Sales funnel is maturing

Discussions
#1

I posted the other day about how I’m experiencing some welcome and overdue-feeling success with a PPC campaign and a landing page. My landing page, for which the CTA was “view free demo”, was converting at about 20%.

Although the landing page was doing great, I hadn’t really planned what should happen to the prospect after he or she opts into the demo. The next step was to sign up for a free trial, but the conversion rate seemed really low.

On Saturday (June 13th) I put up another page after the demo squeeze page. The copy is relatively long and so is the form. This move was inspired by the following:

  • In 80/20 Sales and Marketing, Perry Marshall says that sales is a disqualification process
  • In The Ultimate Sales Letter, Dan Kennedy says something like “Who reads long copy? The ones who buy!”
  • I watched a @CasJam video on YouTube where he said he used a longer order form for Restaurant Engine because he wanted only serious prospects to come through (or something like that).

The significant thing about the longer form is that the prospect is inviting me to call him or her on the phone. They’re saying “I want you to call me.” This is different from before where I would google the salon name and try to get a hold of the place, perhaps creepily.

I put the longer form up on Saturday and I frankly didn’t expect to see anything happen for quite a while with it. To my surprise, I found on Monday that somebody had filled the form out. Somebody wanted me to call her! Then, today, I discovered that another person had already filled out the “call me” form. I’m in fact two for two: exactly two people have filled out the “view demo” form, and those same two people also filled out the “call me” form.

So I’ve established the following:

  • I can buy traffic on Capterra. For $500/mo I can get about 5-10 visitors a day. I know this for a fact.
  • For this price, I can get roughly one person a day to complete the “view demo” step of my funnel. I know this for a fact.
  • A certain percentage of the demo-viewers will invite me to call them. I know this for a fact, although I don’t know the percentage or volume yet.
  • A certain percentage of the people who invite me to call them will begin a trial and eventually become customers. This is an assumption, but a very safe one. Others before have found me online and eventually become customers, just not through this exact funnel yet.

I’m not sure what the point of this post was. I guess I want to share my excitement, which might be encouraging for others and maybe even educational. As always, any thoughts are welcome. (I know my website sucks. My sales funnel operates independently of the main site, which I’m in the process of re-doing.)

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#2

I think one of the next things is to work out the CPA. I found on Capterra I could get a CPA of about $200 which is pretty good. It may take a couple of months to get enough metrics to calculate it. I would also ask your current users to give you a review on Capterra.

#3

Good suggestion. I’ll be very interested to know that number. It looks like I may have gotten my first paying customer as a result of my Capterra campaign, although I won’t know for sure until after their 30-day trial is over. I expect that it’ll take at least a few months to get a few new customers.

I suppose once I have a pretty good idea of my CPA and once I have fair confidence in the repeatability of my sales system, I can up the advertising budget confident that I’ll get back more than I’m spending.

#4

On the long-form landing page you provided I couldn’t see the border of the textbox with id “input_10_8” (the phone number). So I couldn’t see where to put the phone number in.

#5

Cool that you’ve got a clear idea of how this particular funnel works - time to get enough data to fill in the numbers of each stage I would think.

Playing devils advocate - how did the 2 contacts you got from Capterra go? Where they well qualified etc or could they have been stooges?

#6

@Leon Thanks. Fixed.

@Rhino I’ve only been able to get a hold of one of the two. She was definitely legit. It’ll be interesting to see over time what percentage of people who request a call actually take a call.

#7

Keep the news coming and in depth stats. I love it

#8

@courtz Okay, here it is: got my first customer via Capterra today! I’ve spent $587.25 so far on Capterra ads, so my average CPA as of today is $587.25. I estimate my LTV to be a couple thousand bucks, so $587.25 is I suppose an acceptable starting CPA.

I believe I’ve been running the ads for almost exactly a month, so I suppose I can potentially expect to get one new customer per month via Capterra. (I’m currently spending $500/mo with them.) My hope and expectation is that I can get the CPA down and acquisition rate up. After, say, three customers at a good CPA, I think I can probably safely throw more money at advertising and be reasonably sure it will be money wisely spent.

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#9

Okay, now I’ve gotten my second customer. CPA is now $293.63.

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#10

@jasonswett you must be the happiest guy ever. to find a funnel that works LTV vs CPA is a dream! What other funnels do you have?

#11

I’m pretty stoked, although my excitement is tempered by many past experiences of getting prematurely excited and then realizing I was just excited about an illusion. So time will tell.

As far as funnels go, I pretty much just have this one right now. Once I have this one functioning reasonably well, I plan to invest more money into it until I have a number of additional customers and then maybe establish other funnels and/or expand into new marketing channels like AdWords, trade magazine ads, direct mail and trade shows.

#12

Capterra is a great funnel for salon software, I think it is better than adwords for now. I think you can probably get 3-4 new clients per month off it no problems. The guys at the top of the list on there probably get a lot more but are paying $10+ per click (they have higher budgets than you or i!!)

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#13

Thanks for sharing this. I was not familiar with capterra. Learning about it now :).

#14

Dude. Well done. Keep going!