No matter what you might think, finding clients in B2B is not hard.
If you spend a lot of time doing sales prospecting or if you decide to spend a lot of money on ads, you’ll be able to generate leads.
What’s really difficult is to make all your unit economics work.
Essentially your customer acquisition cost needs to be as low as possible so you can maximize your margins and invest more to grow your business.
For example, let’s say you spend $400 to acquire one customer who will pay you $500.
This means that your margin is $100.
With that $100, you won’t be able to acquire another customer since your Customer Acquisition Cost is $400.
But now, let’s say that you manage to reduce your customer acquisition cost to $100. It means that your margin is now $400.
So technically, you could acquire a lot more customers faster now.
So how exactly do you decrease your customer acquisition cost?
Well, that’s where sales funnels come into play.
A good sales funnel can 10x your return on investment with the exact same initial effort.
To illustrate it, think of a chef using a funnel to fill small bottles with sauce.
Without the funnel, pouring the sauce directly from a large pot would be inefficient.
He’d have much of it spilling and going to waste, similar to broad, unfocused efforts.
But by using the funnel, the same amount of sauce is directed precisely into the bottles, ensuring minimal waste and maximum efficiency.
The reason we look at the funnel before acquiring customers is because we don’t want to waste our effort.
With a good sales funnel, you will generate more revenue with a similar effort.
With a good sales funnel, your customer acquisition cost will be lower, which means that your margins will be higher.
Higher margins mean that you can spend more money on customer acquisition and, therefore, generate more revenue.
What’s a sales funnel?
If you’re new to sales funnels, they’re essentially a series of steps your prospect will take from the discovery phase to the closing phase.
Let’s take a simple example from a launch we did recently.
Here’s a LinkedIn post from Tal with a clear call to action.
Thanks to that CTA, people will visit our website, which is optimized for conversion
Then we will measure how many new accounts are created through the duplication of any template.
And from there, we will know the amount of paid customers.
Obviously, that works if you manage to create a really strong self-service and product-led growth motion, as we did at lemlist.
Because without a real funnel that is optimized, it would look like this.
As you can see on this linkedIn post, there’s no real value.
It’s very salesy and self-centered.
The call to action is simply “Shoot me a message”.
But there’s 0 engagement. Meaning that you probably had only a few people watching the post.
In the end, I highly doubt that any deal was closed after that post.
That’s because the whole funnel is extremely weak…
The 3 keys to creating a good sales funnel
1- You want the funnel to be smooth.
I’ve seen people adding calendar links in their funnel where you can only book 3 weeks from now.
That’s not smooth. Nor fast.
2- You want your funnel to allow you to qualify people.
Time is our most precious asset.
Don’t waste yours, and don’t waste your prospect’s time.
If they’re not a fit, that should be clear in the funnel.
For example, if you have something saying, “Our pricing starts at $10k per month - is it a budget you’re comfortable with?”
You know that every single person who is not in that target of the price will not continue.
3- You want your funnel to be as fast as possible.
It’s either a YES or a NO, but you should know as quickly as possible.
Sales velocity is extremely important as it will determine whether or not you can grow fast.
Are sales funnels the same?
Well, your funnel will depend on the price of what you’re selling.
Most often, if the price point is above $1K, you will have to go through a closing call unless you have a really strong brand.
And it will usually look like something like this.
At first, you need to generate demand.
And that usually comes with cold emails, sales prospecting, a post on LinkedIn, or your newsletter.
Then you’ll have a conversion page where the goal is to push towards a meeting.
And from the meeting, this is where you’ll need to close deals.
Most people forget that each step of the funnel is supposed to sell the next step.
So, on your conversion page, you should always sell the call, not the final product or service.
If your funnel is to sell a product or service that is less than $400, your funnel should be a bit different where this time because your goal is gonna be to close leads on autopilot without having to do sales calls.
Exactly as I showed in the first example.
Sales is about one thing: trust
Overall if you want to build efficient B2B funnels, you need to remember that sales is about ONE thing: trust.
Let me explain why.
If I tell you that if you give me $10 today, I’ll give you $100 back in a week, would you do it?
I guess the answer is YES because if you’ve been watching my videos and have followed me for a while, you already trust me.
Because you know that I’ll be able to deliver on my promise.
But if it’s a random person in the street, would you say yes now? Probably not.
Because you don’t trust them.
And even though I know that everyone loves to overcomplicate business, B2B is all about trust.
Trusting someone to deliver a product or service that will either help you make more money or save time.
Your entire sales funnel’s goal is to build that trust.
Before I give you another secret gift, I want to go through one very specific example of funnels we use to generate revenue for lemcal.
The first step is to generate demand through a cold email.
Essentially, here, I want to focus on a pain point relevant to my target.
The biggest pain point we wanted to solve with lemcal was what we call the no-show rate.
That’s when people book a meeting on your calendar and never show up.
So we took the list of people using Calendly, and we started cold emailing them.
The subject line is intriguing and focuses on the pain point.
Then I add social proof in the first line mentioning someone who’s well-known in the industry.
Then I explain why we did it, which will add even more social proof if they google my name (which they probably will.)
And finally, my call to action was straight to the point.
I would also add a few follow-ups to maximize my reply rate, and I’ll give you access to the full campaign so you can duplicate it for free.
All of that led to these kinds of replies.
I would then send them a link to that page 👇
Leading to qualified meetings and more sales overall.
As always, I’ve prepared a free Notion doc that you can steal with tons of different funnel templates, including how we made $100,000 in one hour with a webinar, how we generate thousands of signups every time we launch a new feature, and how our sales team book calls on autopilot.
Chapter 8: Why sales funnels are dead and what to do instead?
Every week I’ll publish new articles on how to build and grow a B2B business that generates millions of dollars.
Without any BS and giving you practical templates that you can steal.
Peace, love, and profit 💰
G. ✌️
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