What Is a Sales Funnel

You’ve probably heard the term sales funnel before. The term might bring to mind a big corporate machine that costs thousands and is constantly bringing in new clients. All of the big companies have sales funnels, but it’s not something that a coach or small business has, right?

Wrong! You probably have a sales funnel for your coaching business in place right now. You might even have multiple sales funnels. Here’s the coach’s guide to sales funnels.

What Is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is the process you have in place to move coaching clients through the customer journey. The customer journey is broken down into 5 stages:

1. Awareness – When a potential coaching client first discovers your existence
2. Consideration – After getting to know you, they consider you as a coach
3. Conversion – The prospect becomes an actual coaching client
4. Retention – The coaching client becomes a repeat coaching client
5. Advocacy – Your current coaching client talks about this amazing coach they are working with and refers you to other potential coaching clients

What a sales funnel does is move people through these stages as effectively and efficiently as possible. It uses sales psychology to know exactly what a prospect needs to move from one stage to the next.

Sales funnels usually focus on getting people through the first 3 stages. Stages 4 and 5 are handled with offboarding processes, referral packages, nurture emails, etc.

Examples of Common Sales Funnels

• Free trial
• Lead magnet + nurture sequence
• Low-ticket offer “teaser” with a high-ticket offer upsell once concluded

These are examples of sales funnels that you will have seen in use by companies of all sizes.

Do Coaches Need Sales Funnels?

Yes, and most coaches already have basic sales funnels in place. The term sales funnel is simply marketing jargon for a system designed to get new coaching clients. Once you have your system in place, all you need to do is feed more clients into the top of the sales funnel.

For most coaches, the top of their sales funnel is social media. They give away value for free to build awareness. From there, they may use other freebies (like a lead magnet) to help move their social media followers to the consideration stage of the customer journey.

Without a sales funnel, coaches may still convert clients by mentioning their coaching program from time to time, but the rates will be much lower and take much longer. A sales funnel helps you to speed up the process and convert more coaching clients.

Benefits of a Sales Funnel

The main benefit of a sales funnel is it works to convert new coaching clients with very little effort required from you. As long as you are getting free content in front of people and marketing the first step of your sales funnel, you will see a percentage of those prospects being converted into coaching clients. In time, you can tweak parts of your sales funnel to increase the overall conversion rate. You could also scrap it and try a new sales funnel, but the goal is to create an evergreen sales funnel that can run as long as you run the associated coaching program.

Other benefits of sales funnels include:

• The ability to automate most or all of the sales funnel
• Better customer experience for your coaching clients because the process has been standardised, and they’re not waiting around
• The ability to track data to analyse the effectiveness of your sales funnel
• Easy process to follow if you onboard salespeople or client managers

How to Create a Sales Funnel for Your Coaching Business

To create a sales funnel for your coaching business, you need to understand what happens for your clients at every stage of the customer journey. Let’s take a look.

Awareness

The first stage is awareness. It starts at the first touchpoint, but the number of touchpoints it takes a coaching client to move to the next stage can vary depending on a number of factors. What it all boils down to is people need to know, like, and trust you before they can begin considering working with you. This concept comes from Bob Burg, and it has become a cornerstone of marketing (personal branding in particular) since.

Think of it a little like dating. At the start, you’re getting to know someone and see if they are worth continuing texting or going on dates. The more you get to know them, the easier it is to see if they are someone you like or dislike. This often happens imperceptibly. If you like them, you’ll feel warm towards them. If you dislike them, it’s more of a growing gut feeling. In sales funnel terms, the following signs show like:

• They start following you
• They continue following you
• They interact with your content
• They look for other forms of content (other platforms, blogs, guest posts)

Trust is the next stage. As they continue getting to know you and getting to like you, they will slowly build trust. They will see from your actions that you care about your coaching clients. They will see that they are getting value from your free content. They will see testimonials and case studies from past coaching clients showing your results. All of this adds up to trust.

Without all of these three aspects, followers won’t consider hiring you as a coach.

Consideration

This stage is a little bit like a waiting stage. Your followers want to work with you; they may just be waiting for the right circumstances. This could be any number of things:

• The right coaching program
• The right price
• The right time
• The right pieces to fall into place before they move forward

This is why it is essential to know the pain points and objections of your coaching clients. Unless you overcome their objections, they may be stuck in this consideration stage forever. (Or at least until a similar coach comes along and tips the scales in their favour.)

In the consideration stage, your goal is to keep your prospects in forward momentum. This makes it easier for them to keep taking steps forward. Lead magnets are great ways to do this. Clients have no problems signing up for a freebie. From there, you can use the lead magnet and welcome sequence to nudge your prospects to the next stage.

Free trials are also great during the consideration stage because your clients can try it out for themselves, and they can always cancel it if it’s not for them. Low-ticket offers similarly allow clients to take a small step towards working with you with less risk than a multi-thousand coaching program.

The thing that all of these steps have in common is while they are extremely low barrier, the prospect still has some kind of skin in the game.

• For a lead magnet, they need to hand over their email
• For a free trial, they set up an account
• For a low-ticket offer they are handing over some money.

This is important because it primes the prospect for the conversion stage. They’ve already given you a small yes, and the next yes to another offer, a masterclass, or your coaching program doesn’t seem like such a big step.

Conversion

This is the initial goal. Don’t slow down once you’ve converted your coaching clients, though. Every experience they have as a coaching client will impact the next two stages, retention and advocacy. You want to produce coaching clients who can’t wait to work with you again and who want to tell everyone they know about you. This means you need to create an experience that is easy and adds value at every possible point.

The best thing is you have an established relationship with your coaching clients. You can ask them questions and get feedback to help you keep tweaking these experiences.

Need help creating marketing assets for your sales funnels? We create copy for coaches that reels in their dream coaching clients and turns them into raving fans. Contact us to discuss how we can help you create a sales funnel.

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• Lead magnet creation
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