I think many of us, in business or otherwise, are aware of the sales funnel. The idea is you have most of your customers on a lower pricing level and as people get increasingly invested, they move down the funnel. So there are less people at the ‘point’ than at the ‘base’ and that’s ok. It’s a process. Some people take longer to go through the funnel than others, and some people stay at a particular level. (You can totally tell I spent my college years studying geology and French and not business, right?) Still it’s a getable idea.
So while we were working on our marketing plan in October for the upcoming year, we realized we didn’t have a funnel at all. As Kassie coined “It’s a wine goblet!”
Mainly, we were asking people to make a big financial leap to support them on an ongoing basis, from about $50 to attend a workshop to $3000. Very few people made that leap, again, not a shocking or hard to understand idea. Here is my beautiful diagram to show our problem:
You probably have noticed in your consumer life that there is more than one way to get more out of the sales funnel.
For example, you could cram more people into it. Every free ebook you’ve ever downloaded, every email newsletter you’ve ever signed up for, was getting you to this base level.
Another example, you could offer more at a certain tier. Ex: For those people happily buying your $10 scarves, you get more and different $10 scarves for them to buy.
Our problem, however, was identified. We needed an offer something between $100 and $3000. An intermediate level, maybe something around $500-$1000.
As a trial of this concept, we offered to make non-profit donation forms a for $599 introductory rate. These forms allowed non-profits to take donations on their domain, issue receipts automatically and other fun things to make the person’s life easier. So for the risk of spending $600ish, there was a definite outcome.
It went way better than I expected… and for this reason, Breaking Even will be releasing a product every quarter in 2015. One for bloggers, one for businesses, one for non-profits, and one for all three.
I urge you to look at your funnel and decide:
1) Do you need more people in it?
2) Do you need more movement on one level?
3) Do you need to add something between levels (like we did)?
4) Are you missing a level entirely?
If you go through this exercise and it ends up being helpful, let us know! I’d love to see other applications of it… and I hope this idea rocks your world as much as it did mine.