Small Business Smarts for Challenging Times: Know Your Funnels - Part One
If there was ONE piece of advice I could give to every entrepreneur and small business owner it is this: get very clear, very quickly, on how you make your sales. Who is buying the most and from what effort of yours? This tells you right away where to focus all of your attention during times like these.
The notion of “funnels” sometimes sets people off. Some feel that putting your clients into funnels or treating them like a “number” is crummy, impersonal. But I’ve never subscribed to that perspective. I believe funnels or flows or whatever you want to call them helps you be of highest service to your customers — giving them the best possible understanding of what you offer and matching up their exact needs to your exact services. It doesn’t waste their time or yours. To me, that’s the right way to do business and be of highest service to your clients and customers.
It’s very simple: you need to know which of your efforts are producing revenue and which ones are not.
I’m going to use one of my clients as an example, but will keep it general to keep their privacy intact.
We’ll call them Client Amazing.
Imagine with me: Client Amazing is doing a lot of work. They have free workshops - in person and online. They host a podcast. They have free worksheets you can download if you give your email address (great way to grow your email list!) They have a year-long offering for clients. They have a six-month offering for clients. They have a robust email newsletter and a really big email list. They share video content daily on all of their social channels. They have a robust YouTube channel and are exploring TikTok seriously. They host free webinars and spend a lot of time and effort - on social, on email, daily - to get people into those free webinars. They launch 30-day challenges on social media to grow their audience and share their services. That’s a new piece of content every single day for 30 days! On top of all the other things!
Client Amazing is doing SO. MUCH. WORK.
But when I started working with Client Amazing, they could not tell me where their clients were coming from and which of all these efforts was bringing in the most revenue.
Knowing what revenue is coming in from what efforts is vital even in very certain times. But it’s the most important thing in uncertain times. Why? Because if you know what efforts bring in the most money, you can focus most of your time on only those efforts. You can actually work less, stress less, have more clients and more revenue.
Does any of this sound familiar? Are you doing a lot and working really hard but not seeing the results you want?
It doesn’t have to be hard. But we make it hard.
Instead of spending all your time and effort on dozens of daily activities that make you feel like you’re doing everything you can to bring in new clients, customers and sales, take a pause and do what you’ve been avoiding: look at the data.
For so many, looking at the data feels like looking at your bank statements. Some of us have very old and very complicated feelings about money and finances and we just cannot look. We are afraid of what we might find. I find this same uneasiness in clients around looking at their data. They don’t want to look. They are afraid of what they’ll find. Or that it will be overwhelming and complicated and they won’t know what to do once they’ve seen what they are afraid to see.
But here’s the secret: your data is your super power.
It tells you everything you need to know about what to do next.
Also? It doesn’t have to be complicated.
If you do this and only this right now, it will be a game-changer for you.
I promise.
So how do you get started figuring out what’s working for you and what’s not? I have a three-step process that I guide every client through when we first start working together.
What are you getting out of all your free marketing efforts?
What products and services bring in the most revenue?
Connect your marketing efforts to the services that bring in the most revenue
Once we make it through those three steps, we can start to bring in paid efforts, social, email performance. All the fun things. But before you spend any money on ads, you need to know how you free stuff is working out for you.
Today, we’re going to tackle the first part. What are you getting out of all your marketing efforts?
Let’s go back to Client Amazing. Here’s the quick spreadsheet we created to get a handle on what their three main free marketing efforts were doing for them:
Once you have all your free activities in your worksheet, what do you see?
For Client Amazing, it was immediately clear that all the effort around social media Challenges was not nearly as effective as Webinars and Downloads. When we considered how much time and effort it took her and her team to create content for them and run them, these numbers made it painfully clear that they just weren’t worth it. Focusing on the other free efforts was the way to go. No more Challenges!
For Webinars, it was immediately clear that only one was really resonating with customers. Why was that? Was it the topic? Did that one get promoted longer? In a better way? Did it get a shout-out by an important influencer?
For Downloads, it was clear right away that a few were hits and a few were absolute duds. No need to continue promoting the duds, updating them or spending any time on them. And what did the “winners” have in common? The topic? How they were marketed?
In Client Amazing’s situation, it turned out that Webinar 5 and Download 2, 3 & 5 were all about very similar topics. It immediately shifted the focus from doing lots of things that were sort of working to focusing only on those things that were really working. Now Webinar 5 has tripled engagement and Downloads 2, 3 & 5 have become a single big workbook with 4x the downloads. THAT’S the power of focusing on what’s working.
This very simple exercise - of taking all your free efforts and seeing who is signing up, downloading, clicking, engaging - will give you so much insight into what is resonating for your customers and will help steer you to what services and products they want from you most.
This is valuable information in great times. It is vital information in challenging times. And it is so easy to get started!
In the next post, we’ll cover the second part of Knowing Your Funnels - completing an easy worksheet of your revenue by product or service.
Until then, I encourage you to take some time to complete this easy sheet of all your current free efforts to get new clients, customers and sales. Fill out your spreadsheet to see which of your efforts are resulting in the most engagement. You can start making meaningful adjustments right away that will “trim the sails” in your business.