If you’re in business chances are you want to sell more of your products or services. Whether the business is highly successful, doing OK or just plain failing – it’s all about generating more business. Even the most successful organizations need to continually upgrade and innovate their marketing and/or sales strategy just to keep up with the current technology, let alone trends and customer demands. In other words you never want to become a “Zenith” or a “Blockbuster”. Both great ideas for their time, but ultimately they lost the race by ignoring the “writing on the wall”.

So what’s the newest technology on the market today for getting more sales, customers or clients? That would be “Funnels”. To be exact we’re talking about Sales & Marketing Funnels. So what is a Funnel and why as a small business owner should you even care? Here’s Why:

A marketing funnel is a way of designing or creating the perfect customer journey all the way from the “awareness” stage (when they first learn about your business) to the “purchase” stage (when they’re ready to buy your product or service). Some of the best funnels also provide a post-purchase follow-up sequence that literally increases the lifetime value of your customer as well as creates opportunities to cross and up-sells your product and services. Loyalty plus increased revenue over a longer period of time on auto-pilot. Now, that what I’m talking about.

Whether you sell your product and/or services online or offline you must have an effective sales process. B2C or B2B the task of taking people from point A to point B is the entire reason why you are in business.

So regardless of how you sell point A is your first contact with that customer and point B is the moment they say “hey I like what you’re selling,” ” I want to take action”, “I want to buy your product, your service, your food, your equipment”, etc. The “what” of it all is irrelevant, whether you’re selling (personal products, courses, eBooks, home services, coaching, meals, food products, fashion, cupcakes, mechanical equipment, widgets, etc) online or offline you should have a well thought out, high performing and easily implemented process to “bring home the bacon”. It’s called a Funnel.

Gone are the days of “if you build it and they will come”. Even the best social proof should be optimized and combined with an effective marketing funnel. Marketing funnels are the best kept secret for keeping your customers buying more and more, which in short time increases the lifetime value of that customer. The right Funnel makes it more feasible to leverage paid advertising platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest or Google.

Typically a decent sales or Marketing funnel consists of having a paid advertising person, a design person, an email and copy person and a web development person and a webinar platform – all at your expense. On the other hand with a well orchestrated “Automated” Marketing Funnel you can run Facebook, ads Instagram ads and more without breaking the bank.

If you’re running an online campaign what you’re looking for are proven and highly converting landing page templates, exit popups that capture attention, preset and follow up email campaigns as well as the transnational side of things like getting paid, including options like PayPal, stripe and various mobile and POS payment solutions. In other words everything you need to prepare, implement and execute a perfect, personalized and profitable Sales and Marketing Funnel.

If your business is primarily offline (retailer, attorney, restaurant, service based business, decorator, real estate agent/investor, event organizer, tattoo artist, car dealership, etc) the process is the same. You most definitely need an effective strategy – a highly converting series of Sales and Marketing Funnels to get the prospect and quickly turn them into paying customers and clients. That’s what a well crafted Funnel provides you – everything you need to get up and running right away. In today’s economy time wasted is income lost.

If you haven’t already jumped onto the Funnel phenomena now’s your chance. Download our Free E-book on” The Magic Of Sales Funnels”. This step by step guide will give you the basics of sales funnels, how they are set up and the best way to implement them for that “magic sauce” we call “sales on auto pilot”.