The Best Sales Funnel.

A sales funnel is the process through which people go from hearing about your business to paying customers.

I learned pretty much everything I know about sales funnels from a pair of startup friends who have collectively launched more than 12 business between two of them.

They now run a startup incubator program; their ‘product’ is a 10-week long instructor-led lean startup course for rural entrepreneurs in the Midwest, held virtually. They recently brought me on two nights a week to help them recruit entrepreneurs for their next cohort.

Up to this point I’ve really only made sales through inbound marketing and 1-to-1 sales, so this was a completely different experience for me. Like a ‘work study program’ on how to get customers en masse. And after joining 4 weeks ago, we were able to sell over $500K in course value through one of the most effective sales funnels I’ve ever seen. Here’s how it works:

1. Social Media ad’s (32K impressions)

2. Interest Form (646 completed)

3. Email Drip Campaign (4 emails each)

4. Outbound Sales Calls (4 touchpoints each)

5. Submit Application (170 submitted))

6. Accept / Reject (80 spots)

Allow me to explain each of these and why the work so well:

1. Social Media Ads (Inbound)

The top of funnel here is target ads on LinkedIn and Meta (Facebook/Instagram). The ad is a simple video from the founders of the program explaining the value to rural entrepreneurs, and asking them to submit a simple interest form for the course. The ads are geo-specific and focused on people who have “founder” or “entrepreneur” interest, which works extremely well for targeting and calculating ROI. Roughly 2% of people who see the ad will submit the form.

2. Interest Form (Inbound)

The interest form from the ad is straightforward, gathering name, email, phone number, and location. Once someone submits the interest form, they become a lead (aka someone with explicit interest in the product). We then add their info to a database / CRM so that we can begin reaching out to them. The Ads → Interest form step is what’s called “inbound” (ie. prospects see the content, self-select by submitting a form). From there, we move onto outbound sales:

3. Email Drip Campaign (Outbound)

Once a prospect has submitted the interest form and been added to our database, we then begin sending them a series of automated, personalized emails. Each email is structured to explain the program and encourage the prospect to submit an application before the deadline. We send up to four emails to each prospect, each with a link to apply, and roughly 2.5% submit without us talking to them. They call it drip campaign because you just repeatedly drip content into their inbox until they either take action or dont.

4. Outbound Sales Calls (Outbound)

Meanwhile once the prospect starts receiving emails, we also spend time actively calling and texting them. The goal is to have 4 touch points with each prospect (either call, text, DM, etc.) on top of the email campaign, for a total of 8 touchpoints. They say the magic number is 7 touches to get a sale, so we try to make sure of it. This helps us not only field any questions with prospects, but really create relationships which drastically improves conversion. Even if most calls result in a voicemail, anyone who answers is 10x more likely to apply. Overall the process brings the conversion on interest forms to application from 2.5% to 26%

5. Submit Application

The last big step in the funnel is having the prospect submit a formal application to participate in the course. The cyclical nature of courses is really nice because there is a deadline to apply, which adds time pressure (and helps us organize our outreach). The whole goal is to get more applicants than spots available so that there can be some sort of selection process for who we let into the course. The more prestigious the course, generally the more applications, and the higher the quality of the outcomes.

Overall this seems to work really really well for a few key reasons:

• Inbound + Outbound: the combination of inbound lead generation and outbound sales / emails is what gets the conversion rate here so high. If you just do inbound you may save money on paying sales people, but your retention will likely be lower. And you can’t just do sales cold calls because you end up wasting a lot of time calling people who wouldn’t ever be good customers. That’s why the inbound self-selection is so important for qualifying who to expend effort on

• Time Bound: The nature of course is that there is naturally a deadline to apply, which adds time pressure, a crucial part of getting high-consideration prospects over the final edge. For instance, of the 170 applicants, roughly a third of them came in the final 48 hours before the deadline. Compare that to a standard SaaS where the product is simply “always” there, that sense of urgency simply doesn’t exist

• Selection Process: Finally, the fact that there is a selection process (ie. prospects must “apply” to receive the product, and then there are more applicants than spots available) helps increase the relative ‘value’ of the product to each person. They are more likely to take it seriously if there is a chance that they don’t get in. And if they do get in, they are more likely to stick around having ‘used up’ a spot that could’ve been for someone else.

Ultimately some very interesting pieces here. And it makes me wonder: how much of this could be applied to a standard B2C SaaS business model?

Cheers,

Ramsey