AP 0731: How Can I Keep Track of My Sales Funnels as I Grow My Business?

AskPat 731 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody. Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 731 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, 5 days a week.

All right, now here's today's question from Henry.

Henry: Hey Pat. My name is Henry and first off, I wanted to say thank you so much for this site. Ever since I started listening about half a year ago, I've been so inspired to have my own business and I'm so determined to achieve that dream all thanks to you.

I started this site called guitareasier.com, which is geared towards beginner guitar players, and I've been building my site up and configuring my convert kit and I'm seeing that it feels like I'm building a spider web. It's crazy.

I wanted to ask how do you keep track of your funnels of where you're leading people and your emails and your web links and what do you do to make your site scalable because I can kind of see that if I don't organize this right, it feels like I'll end up adding more work as my site grows and I'm not sure if this is going to be the case or not, but is that something that's just inevitable?

Let me know if you have any strategies for this and yeah, thanks and I hope to hear from you soon.

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up Henry. Thanks so much for the question. Appreciate the kind words and I know how you feel because once you start to get into funnels, obviously you don't just want to have one funnel. I think it's important to start with one, but as your business begins to grow, there can be many different ones, people coming in from different lead sources, people going into different places, and potentially being in multiple places, it can definitely become a spider web.

Now there was a piece of software I used before ConvertKit called Infusionsoft that I had gotten kind of just to try and organize all that stuff. I had a lot of ideas in my head of what I wanted to happen, but the nice thing about Infusion Soft is you can draw it out.

The way that you set up the funnels is you actually drag and drop little boxes and arrows, have one box lead to another, and if they do this, then it goes to this one instead, and if they do that, then it goes to that one instead. It was actually a nice clean, easy way to set it up, but unfortunately Infusionsoft, it was just way too confusing beyond that and there was some more capabilities that I couldn't figure out.

I moved to ConvertKit and I love it. Now they don't have the visual aspect like Infusionsoft does. However, it wouldn't be too hard for you to, on a white board, on a piece of paper, or whatever, draw out exactly what you want to happen. That's what I had to do. That's the first thing.

You'll begin to see how things work and the thing you want to make sure you with the idea that you want to keep it as simple as possible. Make the funnels straight, don't have too many “if this, then that” kind of situations. I mean, you could get to a point where you are then segmenting people and doing all these things based on these little, tiny things that don't even really matter.

For me, I just have three buckets in my audience and that depends on certain actions that they take or certain things that they download or certain clicks that they make. Beyond that, it's really just pure once they get into those funnels, sending them emails, providing them value, and then from there it's either understanding if they're a customer yet or if they're not customer yet. Depending on that, then they get switched over to one thing or another after they take action or don't take action.

Again, keep it as simple as possible, draw it out, and if it becomes a spiderweb where you can't follow it from the producers point of view, well then it's going to be hard for people who are in that funnel to kind of realize where they're at and things are probably not going to make sense for them.

Literally, draw it out. Draw a box with an email and say “this is what this email does, these are the choices they have, and depending on the choices, this is where they go.” Also keep in mind where they go after they click things. For example, certain thank you pages. If possible, you can have generic thank you pages for things or you can have specific ones that are created just for certain actions that they take.

Take it one step at a time, keep it as simple as possible, and I think it was Ramit Sethi who told me he owns at IWillTeachYoutobeRich.com. He has, in my opinion, one of the best email marketing platforms, or not platforms, but just sequences in the world and he segments, he tags, and it's all based on things that you've read and things that you've purchased from him. You'll get upsells for things you haven't gotten access to yet. If you've viewed sales page, you'll get an email later saying “I saw you view that sales page. Maybe this will help you make your decision.”

All this is kind of crazy stuff, but he told me “keep it simple and at the very, very basic level, understand whether or not they are a customer or not a customer.” That's how you initially tag and then from there, you can expand out too “okay, well where are they coming from and what segment, or bucket, should they be in” and that sort of thing.

Another great resource would be “Ask” by Ryan Levesque, another great books that shares about dividing your audience up, creating these different buckets, and better serving them.

In terms of scaling, kind of your second question there at the end, once you get the systems in place, and again try and keep it simple, it will automatically scale on its own. However, it's inevitable that as your business grows, there's going to be more tasks to do, there's going to be … For example, the more products you add, the more questions that come in, so a little bit more customer service will be needed to handle those questions so that you don't take your time away from other things that you need to spending time on.

How do you scale? Well, I learned recently that you scale best by, first of all, using the tools and automating and optimizing and being efficient as much as possible, but beyond that, you're going to, at some point, have to make a decision on you either grow with a team or you stay stagnant, so hiring a team. There's a lot of great resources out there for team-building, but hiring one at a time to help you with some of those support needs that you have or some of those tasks that you regularly do that you can take off your plate. That's how you grow. That's how you grow and scale.

Hopefully, that makes sense and Henry, again, I appreciate your question coming in. I want to send you an AskPat T-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. Thank you so much.

Of course, for those of you out there who have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, all you have to do is head over to AskPat.com. You can ask right there on that page.

Thanks so much. I appreciate you and here's like a quote by Jeff Bullas to finish off today for you and that is “Never underestimate the vital importance of finding early in life the work that for you is play. This turns possible underachiever into happy warriors.”

Hope you're a happy warrior today. Cheers, take care. Thanks again. Bye.