Facts never helped anyone sell anything. They are overvalued by sales people and when we try to sell funnels. If you’re struggling to sell marketing funnels, maybe your customers are also struggling to sell their products, keep reading this post.
I’m going to talk about how to sell marketing funnels, as well as how to move away from competing against other products when customers say “yeah but can’t I get my nephew/guy down the road/ClickFunnels to do it?”
Marketing funnels are very complex. Even though we might be experts, they’re still relatively complex systems and processes that we need to put together, in order to do loads of cool stuff like marketing automation, remarketing and emails.
Even though we know how powerful they are, and how cool they can be, and all the stuff that we can do with them. Customers still don’t really see the benefit to them, or why they should buy them.
When a customer doesn’t understand how it benefits them, we think we should go to facts and statistics about the product and about the funnel. What happens is they might say “Okay, yeah, but why wouldn’t my nephew do this?” Or “It sound just like a website? Why wouldn’t I just kind of get a website designer to do this?” Or even worse “I’ve heard of like software and stuff like lead pages and Click Funnels that can do it for me, why wouldn’t I use them?”
The first rule of selling marketing funnels is don’t talk about marketing funnels. Too often we get caught up talking about the features and all of the stuff that a marketing funnel has.
What we should be focusing on is the benefits. The misconception is that facts help people make better decisions. Surely, as many facts as possible, help people make rationalize and informed decisions.
And the problem, is that’s just not true.
The first rule of selling marketing funnels is don’t talk about marketing funnels.
Let’s take two huge political examples to kind of illustrate this. Donald Trump running for president and Brexit.
Now, whichever side of the camp you fall on, I don’t care, whether you voted for Trump, you didn’t vote for Trump, whether you voted for Brexit, whether you didn’t vote for Brexit.
The problem is that there were facts from both sides. Regardless of whether these facts were true or not. That’s not the point. There were facts from both sides.
And yet, even empirically, when we look at the data now to suggest what was true and what wasn’t true, people weren’t making decisions based around the volume of facts from each side, they won’t even make a decision based on whether the facts were true. They will making decisions based on emotion. “How can I see this affecting me in the future? What is my emotional connection?”
A lot of human beings like to think that they’re very logical, and that they think things through in a rational manner. We don’t. We’re animals. Most most of us live in the very primitive parts of our brain.
And that part of our brain doesn’t allow us to use facts to our advantage. Facts tend to be overvalued when we’re selling. But undervalued as the buyer. Especially when we’re trying to make a decision.
So when a customer is trying to make a decision about whether they should buy a marketing funnel from you, most people will resort to facts to try and turn objections or close the sale.
Another example just like before, when we’re with a marketing funnel customer, and they say “Okay, well, why wouldn’t I just get my nephew to do this? He said he can do it for 500 bucks. Why wouldn’t I just use Click Funnels?”
Lots of funnel builders will try to go back to facts, and what they end up doing is competing fact against fact. They’ll say “yeah, you could use Click Funnels, but you won’t have the support. Or, we’ve tried them before, and they’re not that great. Or your nephew could go ahead and do it. But you know, we’ve got loads of experience. And you know, we’ve done this before.”
The truth is, the facts don’t help people make decisions. Often it can paralyze them with analysis paralysis. So instead, what you need to do is sell futures, not features.
Sell futures, not features
From the offset, you shouldn’t really be talking about marketing funnels at all. You should be asking the customer “tell me more about your working day”.
“Well, I’m up at 6am. I kind of have to leave my husband to get the kids ready and take them to school, and then I’ll be working through the day. I tend to miss lunch, because I’ve got so much work to do. And then I’ll leave late and try and have to pick the kids up and go home and then we try to have a meal, but we’re often too tired”.
You’d respond “So that’s your family life? What if I allowed you to go to work later and leave earlier, so you could spend more time with your family?”
“Yeah, that sounds amazing” they’ll reply.
“Great. We have an email marketing platform that can help you do that.”
Look what we’ve done, we’ve sold the future, not the feature. We’ve sold the better life and the benefit to the customer that they want. And we will deliver it with email marketing.
In truth, I don’t even need to mention email marketing. You need to be able to connect to the life and the emotions and the feelings and the status of the buyer. That’s what they want to experience. That’s what they want to buy.
That’s what they want to buy from you. When we talk to customers about very complex and large scale marketing, funnel projects or consulting, it’s very easy for us to start getting lost in the automation side and the follow up processes and the remarketing and the building of audiences and chatbots and qualification. When really what we should be doing is bringing it back to their life and bringing it back to what they want.
When a customer comes up to me and says “okay, but why wouldn’t we just do this ourselves?” The first thing I’ll say is, “okay, well, why haven’t you?” And that immediately puts them in a state of thinking, Oh, well, maybe because I don’t have the time. And I don’t want to?”
They want you to say “we’re going to start getting you some time back today, you can even start focusing on hiring.”
One of our customers wants to write a book. And my job is to give them more time to write that book and more excuses to write that book and more material to write that book. They as the customer shouldn’t be doing any of the marketing tactic stuff.
People don’t buy funnels is a bit like people don’t buy beds. What people buy is a better night’s sleep. They buy status, they want to make their partner happy, they want a comfortable night’s sleep, they want a better back, they want to feel more energized in the morning. That’s what people want.
People want a reward at the end of the hard working day. To be able to go and think “at least my bed is comfortable, even though everything else around me is extremely stressful.” That’s what they’re buying. They’re not buying mattresses and springs and headboards, and particular types of wood. They’re buying status, they’re buying emotion, they’re buying connection to other people.
That’s what your marketing funnels have to deliver. And that’s what you have to focus on. Every other funnel builder that you are competing with will try and break it down to facts. And they’ll say, “Oh, well the page builder, we use as much faster than the page builder that company B uses, or the code we use in ours is much cleaner than the code they use and Click Funnels.” Customers don’t give a flying fuck about that stuff.
What they want to hear is “I’ll tell you why you don’t want to use Click Funnels. You already don’t have the time to have this meeting with me now and I’m trying to save you time. You tell me that you wake up early and you go home late, you don’t have enough time to spend with your kids. And now you’re saying that you yourself want to build something or you want to hire someone to build something? Continue to train them or get it wrong? Does that sound like an a sensible investment of your time?”
“No, it doesn’t”
“Great sign here. This is what we can do to get started.” You should be selling futures, not features.
What’s the biggest benefit that you bring to your customers? How do you make their lives better? Let me know in the comments below.
We’ve got some free training down below on how to find your first marketing funnel customer.
