EP17 – How To Sell Without Being Fake Part 5 – Create a Sales Funnel

This is the fifth episode in our series about selling without being fake. In this episode, we talk about how to create a sales funnel for your business with clear illustrations and examples. Podcast Transcript: Joshua MacLeod: Business owners become a little bit, I hate to say it, but lazy when it comes to marketing. They want to hire somebody else to just take care of that because it takes too much work to really do a deep dive of understanding my customer. Bernie Anderson: Yes. Joshua MacLeod: If I can get business owners to stop complaining about their problems and put all of that energy into understanding their target customer, most of their problems would evaporate because they would know automatically what to do because “I started thinking about my customer.” Podcast Announcer: Welcome to The Growability Podcast, teaching business and nonprofit leaders a more excellent way to run a business, visit growability.com for your leadership, coaching, consultation, and business collaboration needs. This is the fifth episode in our series about selling without being fake. In this episode, we talk about how to create a sales funnel for your business with clear illustrations and examples. Here are your hosts, Joshua MacLeod and Bernie Anderson. Bernie Anderson: I think a great question for us to answer today on this conversation, Joshua, or in this podcast is, how do you build an effective sales funnel? Joshua MacLeod: Business owners are way too quick to spend money on marketing. Bernie Anderson: Yes. Joshua MacLeod: Way too quick. A business owner will give money to a website designer, photographer, or a filmmaker, a print designer, or a mail agency, or a phone agency, or anything like that, they give money to those people without having even designed a customer persona. You have a conversation that’s like 10 minutes with the website designer like, “I want our website to do this. I want our website to do this. I want our website to do this.” The website designer is like either a graphics designer or a programmer, neither of which has any concept of who your target customer is. Bernie Anderson: That’s right. Joshua MacLeod: When we work with clients, we’re like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! Don’t spend money on marketing before you’ve really defined exactly who your target customer is.” When you build your website, you’re not building your website based on what you think you should put on your website. You build your website based on what is your client asking for and what problem do they have and how can you solve that problem? Never spend money on marketing until you have a clearly defined customer persona. Joshua MacLeod: The only person who benefits is the web programmer or the designer or the advertiser that’s taking your money. Additionally, never work with any kind of marketing company that doesn’t ask very specifically right at the beginning, who exactly is your target customer? What does your target customer value? What is the pain that they face? How do you help them in their life circumstance? What makes you different than any other person? This is a really important thing for every business owner to understand. Joshua MacLeod: I think business owners become a little bit, I hate to say, but lazy when it comes to marketing. They want to hire somebody else to just take care of that because it takes too much work to really do a deep dive of understanding my customer. Bernie Anderson: Yes. And actually Joshua, the little like we’ll call it a rant, but it’s good. It’s a good rant. I mean, people that we talk to that are like, “Yeah, I’m like going to go spend all this money on the social media thing. Social media is like the magic bullet that’s goin...