🗞 What's New: Building an effective sales funnel

Do you have an effective sales funnel?

• From the various stages, to the steps to take at each stage, this guide for beginners can help you build your strongest sales funnel yet.
• The founder's journey is full of insight and learnings. Here are some of them. Hint: Being small is a major advantage, so don't let the big guys intimidate you!
• Founder Guilhem built and launched Football Live Score in 2 months after taking the leap into indie hacking. Below, he shares his roadmap, and how he's learned that done is better than perfect.

Want to share something with over 100,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

💲 Building Your Sales Funnel

by Eric Hui

A customer's journey is mapped across a sales funnel through many checkpoints, from engaging with the brand, to conversation and commitment.

Marketers must ensure that each customer moves from one stage of the sales funnel to another without a hitch. The better the experience, the higher chance of converting a lead into a customer.

Here's how to build and manage your sales funnel!

What is a sales funnel?

The sales funnel narrates the journey of a customer, from the point when they were just a prospect, to when they converted into a loyal paying customer. It is a step-by-step process that tells a business how close someone is to becoming a regular customer.

The sales funnel is called a "funnel" because it refers to the motion of a real funnel. At the top will be lots of potential customers; some will proceed, and finally, fewer will become loyal paying customers.

How does a sales funnel work?

There are four different sales funnel stages that every customer goes through:

1. Awareness:

This is where people become aware of your brand's solutions, products, and services for the first time. In the awareness stage, your business will make its first impression. Make sure it is prominent and intriguing.

Being the first sales funnel stage, the number of people involved is also large. Random people learn about you from LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, word-of-mouth, etc.

~1% of the visitors will immediately become paid customers. This happens only when the potential lead has already researched you, and comes on board with a plan to make purchases instantly.

2. Interest:

This is the point where a prospect starts researching your business. They compare and weigh their options.

Don't get too sales-y here. Start building a relationship and sharing information that can help them. It's important to ignite their interest to the next level by providing great content. Each page must deliver the information that your prospect is looking for. The better the content, the higher chances of moving them to the next stage.

The point of this stage is to help the prospects make an informed decision. Never deceive your potential customer with false promises.

3. Decision:

When a prospect enters this stage, they are open to things that can persuade them to become a customer. Even though it looks like an easy stage, this is the hardest one. At this point, many prospects leave due to the need for more information.

At the decision stage, your prospect will start looking for information like pricing, product comparisons, terms, etc. They will compare it with competitors, and weigh which offers better value for their money.

A slight mistake here and the prospect lead will be lost. Businesses can include certain incentives and rewards to move them to the final stage:

• Free consultation.
• E-book offers.
• Free trial.
• Webinars.
• Free shipping, discounts, bonuses, or other promotional offers.
• Testimonials and reviews by real customers.

4. Action:

Always remember that, at the bottom of the sales funnel stage, the customer actually acts.

Many founders believe that the work is done after the purchase is made. But don't you want them to return for repurchases? This is where retention work leads to additional purchases, future suggestions, and repurchases.

However, if the customer doesn't buy from you, don't automatically assume that you have lost them. You can create a nurturing campaign later to ensure that your brand stays on top of their minds.

Knowing what type of content is necessary at each sales funnel stage is essential. With the proper information, it is easier to take your prospect to the final stage of the funnel.

Building your sales funnel

Here's how to actually build your funnel:

1. Analyze your audience: It is vital to know your audience. Use different tools to track user behavior, and monitor their activity on your website. Google Analytics can help track where your prospect clicks, how they scroll through the site, and the pages where they spend the most time.
2. Capture their attention: Once you have analyzed your audience's behavior, it's time to capture their attention. A person's average attention span is just 10 to 20 seconds. In such a short time, your content needs to be extremely compelling. Diversify your brand's content portfolio with infographics, informative videos, and other interesting work. Over time, invest in paid ads.
3. Build a captivating landing page: Don't be pushy at the beginning. First, capture leads that you can nurture later. Your landing page should excite the visitor. Use a highlighted call-to-action button, along with interesting offers (i.e. free e-books or other forms of unique, downloadable material).
4. Email drip campaign: You can also market your leads via email. The ideal frequency is twice per week. Tell them about yourself, how you are different from others, and how your brand can solve their pain points conveniently. End your drip campaign by providing an irresistible offer, like a reduced price.
5. Stay in touch: Always remember your existing customers. Continue reaching out to them with new offers. Thank them for being loyal, and show them what they mean to you.

Final verdict

It takes patience and hard work to build a great sales funnel. However, if you invest in generating and nurturing strong leads, you can see amazing results.

Just remember that random and prospective customers should always be at the top of the funnel, while established customers should be at the bottom.

Where are you in your sales funnel? Share in the comments below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Growth Trends newsletter by Darko

🔎 Can ads be GDPR compliant?

🤯 Was the "creator economy" overblown?

🛠 Building an awards page to add authority to your website.

📊 Three marketing trends to keep a pulse on in 2023.

📱 Creating age-appropriate ad experiences for teenagers.

Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.

📝 Top Learnings for Founders

by Easttowest

Indie Hackers has been incredibly valuable for me, so I want to try and give back a bit. I quit my job a year-and-a-half ago to build a product with my cofounder. We've been laser-focused on a problem that we're trying to solve, and have finally started to generate some revenue.

Here are a few ideas that have helped us!

Being small is an advantage

As someone who has worked at a few big tech companies before, I have been amazed at how slow they can be. You're not at a disadvantage by only having one or two people on your team. Start seeing your size as a competitive advantage.

Don't follow trends

AI is hot right now. The technology is incredible, but it's also tremendously hard to build a business on top of it when the landscape changes so quickly. I believe that a better approach would be to build a viable business on known tech, then augment it with AI (or any other new thing).

Embrace the "infinite game" mentality

As a founder, you need to be prepared to play the long game. This means doing as much as you can yourself, even if it's not the most efficient option in the short run. The skills that you learn from one product will be valuable in the next.

Don't be embarrassed by your product

It's natural to feel defensive when someone doesn't get your product, especially in the early stages. But instead of getting defensive, try to understand their perspective. Explore the insights that you can gain from their feedback.

Some of our best product learnings have come from the most critical feedback.

Flip an assumption

To achieve a huge improvement in your product, you need to challenge the assumptions that others take for granted.

For example, Facebook assumed that storing information was valuable, but Snap turned that assumption on its head, building its product around ephemerality. Look for assumptions in your industry that have not been interrogated, and consider flipping them.

People will not interpret things the way you think

It's easy to assume that people will interpret your product or message the way you intend, but this is often not the case.

Go into user interviews with the assumption that you have little to no understanding of how your product will be perceived, and be prepared to learn and adapt.

You can learn more about what we're building here!

What's been your top learning as a founder? Share below!

Discuss this story.

🚀 The Spector Report

by Josh Spector

I'm sharing growth tips for creative founders! Here's this week's:

There’s no one right path to success.

There are infinite ways that you can succeed, and the way you ultimately do will be unique.

Don’t get paralyzed by searching for the right path. Pick a path and figure out how to make it right for you.

Subscribe to Josh's For The Interested newsletter or I Want To Know podcast for more.

⚽️ Guilhem Built and Launched in Two Months

by Guilhem

Hi, indie hackers! I'm Guilhem, founder of Football Live Score, a platform that gives you soccer events in real time.

While I was looking for my next professional adventure, I challenged myself to launch a product using the latest technologies. I’ve been focusing on mobile product management for quite some time now. I’ve always built mobile products for other companies, but never took the time to build one for myself. I’ve always wanted to have my own product out there.

It was challenging, but here is the result!

The app

My app gives users live soccer results. It also has a unique feature that allows users to broadcast live soccer events to their communities on Slack, Discord, Twitter, and Telegram.

It’s available on Android, iOS, MacOS, and as a web app, and was built with Flutter and Firebase.

There’s a lot that I can do to improve upon it, but I’m happy that I managed to release such a big service all by myself, on four platforms, in roughly two months.

I launched it at the beginning of November, and I haven’t done any marketing besides posts on LinkedIn and Twitter (and now this one!).

The numbers

Here are a few numbers from my launch:

• Android: 1K installs.
• iOS: 1.5K installs.
• Web: Very little traffic. 235 users. I just fixed the SEO indexing of the landing page.
• AdMob revenue so far: $35.

Only a couple of users have set up chat integration so far. I’ve added Twitter integration due to a user request.

The roadmap

The initial product was just aiming to provide a web app to set up and receive live events on chat apps. But I got a bit ambitious, and built a full app to browse soccer results. This was a lot more work than I initially thought, and it diluted the initial value proposition. I’ve updated the app to make it more visible, but it’s still not the conversion that I was hoping for on this unique feature.

On the other side, being present on stores as a mobile app has allowed more users to come to my service for free, which generates ad revenue. So, it was beneficial overall!

Since the launch, I’ve updated the app with many fixes and proper onboarding to make the user activate notifications as early as possible. Currently, it needs to be refined even more. My next steps will be focused on bringing more value to the app. For that, I’ll add Twitter and YouTube channels for the main leagues, teams, and players right in the app.

I'm considering adding other sports, since I can reuse a lot of code. However, other sports are smaller markets, and I'm going to be very busy on the personal side in the next few months. So, I'm not sure I'll do it yet.

I’m so happy that, even though I’m getting older, I finally pushed something out there for myself. I just wanted to spread that happiness.

It’s not perfect, but it’s there, and a few people are using it. That makes me happy, and brings me energy to implement a few more updates in the future!

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Eric Hui, Darko, Easttowest, Josh Spector, and Guilhem for contributing posts. —Channing