A sales funnel is simply the path you lead a customer through to buy something.

If you’re selling something, you already have a sales funnel, either you’re aware of it or not.

If you’re gathering email subscribers, you have a very basic sales funnel.

If you don’t have any of these, you will when you finish reading this.

Traditionally, businesses spend money to get new leads and customers. But what if you could make money while acquiring new customers instead?

In this post, you’ll find the easiest explanation of what is a sales funnel. And how you can build one today to start getting paid for every new customer or lead. So you can scale big time!

Some of the links in this post are “affiliate links.” This means that if you click on the link and buy something, I will receive an affiliate commission. This has no cost to you and I only recommend tools that I use or have used myself and that are within the most useful, to the best of my knowledge.

There Are Sales Funnels Everywhere

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I’m not proud of my 20s… I was unemployed and living in my parent’s house, doing the odd job as a computer technician for gas money and meals.

The first time I consciously encountered a sales funnel, it was around 2 a.m. and I had been playing computer games all day.

I hadn’t even realized that I hadn’t had dinner until my stomach started feeling as if it was eating itself from the inside… In fact, I had only eaten breakfast.

I quickly abandoned my computer, grabbed the car keys and felt my pocket for money. €10 was all I had… McDonald’s was the only choice in my small town at that time.

When I started the car, it flashed the sign of an empty gas tank.

Crap!

Hunger from a whole day of fasting made me resourceful enough to put €5 into the gas tank and consider buying 5 cheeseburgers (€1 each).

But as I devoured all these calories alone in my car, I found myself thinking…

“Why do they sell €1 burgers and €2.5 drinks? It makes no sense… that tap coke costs around €0.20 / cup!”

The Sales Funnel in Front of Us

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It was only years later that I made the connection with sales funnels!

I had heard many times that people buy with their emotions, not logic. But when I heard it from Russell Brunson, I remembered that day, years before.

I wasn’t being logical in that situation; I was being resourceful in order not to starve (survival).

If I had money to spend, I wouldn’t have bothered to use those €5 to maximize calories. I would have bought a menu instead, probably the usual Big Mac Menu for around €6.80 (Big Mac + Coke + Fries).

McDonald’s spends around €0.80 in advertising per customer.

If all they do is sell a burger for €1, after the production cost – let’s assume that, with the ingredients, making a burger costs them €0.40…

From the moment you drive in and buy a cheeseburger, they are losing €0.20!

But now, you’re offered a coke and fries, which can be combed into a menu for around €5 (depending on the burger you choose).

This is the first upsell in the funnel.

Assuming that fries and coke costs McDonald’s another €0.40, they’re now profiting €3.40 from your purchase.

Next comes: “Would you like to make that a large menu for an extra €0.50?”

This is called an order bump. It’s a small increase in the order but helps maximize the profit from the sale.

And the last upsell: “Will you be having any dessert or coffee?”

A Good Sales Funnel Can Be Scaled to Infinity

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The great Dan Kennedy always says: “whoever can spend the most to acquire a customer, wins”.

If you’re spending $1 on ads to get a lead and instantly get $2 back from your funnel, how much can you spend on advertising to get more customers?

Exactly. All of it!

According to Steve Larson, One Funnel Away coach, these numbers represent a bad funnel. In a good one, you’ll get $3, $4, or even $5 for every $1 spent.

How to Get Paid for Leads

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If you’re paying for advertising to get visitors, you’ll use a low-priced product at the front end of your sales funnel for a very discounted price, where you’ll probably losing money (similarly to McDonald’s).

If you’re targeting the right customer, most of them will take your offer, because it’s an incredible deal!

But now you’re losing money… which means that you need to upsell.

Let’s say you sold an eBook for $7.50 (free book, pay for shipping), you now have a customer, even if you’re losing money, they already took out their credit card.

You can place an easy order bump of the audiobook version for $37. If 1 in every 10 customers take that offer (a lot of people prefer the audio version), that’s another $3.70 per buyer.

Making sense?

But now, you can place an upsell of an in-depth training on the same subject for $197.

Let’s say that 1 in every 30 people buys your course – that’s another $5.91 per customer…

You’re now making €17.11 per customer. That should make up for a very high Ad cost and to cover the expenses with the product.

But you can still place a down-sell and more upsells, or what’s called one time offers into your funnel to maximize profits.

But remember, the objective of this funnel was not to make money… You’ve acquired a customer!

You now have their email address and can continue marketing to them. These customers will be worth much more for no extra cost.

But What if You Don’t Have Your Own Products?

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Let’s say you’re just starting out and focusing on affiliate marketing. You don’t want to create any product of your own.

All you need to create is the freebie that will get people to subscribe, if you’re getting visitors organically (free), you won’t be losing money and you’ll get another contact to whom you can send emails later on with affiliate offers.

But you can still place an affiliate offer in the thank you page after they subscribe, getting paid for every subscriber.

The Email Sales Funnel

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After your customer has opted-in and either bought or not from you, comes the email funnel.

You can set up automated email campaigns to take your new subscribers in a similar journey as the initial sales funnel.

The difference is that you should also be creating a relationship with your subscribers. It’s important to give them enough value to get them to trust you as an authority in your niche.

By communicating with them often, you’ll build a relationship of trust which will not only get you repeat customers but turn those who were not ready to spend money the first time into new buyers.

Some people need to get to know you better before they buy from you. Others might be interested but not ready to buy.

Learn all you need about email marketing in this post: “Email List for Affiliate Marketing [Complete Actionable Guide]”

Grab Your Sales Funnel Template

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I build my sales funnels with Clickfunnels, which allows me to share them with others.

If you’d like to download the Free sales funnel template that I use with affiliate marketing, along with the plans from 15 super affiliates on how to become a full-time affiliate in 100 days…

All you must do is click the button below and after you subscribe, you’ll receive an email with instructions.

How to Build Your First Profitable Sales Funnel?   

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A good sales funnel can be a money-printing machine! Once you master the art of funnel building, you must be careful not to sell more than you can fulfill.

Learn more about building sales funnels in this post: “How To Build a Sales Funnel for Dummies”

After building a sales funnel for a client (one of his first), Steve Larson began receiving calls from the company asking him to turn it off.

When he asked if it was selling, they kept saying it was selling too much…

Steve could only think “which company doesn’t want sales?” and started ignoring their calls.

Until the CEO called him extremely upset saying that his funnel was going to ruin them and explained that they didn’t have the capacity to fulfill all the orders they were getting and needed to go slower.

Of course, it’s not likely that you will achieve this kind of success with your first funnel. This is marketing. The name of the game is testing and tweaking.

The good thing is that you don’t need to do all the testing yourself, because Steve, Russell, and Julie Stoian, three of the best funnel builders in the World can teach you the exact science of building sales funnels in the “One Funnel Away Challenge”.

First-time funnel builders keep reporting $1,000s in sales even before the end of the 30 days challenge.

You can register for the One Funnel Away Challenge here!

You can find freelancer funnel experts to help you build your first funnel in the Funnel Rolodex.

Do you feel ready to build your first sales funnel? Leave a comment below and let me know!

Also, feel free to ask any questions on sales funnels.