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An Exact Breakdown of Using Sales Funnels to Set Goals
If I told myself in year 1 that in year 7 I had 3500 IG followers … well, I would be appalled and probably give up on my business before it ever really got started.
Now, I know that those numbers I was so focused on back then? They don’t really matter. And today I’m going to share more about the numbers that actually matter – and how you can set goals based on that number.
In fact, I’m sharing one of my personal 2024 Goals with you and walking you through exactly how I set the goal based on my KPIs and data.
Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- If you want your business to grow, effective marketing is crucial. But that doesn’t mean you have to spend a ton of time on your marketing – even if you’re a solopreneur. Do you dream of business growth, but aren’t gaining traction? Does the thought of tackling your marketing feel daunting? Or, do you understand the importance of effective marketing, but simply don’t have the time to get it done? There’s good news! Marketing doesn’t have to be so overwhelming, confusing, and complicated. Say goodbye to the confusion and complexity that has held you back, and say hello to a clear, actionable roadmap for business growth. In my book, Chasing Simple Marketing, I’ll take you on a journey to demystify marketing with simplicity as your guiding principle. You’ll walk away with a clear, concise, and personalized marketing strategy designed specifically for your entrepreneurial journey. You don’t need a Masters of Business Administration (MBA) or a background in business to tackle your marketing head-on thanks to the strategies and techniques in this book that deliver real results. No longer will marketing feel like an insurmountable mountain; instead, it will become an easily manageable and integral part of your business. Take your content from non-existent or inconsistent, to a true tool to grow your business by Chasing Simple Marketing. You can grab your own copy by heading to Amazon and searching for Chasing Simple Marketing, or you can hop over to amandawarfield.com/book to learn more about buying it for yourself.
- The Community (use code LISTENER for your first month free!)
- Episode 200: A Look Back at 6 Years in Business
- Episode 208: Here’s Exactly What I Track in My KPI Spreadsheet
- Content Batching Bootcamp
- This week’s action step: If you have any arbitrary numbers-based goals on your 2024 goals list – cross them out.
- This week’s book recommendation: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
- Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield
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Have a comment about today’s episode, or a topic you’d like to suggest for a future episode? Shoot me an email over at hello@amandawarfield.com!
Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!
*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate
If I told myself in year one that in year seven of business I had 3, 500 Instagram followers, well, I would be appalled and probably give up on my business before it ever really got started. And now I know that those numbers I was so focused on back then, they don’t really matter. And today I’m going to share more about the numbers that actually matter and how you can set goals based on that number.
In fact, I’m sharing one of my personal 2024 goals with you and walking you through exactly how I set the goal based on my KPIs and my data. You’re listening to episode 209 of the Chasing Simple podcast, and I’m your host, Amanda Warfield. This episode was brought to you by my book, Chasing Simple Marketing, and you can grab your own at amandawarfield. com / book.
How do I find time to create content without overwhelming myself? Where should I even be showing up in my marketing? How do I come up with fresh content ideas? Where should I be focusing my marketing efforts? What is lead generation anyways and how do I do it? Are launches still a thing? And most importantly, how do I put it all together to market my business strategically?
Can I really grow my business without spending all of my time marketing? These are some of the questions that float around in your head when you think of marketing. Welcome, friend. This is Chasing Simple, where practical marketing strategy meets simplicity. I’m your host, Amanda Warfield, simplicity focused content marketing and launch strategist, speaker, educator, and author of Chasing Simple Marketing.
I traded in my classroom lesson plans for helping creative entrepreneurs sustainably fit marketing into their business without it taking over their business. So that they have time to grow their business, take time off, and live the life they dreamed about when they first decided to go out on their own.
When I’m working, you can find me working with one on one clients, such as The Contract Shop and Rebecca Rice Photography on their marketing strategy and copywriting, or helping my students simplify their marketing and launches. And when I’m not, you can find me spending time outside with my husband, Russell.
Reading in our hammock, watching GameCock Sports, traveling, or forcing our cats to snuggle me. If you feel overwhelmed by marketing, you aren’t alone. Many entrepreneurs find marketing frustrating, overwhelming, and simply an obligation. They know they need it, but they don’t enjoy how easily it can suck up their time when what they really want to be doing is the thing that they started their business to do.
Which is why I’m here, to help make marketing simple and less time consuming. So that you can spend less time on your marketing and more time growing your business and doing what you love. Each week I’ll bring you transparent conversations, actionable steps, and judgment free community to encourage and equip you.
So grab yourself a cup of coffee or whatever your drink of choice is and meet me here each week for love, support, practical tips, and advice on uncomplicating your marketing and business. Let’s do this entrepreneurship thing together, shall we? If you want your business to grow, effective marketing is crucial.
But that doesn’t mean that you have to spend a ton of time on your marketing, even if you’re a solo preneur. Do you dream of business growth but aren’t gaining traction? Does the thought of tackling your marketing feel daunting? Or do you understand the importance of effective marketing but simply don’t have the time to get it done?
There’s good news. Marketing doesn’t have to be so overwhelming, confusing, and complicated. Say goodbye to the confusion and complexity that has held you back and say hello to a clear actionable roadmap for business growth. In my book, Chasing Simple Marketing, I’ll take you on a journey to demystify marketing with simplicity as your guiding principle.
You’ll walk away with a clear, concise, and personalized marketing strategy designed specifically for your entrepreneurial journey. You don’t need an MBA or a background in business to tackle your marketing head on thanks to the strategies and techniques inside of this book that deliver real results.
No longer will marketing feel like an insurmountable mountain. Instead, it will become an easily manageable and integral part of your business. Take your content from non existent or inconsistent to a true tool to grow your business by chasing simple marketing. You can grab your own copy by heading to Amazon and searching for Chasing Simple Marketing, or you can hop over to amandawarfield. com / book to learn more about how you can grab a copy for yourself. It’s hard for me to believe that I’m actually starting my seventh year of business. In episode 200, I kind of go back and I look at the first six years of business and where that led me and, you know, how we got to where we are today, which is It’s me being the breadwinner for our family.
My husband actually is in school right now. He’s not even working. We own two homes. I’m able to work in ministry and do it because I love it and not because I need the paycheck because frankly, ministry doesn’t pay. And I’m able, I’m able to do that. Of course the paycheck, like, an extra paycheck is always great, right, but, um, I’m able to work part time at my church and do something that I really love while also doing this thing that I really love part time and serving clients and getting to teach and, man, it just, looking back on my life, it feels so, it’s just so surreal, it’s so surreal in, in so many different ways, um, and this isn’t a reflection episode, so I’m not gonna go down that rabbit hole, even though, man, every time I start thinking about Business in life, and I’m just so grateful and reflective for where we are and of course Let’s be very clear.
There’s so much privilege that my husband and I have both had to help get to where we are today like that’s 100 percent involved in all of this. So just throwing out that out there I 100 percent recognize that but as grateful as I am for all of this I need it to be so very clear that I do not make six figures in revenue.
There’s a small chance that I could this year in, you know, 2024, but that’s not even for sure, it’s not guaranteed, it’s a small chance, and I still to this day don’t make six figures in revenue on a yearly basis. I have 1, 500 people on my email list and I have 3, 500 followers on Instagram. If I went back and told year one Amanda, she would be shocked, she would be disappointed, and she would be really confused because in her mind, in order to have the things and be where my business is now and to be at the place in life where my husband and I are now, I would need much larger numbers.
I would need to be making six figures. That’s what I thought a successful business was. But here’s the thing. When you’re ready to scale your business, and by scale I mean offer digital products in some way, shape, or form, create courses, um, have one to many offers versus just one on one offers, when you’re ready to scale and have those type of offers, the number of followers, your email list, that’s gonna matter a whole lot more.
But when you’re just building those foundations for your business, when you are solely working one-on-one with clients, when you are just starting to create the different digital products and you’re not ready to maybe run ads to them and all of that, while you’re building those foundations, those numbers, they don’t matter quite as much because your relationships with your audience matter a whole lot more.
Which is why consistency is so important because if you’re not showing up consistently, you are undermining that relationship with your audience and making it harder for you to sell. So if you struggle with showing up consistently, make sure you check out Content Batching Bootcamp. It’s my course all about how to create consistent content to have a batch schedule and one that works for you and your business, not simply one that is.
What some cookie cutter recipe of what mine is it’s a Course that teaches you how to create your own. So check that out if you’re still struggling with consistency because Here’s the thing. Your numbers matter, but only the strategic ones. Your number of followers? Not so much. The number of people needed to get through a funnel?
Yes. If you’ve done the math. So what you want to make sure that you are really focusing on is to focus on it. You’re marketing strategy and where you’re trying to lead people and the importance of that comes in when you’re building these funnels for these digital products, and you’re focusing solely on your current audience for those funnels, or you’re doing things like getting in front of other people’s audiences, which is going to bring in a small number of new leads, right?
What you want to be doing as you’re building sales funnels is to make sure that you are creating a sales funnel that converts where you want it to convert so that when you decide to do major campaigns like running ads, you know that the funnel you’ve created works. And so. You’re not wasting your money running ads to a funnel that’s not going to convert.
So I’m going to share about one of my own sales funnels and kind of give you a breakdown of what it is that I’m doing behind the scenes with it. So one of my 2024 goals is to get 815 people through my sales funnel. for the community, which is my membership. Now, when I was setting goals and deciding on that number, I didn’t pull 815 out of thin air, right?
I started with knowing with where I am, which is that I’m currently making around 650 a month from the community and knowing where I want to be by the end of the year, which is about 2, 000 a month from this revenue stream. So I want to go from 650 a month to 2, 000 a month. Because I have two different tiers to this membership, my VIP or my fast pass tier and my standard or my pixie dust tier, I had to determine what my max ability to serve VIP members was.
And I decided that number was 15. My VIP members get a lot more one on one attention from me And so I knew that more than 15 a month was going to make it really really difficult to serve them Well, so 15 is my max which left me to figure out how many pixie dust members I need to reach With what’s left of that two thousand dollar goal, which is 33 So that left me with a goal of consistently making 2, 000 a month from the community with a max of 15 FastPass members and hopefully 33 Standard members.
Then, I had to look at what I needed to do to actually hit those numbers because without a plan and a strategy, a goal means nothing. So I came up with quite a few ways that I could work towards that goal, but ultimately decided to focus on one, which was focusing on my business. Sales funnel. After my welcome sequence, everyone goes through the sales funnel for the community.
I set that up last year and I’ve been letting it run so I know that it works, it does, and so that I have enough data to work with. When I set my goals in December, the funnel was converting at 0. 59%. Yes, that would be a number that I would love to see be higher, but that’s a project for another time. It’s not what I’m focused on right now.
So I don’t have enough data to know the different conversion rates for pixie dust versus fast pass tiers. So I just use the number 48 for my ultimate conversion goal. So to get 48 new members in that 48 comes from 33 plus 15, by the way. To get those 48 new members that I want to have by the end of the year at a 0.
59 percent conversion rate, I need roughly 815 new leads to go through the community sales funnel. And yes, if you’re wondering, this is a bit of an oversimplification because you can get really deep into data with memberships. You can look at, okay, but how long does someone actually stay a member and where exactly are they coming from?
And, you know, I could try to look at, well, how many convert At this rate to this one and how many converted this rate to this one and how many people start here and upgrade. There’s a lot that you can do with data, but this is a good starting point, especially for this example. So then I’m left to focus on how to get people into that funnel.
I know that I need X amount of members. I know that my sales funnel converts at this rate, which means I know that I need this number of people to go through that sales funnel for the sales funnel itself to give me that number of new members. So now how do I get people into that funnel? And there’s so many different ways you can do that.
That’s all part of growth marketing. If you want to know the best ways that you can grow your own business through growth marketing, take the quiz on my website, Amanda Warfield. com slash quiz. And it’ll give you examples of some great growth marketing strategies to focus on for right now. But. It’s things like being on podcasts, being part of bundles, so on and so forth.
Basically, what can I do to get people through my welcome sequence and through my sales funnel, even better if I can focus on, and I mentioned this in last week’s episode, I believe I’m going to create a freebie specifically for the community. That’s going to strategically lead into that offer, making it much more likely that someone is going to actually opt in through that sales funnel.
So there are different ways that you can focus on getting people into the funnel, improving those conversions and things like that. But that’s a walkthrough of the kind of numbers that actually matter and how you can find them instead of Arbitrarily plucking numbers out of thin air. And so while year one Amanda might have been really upset with the fact that I only had 1, 500 people on my email list and 3, 500 people on my Instagram following I’ve come to realize that those numbers are aren’t what matters so much as the strategic numbers, like how many people have gone through a funnel, how that funnel converts, and what I need to do to get more people through that funnel.
So, your action step for this week is that if you have any arbitrary numbers based goals on your 2024 goals list, I want you to cross them out. I want you to give yourself permission to focus on creating the systems that you need, To gather intentional data like last year, I set up the sales funnel and then I just let it run naturally so I could see what that conversion rate was instead of trying to force some arbitrary number.
I just let it do what it needed to do in order to give me the numbers I needed to give me. Now, your book recommendation for this week is Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. I said this last week, but this book is also a heavy one. I was reading a lot of heavy books back to back, I guess, last year.
Um, this is a heavy book. And, um, It, it deals with topics like gun violence and mental health and, yeah, just trigger warning for, for that. It is a dark book. It’s a heavy book. But man, it was a can’t put down kind of book. Um, I read it super quickly and cried a lot of tears, but, yeah. Yeah, I’m trying to think.
I don’t even know what kind of genre I would give this. It is definitely one of those books that I think will stand the test of time. It is its own thing in and of itself. It’s actually especially nostalgic if you’re someone who is a millennial. It has to do with a gaming company and gaming and there’s a lot of like, I believe like 90s stuff.
It’s Great on a lot of levels. So anyways, I will link to that in the show notes. And until next time, my friend, I hope that you will go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.
Thank you so much for joining me here today, friend. You can find this episode show notes, as well as all of the resources you need to simplify your marketing over at amandawarfield. com. If you liked what you heard here today, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode. And if you could take a moment to leave a rating and review, it would truly mean the world to me.
Ratings and reviews are the number one way that you can support a podcast, and ensure that it sticks around for many more episodes to come. I’ll see you next time. Now go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.
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