Do you ever feel like you have 1000 things you could be doing in your marketing, but you don’t know which is the most important? You are working on improving your sales funnel. But you’re not sure what impact it’s going to have until after you’ve done it. This is where identifying and fixing the biggest sales funnel leaks comes into play.
In this post, you’ll learn:
- What is a sales funnel
- The 5-step process to identify and fix a broken sales funnel
- How much money do you make in your optimized funnel using Free Funnel Revenue Calculator
Learn about the system that can help you with figuring out where to focus next in your sales and marketing efforts.
How Sales Funnel Works
Can you imagine how you will feel when you know for sure what you should be doing? What would bring you the most sales and revenue? Wouldn’t that sales process be nice?
I’m sure you’ve seen this picture before.
Whenever you read an article about a sales funnel, it looks like this. Very nice and neat. You pour the traffic in the top, and lovely money comes out of the bottom. It’s perfect!
Except that in real life, it doesn’t look like that at all! In my experience, from what I’ve seen over 10 years working with funnels, this is how it actually looks.
The average sales funnel is pissing out money left, right, everywhere, and not enough money is coming out of the bottom. You keep pouring traffic in, but it doesn’t make enough money.
I’m going to talk you through the exact system you can use to identify the biggest hole in your funnel and stop losing money.
How Do I Know This System Is Something That Works?
This is the exact system that we use repeatedly with our clients to help them.
These are two simple truths:
- Your marketing funnel is a key driver of your business.
- If you have holes in your funnel, you are losing money.
I didn’t always hold all the secrets to fixing marketing funnels.
As an agency owner and entrepreneur, I found myself in a similar place to where you are likely today. In my case, I had a webinar funnel set up that was getting me some money, but I knew it wasn’t making me as much as it could.
I knew I was losing possible paying customers and sales every week, and it caused me headaches and so much frustration. I must have driven my team to their wit’s end as I was trying all sorts of things to fix it.
After too many experiments to count, I developed a process to allow me to find where the biggest hole in a funnel is. With that process under our belt, we can come in to evaluate the damage, identify sales funnel leaks and fix them.
That’s what I want to share with you in this post. Yes, it’s going to be a long post. But I promise it is worthwhile.
How To Find the Biggest Hole in Your Sales Funnel
Would you like to know what is the biggest hole in your sales funnel? What is losing you the most money?
You can do this through a 5 step process. It’s not complicated. In the end, you are going to understand how it works and what to do.
Step 1 – Map out your sales funnel
You can do this with a pen and paper, on the back of the envelope, or on a chalkboard. However, I like to use a tool called Funnelytics. You can do this there. It’s free to use, you don’t need the pro version to do this.
Let’s imagine that you’ve got a webinar funnel for selling an online course, but you’ve got the most basic version of the funnel.
Here’s what that would look like:
You’ve got Facebook ads (and maybe email), driving people to the registration page. After people sign up for the webinar, they go to the thank you page, which tells people how to attend the webinar.
Then you’ve got the actual webinar watch page. If people turn up to it and finish watching, they go to a sales page. If they buy your offer, they will be redirected to a confirmation page.
This is the most basic webinar funnel I can imagine. If you map it up in Funnelytics, it looks like this:
Let’s imagine that you’ve got this funnel in place.
You look at the numbers, and you know it should be better, but you don’t have a clue where to focus. Then, you start your research, you go and read articles, and books, listen to talks, and go through other people’s funnels to see what they’ve got in place.
You eventually find that the ideal webinar funnel looks like this:
Whoa! It’s got all these emails, ads, reminder emails, FB ads, retargeting, webinar replay, and additional emails. It’s got upsells and downsells, order bumps, and all this stuff.
This is an enormous amount of work.
If you’re thinking about doing all of this, you will be like: Where do I start? What do I do first?
Overwhelmed?
I get it. Your shock is normal.
I’ve been doing sales funnels like this for people, and it takes a few months to set everything up.
I totally get it if you look at this and say: I can’t do all of this, it’s too much work!
So where do you start? What should you do first?
Step 2 – Create the spreadsheet with all the steps of your sales funnel
Here are the steps of your entire sales funnel:
- On the left side of the spreadsheet (in rows), put all the steps of your current funnel.
- Write down: Email, Facebook Ad, Opt-In Page, Thank you page…
- Then, write down in rows the steps you’re thinking about adding as well. For example: order bumps, payment plans…
- In the columns, add: My stats (Numbers), Model, and Benchmark
Here’s a sample of the spreadsheet:
Step 3 – Track your numbers for each stage
Go to all the software you are using, get the analytics, and put the numbers there next to each step that you wrote down.
Reminder: use our Free Funnel Revenue Calculator to see what is your funnel’s potential.
Step 4 – Compare the numbers to benchmarks
Now, find what is your number for each step and compare it with the benchmarks. Mark all the numbers where you see a big difference between your result and benchmark. This way, you are marking areas where you have a big room for improvement.
There may be many steps that are a long way from the benchmarks. That’s why you need to do step 5 to decide which will make the biggest difference. Then, you will know what is your biggest hole and what you need to improve.
Step 5 – Test changing them to see what increases revenue the most
If your numbers are much lower than benchmarks, it is relatively easy to get them higher. If, by testing them, you realize that it can increase your revenue the most, it is an important part to work on and change.
Let’s practice
I’ll take you through an example:
- First, I put up on the left side all the steps regardless of whether I have that in my funnel or not.
- Next, for the steps I have in my funnel, I add the numbers.
- Lastly, in one of the columns, I add the benchmark data I’ve previously researched and found.
Have in mind that this data is different for different industries. So make sure you find the one that is the most relevant for you and your business.
In this example, I see that my conversion rate is 40%. The benchmark says that the conversion rate usually is from 30 – 50%, so that’s good. I don’t have to do anything with that part of the funnel. I could probably move it to 50%, but it’s going to be hard, so let’s not worry about that right now.
My cost per lead is $5, the benchmark says it’s $5 – $10, so this is fine as well.
Conversion for the main product with upfront payment is 0.3%. The benchmark says it’s 1% – so this is the part that I’m going to highlight. There’s lots of room for improvement here.
You get the point – we keep going to check other numbers and highlight all the numbers that are way off from the benchmark.
- We did Step 1 – we mapped out our current funnel
- We did Step 2 – we created the spreadsheet and inserted all sales funnel steps in there
- We did Step 3 – we took the analytics from our funnel and put the numbers in the sheet
- We did Step 4 – we compared our numbers with benchmark numbers we previously researched and inserted in the sheet as well
Now, we are moving to the next step:
- Step 5 – let’s test our numbers and see what changes. What if we can increase the number of people who made an upfront payment?
Model A
We can see now that if we increase the number of people who make the upfront payment, ROAS would be $2.99. This is good!
Model B
What would happen if we could increase the number of people who use the payment plan?
ROAS here would be $2.7. It’s also a big deal.
Model C
What if we put the order bump?
In this case, ROAS would be $1.7.
This isn’t a very big deal. So now that we have all this data, we can conclude that we should focus on A or B. A will give us a bit better results, so let’s focus on that first.
How to Fix the Hole in Your Sales Funnel
We’ve gone through mapping out the funnel, creating the spreadsheet, entering our results, entering benchmarks, and creating different model scenarios. Now we know which change in our funnel will bring us the most money. We finally know what ONE thing we need to change.
That feels good, doesn’t it?
You might find these challenging:
- Dealing with your fear of numbers – If you hate math and hate numbers, then you might feel a bit uncomfortable doing this. But you can do this even if you suck at math. Just use this template.
- Finding out the benchmark data – You have to do research. Ask Google, check with your friends what results they are getting, and find relevant people to compare your results with. The numbers I used for benchmarking are ballpark, but please do the homework and research the exact number for your industry.
- Comparing your numbers to the benchmarks – you have to go through the process. There are no shortcuts.
If you do all of this, you will be able to see immediately what part of your leaky sales funnel you need to fix.
When you fix that ONE part of your funnel, it will reflect in your revenue. If you pay attention to the numbers, there will be no guesswork about what you need to focus on in your sales pipeline. The numbers will tell you.
We can say at last – Mystery solved! You have found the biggest hole in your sales funnel.
Free Sales Funnel Revenue Calculator
When we realized people are not aware of how much money they could be making because they are not aware of benchmark data, we created a free funnel revenue calculator.
You input your current monthly revenue, email list size, and how many website visitors you get per month. Based on the average data for online course creators, the calculator predicts how much money you could be earning if your funnel is optimized.
We’ve recently updated and improved the calculator based on more accurate benchmark data. So, even if you have used it before, I suggest you use it again and find out how much you could be earning if you fix your funnel holes. It’s completely FREE. Calculate how much you could be earning.
