MBA1093 Guest Teacher: Michael Koral – The Right Sales Funnel For Any Small Business

Hey O. Welcome to the hundred dollar RMBA show. Bring the best of business right in your ears every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And today's lesson is a guest teacher lesson on our guest teacher lessons on an expert to teach their area of expertise. Today's guest teacher is Michael Corll from needls.com that's N E E D L S. He leads customer acquisition and operations over there and he'll be teaching you the right sales funnel. For any small business, having a sales system or funnel is essential to make sure your business keeps on running. You gotta bring in more leads, more prospects so you can get more sales. So in today's guest teacher lesson, Michael's going to share with you exactly how to do that and the tools to use to make it happen. Also, at the end of the episode, Michael is going to be offering a great promo and giveaway for you to get started with your funnel. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. The $100 MBA show is brought to you by the audiobook edition of Dear Founder by Maynard Webb and Carly Adler, read by Chris Schula. Enter to win an audiobook copy now by going to Macmillan Audio.com dear founder for the busy leader and entrepreneur, listen to valuable advice on obstacles that occur when starting a business like how to finance your company, the personal challenges of leadership and how to build a company that lasts. To Enter to win go to Macmillan audio.com Dear Founder that's M A C M I L l a n audio.com Dear Founder Building a sales funnel doesn't have to be rocket science. It could be very simple. And as you grow and as you expand, you can start to add more elements to your funnel. In today's lesson, Michael Corll is going to encourage you to stop seeing it as a funnel and more like a choose your own adventure process. I love this methodology because it's exactly what you want to do. You want to guide your customers by the hand so they can self educate and choose through education to buy your product or service. So without further ado, take it away, Michael.

Hey guys, my name is Michael Korl. Thanks so much for joining me today. Today I'll be teaching you how to set up the right sales funnel for any business. So let's just dive right in. You know, most of you probably already Know what a funnel is? That little plastic kitchen tool that was typically used in college to drink beer very quickly at parties, to impress your friends and get really drunk, right? That plastic device has become one of the most important metaphors or analogies used in business today. It starts very wide and it's arrow at the bottom. A simple way to visualize how every business lands new clients or customers. Shove your marketing message from the rooftops and some people may listen and do nothing. Others may listen, check you out, and do a little more than nothing. Others may listen, check you out, and pull the trigger on what you're selling. Every potential buyer goes through the same process, awareness, consideration and conversion. And this stuff is not new. You probably heard it a thousand times. But us savvy business owners sometimes need a reminder of the basics to ground ourselves and rethink the way we do things. I do it all the time running my startup. The idea of a funnel in 2018 has really changed so drastically with the advent of technology to make everyone's mousetrap a little more intelligent. While the principles of awareness, consideration and conversion still hold true, how businesses set up their funnels in 2018 is quite different from even a few years ago. The truth is they don't really look like funnels anymore. They're more like a Choose your own adventure book. If you think you can create one basic funnel to find clients in 2018, you're really doing it all wrong. We're in the age where we're able to follow our potential clients pretty much everywhere they go once they initiate and interact with us. Cookies, pixels, tracking codes, UTM parameters, geotargeting, webhooks, data science, the list goes on. It all gives us the insights we love as business owners that allow us to react specifically to an action they take. It's truly amazing how far we've come. You know, if you're currently running a business, you already have a basic funnel set up. It doesn't matter if you're brick and mortar or digital. If you open your doors or website, potential customers may be able to find you and decide whether or not to buy what you're selling. The key though, is how do you get as many possible people that are that you believe are your target market to buy what you're selling? That's where it gets challenging. The solution, you know, in case you haven't already guessed, it is leverage technology. So you need four basic tools. A tool that drives quality traffic to your website. A tool that creates landing pages for all the different types of traffic you receive a tool that guides people down a path that eventually leads them to buying your product or service, and a tool that tracks the success of everything I just mentioned. If you have these four tools and set them up correctly, I can promise you that you will get more customers buying your product or service than you do right now. And there are many different companies that offer these tools for all different types of businesses. It's hard to know which tools are the best for you, but today I want to share with a few pieces of software that I use here at Needles that I think really help by leaps and bounds and they're way better than the rest. So the first one A tool that drives quality traffic to your website or landing page. I'm not going to spend too much time on this one at all. It's actually my own startup, needlz.com we drive some pretty awesome Facebook and Instagram traffic to your website or landing page. If you haven't heard it, check it out@needls.com it's n e e-l s.com the second one a tool that creates landing pages. You know, just one website is not nearly enough anymore. You need several for all types of traffic you're driving to your business. But I think you already know that. I love using leadpages.net it's simple, intuitive and it integrates with a ton of other awesome software you may already be using. It's so easy to create a high converting landing page with zero coding knowledge at all. We probably have almost two dozen different landing pages we use here at Needls, and we love them. The third tool a tool that guides people down a path that eventually leads them to buying your product or service. I know it's pretty cryptic to say it another way your choose your own adventure emailing marketing software. I personally don't think there's anyone better than activecampaign. I'm sure you've heard of the term if this then that. If someone does something on your site, in an email, on the phone, etc. Do something very specific. Activecampaign is like a massive if this then that matrix. The amount of customization you can do with them is quite remarkable and it allows you to really segment your leads and nurture them on a very personal level. I only started using them recently after switching from Intercom, also an awesome tool, but just didn't have the customizations and workflows that functionality we really need. And I very happily switched. If you take away nothing else from this lesson, take away this. If you want to offer a custom, tailored experience to your potential customers. Use ActiveCampaign. I can't really say enough good things about them. The fourth tool A tool attracts the success of all of the above. If you set up all the tools above, but are not using a tool that ties everything together, you might as well not have set up anything at all. How are you able to know what works if you can't attribute properly? The one tool that works the best for us is Wicked Reports. Like the name suggests, it really is wicked. It's able to track everyone that interacts with your business and can tell you the exact path someone took to get a sale. True Attribution for example, if someone clicks on a Facebook ad, then goes to your landing page, then leaves, then comes back the next day through a Google Ad, provides you their email address, then visits the blog, then in three days comes back directly to make a purchase or book an appointment, Wicked Reports tells you that with pinpoint precision I used to use Google Analytics for this, but it just did not give me the proper insights. It was too one dimensional and the reporting it provided was never able to line up the source. For example, if Facebook would show me that I had 10 purchases in one day and yet Google Analytics showed I had only four from Facebook. Wicked Reports is much more accurate. And if you're interested in uncovering holes in your funnel or as I said before, your choose your adventure game, it's critical. A bonus tool I want to give a shout out to is zapier.com it's quickly linking every possible piece of software with every other piece of software online. It's unbelievable what it can do. I've set up so many zaps to help automate workflows, and going into what you can use Zapier for can be a whole other lesson on its own. But if you're ever wondering if you I wish. If I did x in one tool, another tool should do y. Visit zapier.com and thank me later. Okay, so time to summarize. I started off this lesson saying I was going to teach you how to set up the right sales funnel for any business. That may have been somewhat misleading, as in reality the right sales funnel is not really a funnel at all. It's a choose your own adventure game where the potential customer is making choices and you're right there to greet them with the appropriate message at the exact right time. You need the right tools to be successful and the ones I outlined here today I really love. Use needles to drive quality social traffic, Use lead pages to convert that traffic into leads. Use ActiveCampaign to segment messages to the right people based on the actions they take, and use wicked reports to see what's working, what's not, and give you the insights into the actions you need to take to make your mousetrap the most effective. Alright guys, this has been a blast and thank you for taking the time to listen. If you want to get started by driving quality social traffic to your business, you can visit needls.com and use the code Founders25 to get 25% off your monthly fee with us. Tell them Michael sent you and they'll hook you up with a free T shirt too. Thanks again for joining me today. And back to Omar.

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