As The Professor celebrates his second year in existence, team members have been having a lot of fun playing sales funnel consultant to mostly technology firms across the globe. This role is also referred to as a sales funnel specialist.
And it’s still very clear that all the sales and marketing jargon and incorrect noise on social media has created a lot of confusion.
That said, Eddie Davis sat down to summarize some of the common questions and points of confusion in the market and help owners and executives who think they might need a sales funnel consultant better understand what it is they are getting.
If you don’t see your burning questions below, feel free to ask us on LinkedIn, drop them in the comments or use our contact form or chat. We’re happy to add to this list.
What Is Funnel Consulting in the First Place?
There are lots of top-of-funnel sources of strangers:
- Organic Search/SEO
- Paid Search/PPC
- Signage
- ABM
- Organic Social
- Paid Social
- Influencers
- Referrals
- Partnerships
- PLG
And then any top-of-funnel source requires a strong middle-of-funnel where understanding and trust get built. Websites, newsletters, sales collateral, free training, etc. have to move that stranger towards purchase.
Lastly, at the bottom of the funnel, purchase has to occur as smoothly and predictably as possible. Closed-Wonย in sales and marketing refers to a stage in the sales process where a sales opportunity has been successfully converted into a customer sale.
Funnel consulting is the art of choosing what of all the funnels make sense for a particular business in its current state and helping that business execute those at positive ROI and over-time, increasing the size of the tops of funnel, shortening sales cycles, and decreasing acquisition costs, all of which combined cause “phase shifts” for businesses and massive value to be unlocked.
Novice funnel consultants mostly focus on gimmicks like pop ups and endless email or text chains tied to downloadable content.
Good funnel consultants have the analytical and teaching skills to help businesses fix and build sales funnels that predictably bring more revenue than they cost to run.
Really great sales funnel consultants can pull off magic for businesses such as brand them and get their messaging so precise that they can achieve touch-1 conversions when they never have in the past and can help with objectives like creating new markets, unlocking equity events, etc.
Why Would Someone Use a Sales Funnel Consultant?
There are tons of tools, agencies, specialists you can hire, teams you can build, etc.
There are also lots of approaches to sales funnel building and optimizing each step along the way using tactics.
So pretty much everybody has tried some or many of those and been left unsatisfied. Usually the reason to hire a sales funnel consultant is because the company feels that based on what they have, they aren’t making the revenue they deserve.
Professor’s Note
It’s time to hire a sales funnel consultant when other resources are not able to achieve the revenue and growth your great product or service deserves.
Note: sales funnel consultants can help greatly with refining prototype software as well once it’s far enough along that it has a user interface.
What Can a Sales Funnel Consultants Do that Other Specialists Can’t?
Most companies of any size hire specialists and group them in teams. The way degree programs currently graduate college and masters level professionals in business centers on being deeply specialized and placed in a job function around that specialty.
And then all the specialists live day to day in software packages oriented to their specialty.
Fundamentally, sales funnel consultants have to understand all the possible funnels from end to end and then how to optimize for scalability and revenue growth, so they work across teams and business functions.
Here are some areas they have to have mastered:
Marketing Specialization
Sales funnel consultants need to understand everything that Individual contributors with these titles do:
Content Managers
Social Media Managers
Copywriters
Product Marketers
PPC Managers
etc.
And those folks report to a CMO or VP of Marketing, or in larger firms, Director level people that fill the middle management role.
Unfortunately, none of the individual contributor people have any meaningful sales experience and many of them likely don’t like to have external conversations at all.
With agencies, they generally advertise as having very broad skillsets that ultimately role up to “go-to-market strategy,” but behind the scenes, they only know small pieces of funnels from end-to-end and don’t know all that many top-of-funnel sources overall.
Sales Specialization
People that have developed “sales skills” are generally good at 1-to-1 and leading 1-to-group conversations (live and via correspondence) and overcoming objections.
In a multi-handoff scenario, you have SDRs prospecting and account executives sitting for low to mid value meetings. You then may have a VP of Sales or Chief Revenue Officer who closes the highest value deals.
You may also have a Director of Sales managing metrics for sales teams that have sufficient size to merit it.
In a financial institution marketing setting, silos run rampant, and cross-department sales conversations, particularly between sales and marketing, often do not happen.
Setting aside purchasing lists (that never identify actual purchase intent), none of these sales professionals know how to get potential purchasers to voluntarily identify themselves en masse.
Sales & Marketing Tools (Stack Management)
To create a scalable process, lots of technology comes into play. There are a number of solutions that cover many software categories now, but even when a sales and marketing stack is built with a strong CRM in the middle, both sales teams and marketing teams use lots of software that ideally has to work harmoniously, so real humans don’t waste their time cleaning up bad data and leaving revenue on the table.
So How Can I Engage with a Sales Funnel Consultant?
Keeping in mind that we’re talking about consultants, not people seeking jobs, you’re going to hire a firm/someone to work with you and your team, not for you or your team.
At Sales Funnel Professor, our sales funnel audits often surface that people, tactics, and tools are not working in an optimized way. Our approach to optimization is to coach or player<>coach until the existing team “gets” how things should be done and can feel all the goodness that comes out of doing it that way. That’s when the right habits form.
Free Resource
We’re often teaching how sales funnels work as we go.
Feel free to download our sales funnel images and icons for your own educational use.
So you guessed it, a lot of our consulting starts with an audit and delivering the results via a lengthy, detailed deck and recorded video interview/presentation of our findings.
Thereafter, when clients want to deploy our findings, we integrate with the existing teams and set up optimization tasks like CRM hygiene and conversion rate optimization in discrete tickets to be completed. Unless a client prefers another method, we use a shared Trello board for project management.
What Are the Results for Hiring a Sales Funnel Consultant?
More money is always the obvious result of hiring a successful sales funnel consultant and what a CFO or finance-oriented founder will care about.
But the benefits that ultimately lead to more money at the bottom of the funnel are all the steps required to get a client to purchase working cohesively and faster in aggregate.
These types of “wins” are the result of our funnel consulting:
Decreased acquisition cost per client
Increased prospect volume
Shortened sales cycles
Increased margins
Happier teams & individuals and more fun for executives and owners
Reduced administrative time
Brand transformations
Much of the success comes from being able to see both the big picture and identify audience<>value prop pairs and the small picture: for each pair, what is the most efficient way to deliver the value to the audience and incentivize them to tell their friends?
Do I Need a Sales Funnel Consultant Forever?
Perhaps not. Good sales funnel consultants love teaching and seeing their students and clients succeed. If you have the right staff, they may be able to absorb both actual skills and patterns related to identifying gaps and filling them with research.
Over time, you may be able to develop a self-actualizing flywheel effect within your team. But if they get stuck or want to test cutting edge tech or tactics, the beauty of working with sales funnel consultants is that you can reengage as needed.
A good sales funnel consultant should never “Black Box” their work. What has been accomplished, why that was done and not something else, and how it was done should all be either documented or have been accomplished via your team so that overall understand of go to market strategy increases via the engagement.
Do You Need a Sales Funnel Consultant?
We enjoy talking with companies that have great products and services (and sometimes just good products and services) that need a set of objective eyes and guidance on how to communicate with strangers about their value. Conducting a conversion funnel audit is essential for uncovering bottlenecks and optimizing the user journey from initial interest to final purchase.
Our focus is predominantly on global technology-related or enabled companies, and unless otherwise stated, we work to US Market Readiness standards.
Would you like to see if working together make sense? We host free consultations throughout the work week.
For Further Reading: What Is the Touch-1 Test in Conversion Rate Optimization? What does a CRO expert do?
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