Here, I’ll share three reasons why eliminating sales calls and having an application funnel instead could be a better option for your offer or program.
Before you race off and ditch sales calls completely, remember every business is different. It’s important to always consider what is right for your business, your audience and your offer and apply the right process to align your offer with your audience.
Why do people say yes to a sales call in the first place?
A lot of interest and curiosity will be generated as people consume your launch content but it will also raise questions such as,
- Will this work for me and my particular situation?
- What happens if…?
- This ‘bad experience’ happened to me before, will it happen again?
Having a sales call in your sign up process gives prospective clients an opportunity to learn more about your program and have their burning questions answered so they feel ready and confident to move forward and work with you.
Sales calls are usually the last step to get people to a place where you’ve built trust with them and they believe they have the best chance to get the result they want.
A sales call may actually be the right step to have for enrolling in your program, especially if it’s highly personalised, but it may not be the right activity for you to do yourself. Or, sales calls may be completely unnecessary and it’s possible to automate enrolments with an application funnel instead.
If you want to replace sales calls and automate your enrolment process with an application funnel as an alternative, your messaging and marketing needs to replace the trust building purpose of a sales call by demonstrating the value of the program, building excitement and creating urgency for the benefits of working with you.
The application funnel has the same objective as a sales call. That is to achieve a high rate of applications and enrolments into your program with the added benefit of saving tonnes of time.
What is an application funnel?
An application funnel is where people can apply to join your program after learning about your program. It does the heavy lifting of warming up and converting high quality, good fit leads and saves lost hours spent with tyre kickers who were never going to enrol anyway.
An application funnel typically includes a trigger event like a live workshop, webinar or bootcamp, a pre-recorded webinar, masterclass or training that attracts and educates people about your program and then invites them to work with you via a sales page and application form combined with a high-value time-limited fast action incentive.
It has the potential to work well when optimised with strong messaging for programs priced upwards from $3,000 to $10,000+.
Let’s dive in and look at three reasons why replacing sales calls with an automated application funnel might be a good idea.
Sales calls are unpredictable and time consuming
If you’re not trained in sales and don’t love selling, sales calls will be hard work.
Taking a prospect from uncertain and resistant to excited and ready takes practised skill and understanding of which questions will encourage a candidate to be open about their situation so you can genuinely connect with where they’re at and offer them a solution that will meet their needs.
I’m totally against pushy sales because it isn’t a win-win, and most people leave a pushy sales call feeling like they’ve been railroaded into a decision they didn’t feel 100% excited about making. This creates buyer’s regret, which isn’t how you want people to feel when they start working with you.
If you’re not experienced with sales calls, they’ll inevitably take up a lot of time because you’re not trained to identify the signals a prospect makes throughout a conversation.
As a result, you will miss many opportunities to address their concerns, build their belief and excitement and help them qualify for your program.
An experienced salesperson would aim to have a success rate close to 50% and higher for warm calls, and to do that consistently, they know they have to be in control of the conversation the entire time.
Let’s say you have 50 leads and six hours in a day for sales calls that will take at least an hour each. You might end up securing 20% of calls as enrolments, which means you’ll likely fill 10 places in your program, and it will take around 8 days to get through all the calls.
There’s also show up rates to factor in, because it’s unlikely you’ll have 100% show up to the calls.
Back-to-back sales calls are exhausting, and there’s an opportunity cost of spending 8 whole days doing sales calls because that’s time you would spend doing other things in your business and let’s be real, you didn’t start this ‘ freedom-focused’ business to be tied to it!
If you know sales calls are necessary but you’re not the person who should be doing them, you can engage a professional closer to manage the sales calls and give you
You can offer genuine real-time deadlines for incentives
One of the advantages of sales calls is the ability to communicate urgency and prompt someone to take the next step.
“If you enrol by [this date] you’ll also secure [this extra bonus valued at $xxxx], this is only available for [limited time]”
People don’t like missing out on bonuses that offer genuine value. If they know a time-sensitive offer is within reach, they’ll likely want to take advantage of it and increase the value from the program for their investment.
FOMO is a real motivator because humans inherently default to comfort and inertia. We need a strong reason to take action, or we’ll do nothing.
For ‘lower’ high ticket offers priced from $3k to $5k, an application funnel can replace sales calls using automation to provide the steps a prospect needs to take to enrol.
If you host a live event experience like a bootcamp or live training, there’s a short ‘open cart’ period following the live event for prospective and enthusiastic clients to enrol in your program.
This is when they’ll also be able to secure those extra value ‘bonuses’ that might provide exclusive access to high level resources, more training, strategy or time with you.
If the sales call isn’t part of the enrolment process, an automated application funnel needs to clearly communicate all the time sensitive offers with a genuine real-time deadline so prospects are equally motivated to take action quickly or miss out.
It’s important to be in integrity with your offers and having a tool like Deadline Funnel in your application funnel allows you to create real-time deadlines around extra incentives that reward those highly motivated prospects to take quick action and enrol.
Also, without a sales call, the application funnel needs to do the heavy lifting of influencing the prospective client with relevant content as effectively as a sales call could.
This means you need to include follow up emails to address objections, build belief and help a prospective client see themselves enjoying the rewards of reaching their desired goals after working with you, and remind them there is a deadline to secure extra value.
You know your audience pain points and desires
If you’ve ever been on a sales call with someone and discovered that you’re not a good fit for each other, it can feel like a waste of time for both parties.
An application funnel allows people to qualify themselves for the next step or otherwise, self-select out of your funnel by taking no action.
Doing live launches a few times is useful to give you feedback that you can use to develop the messaging around your offer when you’re ready for an automated application funnel.
When you know your audience really well and can address their pain points and why they’re stuck, at every step along your funnel it will feel like you understand exactly what they’re going through and how you can help them break through to the next level.
It can take time to dial in your messaging as you review the funnel performance and lead quality, but once your funnel is converting 30% of applicants into enrolment the number of leads who enter your funnel is limitless.
You won’t be bound by the time constraints of sales calls as the funnel will do all the work of helping people decide if the next step is right for them.
As with any decision you make in your business, consider what will work best for you, your business and your audience.
You might have an offer that is highly personalised and doing sales calls makes sense. If so, keep booking sales calls but if you’re not confident doing them yourself, hire a professional sales person. It can also be a valuable investment in market research as well.
An application funnel can save you a lot of time but they’re not perfect straight out of the gate. Regular review of the statistics from your funnel is beneficial for identifying where you can optimise and improve results.
If you would like to have an application funnel strategy created and built for you, head over to apply here.
