online coaching podcast

#050: Sales funnels for coaches: the only coach funnel you need to reach 6 figures+

Episode 050

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Achieving six figures in sales in your coaching business is easier than you think. Actually, it’s way easier when you keep it simple.

In episode 50 of the Profitable Online Coaching Podcast, we discuss the coaches’ two-step, six-figure sales funnel.

But before we get into the details…

Do you know what a funnel is?

>>A funnel is made up of the little steps a person takes towards becoming your client. These steps can be downloading a freebie or registering for a webinar – there can be many windows into your coach funnel. The goal is to keep them moving forward to the following steps till they’re ready to work with you.

>> The two-step six-figure sales funnel is the simplest, and it will take you from starting a coaching business to reaching six figures with one funnel and one lead generation strategy.

The more complex your funnel is, the longer your funnel is going to take to convert.

we also talked about…

●   The sales funnel, in reality, is made up of the steps that your coaching clients take before they decide to buy from you. We call it the customer journey. It’s something you need to become familiar with.

●   It’s important that the first step is very well attuned to your target audience. It’s got to show your expertise, help your prospect understand why they need what you’re selling, and how they will make it happen.

●   Content should come easy. It should be the format that you enjoy. If you don’t enjoy being on Facebook, do not stay on Facebook – it just won’t work for you. You can create any other content and then reformat it for social media.

●   It is recommended to have core content because that core content is going to go somewhere where people are going to keep finding it indefinitely. This is why you need core content.

●   The second step is so simple. The important thing is just to have your call to action.

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Six-figure sales funnel for coaches

Hey, welcome to today’s episode today. We’re gonna talk about the two steps, six-figure sales funnel for coaches. It’s quite a mouthful, but all it means is, is that it’s a simple funnel. If you dunno what a funnel is, a funnel is simply the steps that a person takes to become your client. So a funnel is when they first find your piece of content, perhaps like a freebie, they register, then they’re in your funnel and your funnel should take them to the next steps until they are shown how to actually work with you.


The two-step sales funnel

(01:22): But today’s funnel is very simple. It’s a two-step six-figure funnel, and I’m calling it my two-step six-figure funnel. It can actually become a seven-figure funnel. And I will do an episode about this in the future, for sure, probably a YouTube video, because I will need to show you how the math works and how the numbers are gonna work when it goes all the way to seven figures. But the two steps, six-figure sales funnel is the simplest. And it’s gonna take you from a new coaching business to a six-figure coaching business, which means that you’re stable. You have leads and you’re a happy bunny. Basically. One of the things I believe is that the more complex your funnel is the longer your funnel is gonna take to convert. And, you know, in the beginning, when I started putting together my first coaching website, although I had a lot of experience in marketing already, I had to be a programmer.

Why you don’t need complex coach funnel ideas

(02:12) I could build everything I had heard about these people selling really complex funnel ideas and the funnels I put together. I’m not saying they didn’t generate any business at all, but they kind of fell a bit flat and they didn’t seem to be working in the long term, which is something I just could not explain. There were a lot of different points in these funnels, a lot of different things happening, which made it really difficult to improve the funnel overall because you had to improve all these different points and it became really difficult to measure what’s actually working and what isn’t. So it was getting really, really frustrating. So I decided to just listen to my hunch and actually do something which had worked for my B2B clients in, in my agency for many years. And just go to a very, very simple two step funnel.

 

What is a funnel?

(02:59): But before I explain how to actually build this funnel, let’s talk a little bit about what the sales funnel for coaches actually is because a sales funnel in reality is made up of the steps that your coaching clients take before they decide to buy in marketing terms, we call it the customer journey, and it’s basically something you need to become quite familiar with. So it’s very important to have a good grasp of the journey. Your ideal client is taking from feeling the struggle that you resolve when something is bothering them in their lives and maybe makes them desire a solution. And to the point where they decide to actually work with someone like you or with you. So what is this journey? What happens in their head? And you can help yourself with online research with keyword research. But the most important thing is that you understand what this motivator is because the kind of people you need to feed into your funnel have to definitely match this kind of person.

Align with your ideal client

(03:56) And the first step of your funnel is gonna be your content. So your content needs to be super aligned with your ideal client. Now I can hear you think sort of what do potential clients, how do they enter your sales funnel, but your leads will enter your sales funnel at any stage, in the beginning, they might be just feeling the struggle, but they’re not sure whether they wanna work with you yet or not. They might be not quite sure what the solution to their problem is yet. So they could be very early on in their journey where they don’t quite understand. But in this case, you don’t need to worry because as long as you work out the phases of the customer journey properly, then you don’t need to worry because you’re going to have content for every stage of the customer journey.

 

Resolve their problems

(04:44) Now, of course, people who are closer to the decision stage, people who are, have more insight into what their problem is and what the solutions to that problem might be, are going to be way easier to convert. So the job of your content is the first step of this funnel. The secret to the content is that you have to actually have to guide people with your content. So with the, what you write in your article, with what you put in your video, before you transcribe it with whatever goes into your content, this needs to take your client from not understanding their problem, maybe too much to having really good insight into the problem and what the solutions that problem might be. This is absolutely key. Not all content is created equal. And this two step sales funnel can only exist when you write content or create content that takes people through this journey.

(05:39) So it’s important that the first step is very well attuned to your target audience. And it’s in a way, is the trust process in itself. It’s got to show your expertise, help your prospect, understand why they need what you’re selling and how they’re going to make it happen. Because a lot of people don’t buy. Not because they don’t trust the coach can help them, but because they don’t trust themselves. So you need to convince them that not only you can do it and you can be trusted, but you also need to convince them that they can do it. So this is an important part of the process. And you need to, of course help them get as much clarity as possible because of course, you also don’t want to work with the wrong kind of people. So the wrong kind of person is gonna drop off.

 

The wrong ideal client

 (06:25) They are gonna read this article and they’re gonna drop off. They’re gonna drop off because they don’t agree with what you’re saying. They’re gonna drop off because maybe they think you’re a bit too woo. Or maybe they think you’re not spiritual enough. The wrong kind of ideal client is going to drop off. So you need to make sure that there is a lot of content there for the right kind of person and stop trying to make it good for everybody. You only want the right kind of people to come through this content because then they’re going to convert in a way. It kind of goes a little bit against the grain because we don’t want to attract as many people as possible. We only want to attract the right kind of people. So coming back to how you build your two step coaching sales funnel, step one, as you’ve already gathered is to create your core content, your core content.

I would be very tempted to say blogging because that’s the one I use. I of course also have a podcast you’re listening to it right now. I have used video in the past as well. They are all formats that can be used to rank and search engines and bring you clients that are searching for you. They might be searched in different places. Videos might be more searched on YouTube. Of course, blogs are more searched in Google. And of course, podcasts are searched on podcast platforms, but also all of these things will also bring you back to Google because you know, you get video YouTube results on Google. You also get podcast results on Google, and that is getting better and better every day, they’re writing more and more features. So in a way, any format you pick is going to work for you. And of course pick the one that comes easiest to you.

 

Content should come easy

(08:04) Content should come easy. It should be the format that you enjoy. If you don’t enjoy being on Facebook, please do not stay on Facebook. You can create any kind of other content and then just reformat it for social media. You can also automate it through your website, publish on your website and then let the post go automatically to social media. And then when you do hit your six-figure mark, and you wanna get some help, you can get somebody to repurpose even more. But if you’re creating core content, you’re already gonna have a couple of posts a week. At least maybe even more, maybe you can hit three posts a week. It’s even better. You can maybe, you know, add a couple of quotes to that, and you already have a post a day and you really don’t need to worry too much about your social media there.

And then once you have enough funds and enough time to focus on something else, once your practice has been fully booked through SEO E generation, then you can move to adding another strategy. The only problem with social media is that I really don’t recommend to use that as your first strategy because it’s not scalable. So let’s say I have two, 3000 friends, and I know there are some people there who can become my audience and you know, I start posting and some people become clients. So I start thinking, oh, this is really gonna work. And then over time, it flat lines. So there’s a couple of things that fool people into thinking this is gonna work. The first thing is that you have low-hanging fruit in your network that is gonna come to you quite easily in the beginning. But then you realize that growing your audience and growing your following is pretty hard.

 

Lead Generation for coaches

(09:40) It takes a lot of hard work, and this is where it might start working. After some time you get a few leads, but those leads are gonna be more difficult to close, but they’re gonna give you hope. And then what happens is that people get stuck in this Merry go round of creating content for social media for 15 hours a day. And that content is just thrown into the oblivion down the canyon of Facebook’s precipice. And you just never see those posts again. They’re, they’re never going to give you something more than they did during that week that you posted them. This is the big problem. So I definitely recommend having core content because that core content is gonna go somewhere where people are gonna keep finding it indefinitely. This is why you need core content. Social media is an amplification tool. It helps you reach more people, but you have to have the core content.

And of course, if you have the core content, you’re gonna need a place to store it like a website and you are going to need search engine optimization so that those leads can actually find your content really easily. So this is an important part of the two step funnel. If you don’t have that core content. And if that core content is not created in a way that it actually warms up people quite quickly, then the funnel will not work, but these are actually not difficult things to achieve. If you know your clients and you really know them well, you know what they want. It’s not gonna be hard for you to create content for them. It’s not gonna be hard for you to call out that struggle and show them that you know how to resolve it and maybe give them that little something that helps them start on their way to actually getting better and resolving our problem.

The first and second steps of your coaching funnel

(11:18) Okay? So that was the first step of your funnel and probably the one you’re most comfortable with the second step is actually so simple that you’re gonna say really <laugh> was it even worth a step all for itself, but bear with me a little bit, because this is actually the most important, simple thing on the planet, and yet people are not doing it. And the important thing is to actually have your call to action. I see a lot of people creating so much content out there and they are wasting. They are wasting all that marketing because they’re worrying about getting people on their email list when they’re still in the beginning of their business. And they need to be worrying about making money. You need to have a call to action that tells people to jump on a call with you. If you’re in the beginning of your business, especially in order to be successful with any strategy you need to focus and the focus of this two-step sales funnel, you can literally go to my blog@stephaniefit.com, click on the blog, take a look at my blogs.

This is exactly what this two-step funnel is. And it has the potential, not only to help you get to six figures, but to help you get even, you know, way further, multiple six figures and even seven figures, the numbers actually add up. And I think now that I’m mentioning it again, I am definitely gonna have to do that episode about it because it’s something that I really need to share. But coming back to the call to action, you need to have a call to action that gets people on your booking calendar. Don’t put people on your list with your call to action. After your blog, don’t ask them to download that freebie. You want them to have a reason to talk to you. So this is where you don’t have a conclusion in your article. You have a rationalization, a reason for people to get in touch with you and the link to your booking calendar.

You want to make sure that every person who was grabbed and really found value in your articles, and takes the opportunity to actually jump on a call and talk to you because these are the people who will become your clients. And I can promise you, this is the simplest and yet the most effective funnel out there. The main reason why I absolutely love it is that there is no warming up happening there. I am not putting people on my list and having to send them emails every week to warm them up. I am not spending on Facebook ads and then giving them a freebie to jump on my email list and then sending them, you know, this automated thing that warms them up and brings them to book my call. I am booking that call right away. There is no other way. Of course you can harvest the rest of your traffic and have different funnels to warm them up, but do not lose the opportunity to get the low-hanging fruit, to get the people who are really ready to buy from you.

Because that is the reason why they went to Google. They are shopping around. They are talking to people like you already. They want to buy and they want to explore their options. And you are one of those options do not pass on asking them to actually jump on that call with you. Because if you don’t ask, a lot of them will not do it. You’ve got to put the link in the right place. It’s got to be in the right places in your article. It’s got to be there. It’s got to be in a place where, you know, you can put it in different places in your article. I’m a big believer that it should go in the end because by putting it in the end, I get fewer leads, obviously, because not everybody reads the article to the end, but I get the stronger leads.

The people who read the full article, the people who are really into what I’m writing, the people who agree with it, the people who keep coming back for more content, are the ones that are jumping on my calls and they’re saying, I love your content. I think your content has really, really helped me. And now I am ready to work with you. And this is exactly why this two-step funnel is really, really powerful. And there aren’t that many parts to improve. So if at first, your call to actions are not working. You can work on improving those. If at first you see that people are not staying on your page. You can improve your introductions and keep people on that page. If you see that people are not maybe valuing your content enough and sharing it, then you can go in and you can take a look and say, okay, how can I make my content more valuable?

Improving your funnel for better conversion

(15:45) But there are very few elements to improve here. And that is why it’s going to be way easier for you to create this funnel and improve it to a point where it’s generating leads that comfort really well at a really, really high rate. Okay? So I really hope you go out and put this together. If you need help with that, you can get in touch with me and book yourself a free consult st stephaniefit.com/call. As you’ve probably realized again, this is another one of those topics that I’m very passionate about because I see so many people drag themselves out of that position, where they’re spinning their wheels in their business and really gaining strength. You know, when you’re a coach coaching, other coaches, it’s a responsibility. I love to see other coaches succeed because they are helping. They are helping so many people. And this for me is, you know, it’s, it’s my life’s work. It’s what I do. And even if, if you don’t have the money to work with a coach for now, it’s perfectly fine. Try and do this yourself. If you wanna talk to me, I’m always available at Stephaniefiteni.com/call, and I look forward again to talking to you about another topic next week, take care.

 

 

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About the Show

In the Profitable Online Coaching podcast, Stephanie and her expert guests answer the most common online coaching and coach marketing questions to help you unravel the facts and take the right next step for your coaching business.

On solo episodes and with guests, she talks about popular topics such as marketing for coaches, blogging, digital marketing strategies, pricing, mindset, and how coaches build successful businesses.

Stephanie is an experienced SEO Content Marketing Strategist as well as a Marketing Coach for Coaches. She talks about online marketing strategies, social media, search engine optimization (SEO), marketing tools, books, and much more.

She learned programming as a fresh graduate and has worked as a trainer, programmer, and web consultant for over 15 years before becoming an online coach. For the last 6 years, she has offered 1:1 coaching and Online Programmes designed for coaches, therapists, and online service providers. She also offers Content strategy sessions and SEO Content Consultancy services to 6, 7 & 8 figure coaches. Contact her on hello@stephaniefiteni.com.

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