re doing, where’s the best place for them to find you?
Joel Louis: Actually Doug I have a welcome page just for your audience, it’s integratorandco.com/rmrf, so that’s Real Marketing Real Fast, so RMRF and it’s integratorandco.com. There actually have a micro-video series that I did which talks about how to get high-quality leads and convert them into buyers. I break down the acquisition funnel, the whole conversion funnel piece that I talked about earlier, so I actually break that down and talk about the different sales funnel types for each one.
If you’re an author if anyone here who’s an author who’s wondering, “Well how do I sell more copies of my book?” Because I know on average authors on average they sell 250 copies of their book. I have this client, we have multiple clients who have their books is three, four years old and they’re selling hundreds if not thousands of copies of their books on autopilot, and I have a little training that shows how to maximize the ROI from your book and sell it on autopilot even if it’s four, five years old.
Doug: Excellent, well hey I clicked over to the page. It looks nice, even put my picture up there, thanks.
Joel Louis: You’re welcome.
Doug: There’s an example of making an offer and then driving somebody to a page so when they get there they’re not confused. They’re going yes, this is what I heard, oh yes I’m in the right spot because it identifies that we were listeners of the podcast. Thanks again for sharing. Thanks for being generous with your time and letting us know what’s happening, what’s working, and all the good stuff that you guys are doing.
Joel Louis: You’re welcome Doug, and thanks for everyone who tuned in and listened and continue listening to this podcast, it’s amazing. Great work you’re doing Doug.
Doug: Thanks so much. There you go listeners, there’s another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast, and we’ll make sure we transcribe the show notes so you can go back and check on the five things, and then you can also look at the three types of sales funnels that you should be using to grow your business: acquisition, activation, and ascension. Thanks again to Joel for taking time out of his day and sharing with you, and thanks for taking the time and listening to our message. I look forward to serving you in our next episode.
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SHARE THIS EPISODE: HOW TO CREATE A HIGH CONVERTING SALES FUNNEL
HOW TO CREATE A HIGH CONVERTING SALES FUNNEL
An activation sales funnel is a great place to start. Once getting ROI could focus on lower value ladder items like an ebook or quiz.
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Get in touch with Joel:
- Special Offer for Real Marketing Real Fast Listeners – Integrator and Co. / RMRF
- Web – Integrator and Co.
- Joel on LinkedIn
Find out more about Joel:
- Joel on Facebook
Links to other related podcasts and or blog posts:
HOW TO SCALE YOUR BUSINESS PAST SIX FIGURES
MARKETING FUNNEL TIPS FROM THE 28-YEAR-OLD MILLIONAIRE