If you’ve been a coach for a while, you’ve probably heard of the “funnel.” The funnel is how your customer progresses from a free product all the way through to your top coaching package. Many customers start at the top of the funnel with the freebie – but only a few end up in your platinum coaching program.
We talked about how a sales funnel can help your business last week. While a sales funnel works well with physical products, it isn’t always enough for coaching. In working with my private coaching clients, I’ve learned that funnel is a very incomplete way to think about your coaching sales process because it leaves out important steps at the beginning and end of the process.
A better way to think about it for coaching purposes is as a cycle – beginning with attracting traffic to your site and ending with getting referrals. Infusionsoft calls this the Customer Lifecycle (never fear, you don’t need to have Infusionsoft to make use of this important information).
I’ll be getting into each of the steps more deeply over the next few weeks, but for now, let's start talking about the perfect customer lifecycle for a coaching business. The goal is to get the customer to make a decision to move to the next step – in the online marketing world – this is known as conversion.
Today we’re going to talk about the first two steps in the customer lifecycle works for Decisive Minds.
Step 1: Attract Traffic
This is where you get eyeballs to your site. We use our blog and social media, as well as doing interviews and attending live events to get traffic to our site. We’ve also had great luck with Facebook ads in generating interest. Without the interest and eyes on the site, you can’t get to the steps so it is critical that you focus on driving traffic to your site.
Step 2: Capture Leads
This is where people sign up for your list. We capture leads through the four different reports we offer on the home page, through our teleseminars and webinars, and by offering bonuses when we are interviewed by other people. To make it to the next few stages in the cycle, you have to make that first connection by getting them to sign up for your list.
Tune in tomorrow for Part 2: Steps 3 through 7!
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