Your Online Business Sales Cycle

Online Business Sales Cycle

 

Creating a profitable business online is a process, just like creating any other business.

And regardless of what it is that you’re offering, your cash flow is based on your sales.

Once you know and implement the online business sales cycle (which anyone can follow), you’ll be able to create consistent cash flow for your business, too.

Here are the six basic steps in the online business sales cycle:

 

Step 1. Choose Your Prospects

“Prospects” is business-speak for potential clients and/or customers. So, who is the person who is ideally suited for your product, program or service? Who’s your ideal client or customer? Who makes up your target market? Is it parents, health professionals, copywriters, dancers, artists, entrepreneurs, boat owners?

It’s critical for the success of any business to choose a group of people to work with, even if that group is very broad at first. As you become more and more aware of what kind of client or customer shows up for you, you’ll be able to more narrowly target that portion of the market, which will make your marketing a lot easier and bring you cash flow a lot quicker.

 

Step 2. Invite Them into Your Funnel

Once you know who your prospects are, you’ll want to invite them into your sales flow – in the business model I teach, I call it your Funnel – by giving them a free taste of what it is that you offer in exchange for their email address.

There are many ways to do this – creating PDFs like checklists and templates, offering free introductory webinars, virtual or live speaking, Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, publishing blog posts, participating in groups made up of your target market, etc.

 

Step 3. Keep in Touch

Once your prospects are in your sales flow, you’ll want to keep in touch with them on a consistent basis.

Common marketing knowledge tells us that it takes a minimum of 5-12 times for your prospects to see your message before it even registers.

That’s why so many direct marketers will send you postcard after postcard with the same offer. They know that the only way to get you to take action on their offer is to expose you to the same or similar message over and over until you’re ready to hear it.

A very effective way to keep in touch with your prospects then is via regular email communications. Because following up with your prospects is vital to making sales from them, sending a weekly or even daily email does this work for you.

The bonus is that you can follow up with all of your prospects at once, instead of one by one, which leverages your time – something you should always be striving for.

 

Step 4. Make Offers

And because we want to leverage our time, if we’re putting in the work to connect and engage with our email subscribers regularly, then we want to make sure that we are getting a return on that investment.

To do so, you want to make at least one offer a week that can result in sales for you.

You want to be sure to provide valuable content, but you also want to make sure that you invite people to take advantage of one of your offers on a regular basis.

 

If you don’t make the ask, you won’t make the money.

 

Step 5. Master the Upsell

It takes most new small business owners awhile to grasp the concept of an upsell, but once they do, it takes their business to a whole new level.

Once you have one offer to make to your prospects, start putting together your next offer. You always want to have a place for them to go to next, always have something else to invite them to or to take advantage of.

Find out what else they want from you, then create and offer it to them.

The more products you have to offer, the more sales you’ll make because, instead of having to find new people all the time to buy your one product, you can upsell your current clients and customers into your other offer. And selling to people who have already bought from you is much easier than converting new prospects all the time.

 

Step 6. Repeat the Process

The online business sales cycle is pretty simple really. Once you’ve done it once, it’s very easy to repeat.

As you’re creating your own sales cycle, I suggest documenting what you do as you go along to make it that much easier to duplicate the next time around.

Each time you repeat the process, your list of prospects will grow and so will your income!

3 Easy & Effective Alternatives or Additions to Your Coaching Packages

One of the things I enjoy about coaching is that I get to be creative with how I work with my clients, including how to create easy coaching packages that work for both of us.

In the 15+ years that I’ve been around the coaching industry, I’ve seen a rapid change from traditional 1:1 coaching of three 45 minute sessions per month for a monthly fee to session bundles, coaching programs that last as long as a year, in-person retreats, and much more.

So there are some simple ways that you can add value to your current coaching packages, or offer these alternatives to phone-only coaching as stand-alone packages, that can be very enticing to your clients.

Consider adding any of the options below to increase the value of your packages, or offer them as a stand-alone package, giving your clients a way to work with you at a more accessible investment, as well as help you as the coach to leverage your time.

Here are three of my personal favorites:

1. e-Coaching

In addition to phone sessions, one of the ways that I’ve coached my private clients is through e-coaching, or coaching via email and/or instant messaging.

I hold a firm belief that email coaching is just as powerful, if not more so, than phone coaching – and here’s why:

When you send an email asking for help, the simple act of writing and sending it creates energy that initiates the process of an answer coming to you – and not just MY answer.

When you put a problem out into the world, not only do the synapses in your brain start firing (our brains can’t help but answer questions) to come up with a solution, but the Universe starts working in order to bring you a solution as well.

It’s why experienced coaches understand that the real coaching happens between the sessions.

And e-coaching is also just a whole lot easier – you don’t have to schedule a call, you don’t have to be tied to a phone, or even a computer (you can e-coach via smartphone). And your client doesn’t have to wait until their next session to get the support they need – they just send an email!

2. Audio Coaching

For those of you who would rather coach by talking instead of typing, here’s an idea for you.

I had a private client once who was a coach and she was happy to receive questions via email from her clients. But she preferred to answer those questions via audio. What I suggested she do was to simply call into her recording service or use the app on her phone, record her answer, and then send the client the MP3 link to listen to. She loved answering client questions this way, and they loved hearing her voice. Simple and brilliant!

3. Video Coaching

Video coaching has become popular over the last few years, but there are many coaches who still prefer phone-coaching. However, video coaching is an effective alternative and might be preferred by some of your potential clients. When I was private coaching, I did video coaching most often with my clients who lived outside of the United States via Skype. It was free for both of us and it was the next best thing to being in-person.

And you could also offer video coaching in the same way that I described above in #2. For example, I had another private client who preferred recording a quick video where she could share screenshots, links and more in response to her client’s questions and requests for help. I do this for my Lively Biz students using a free service called Loom. Sometimes it’s so much easier for me to answer a question by showing how to do something via a quick Loom video vs typing it all out.

Which one of these alternatives or additions to phone coaching could you add to your current packages or that you could create a stand-alone package to offer?

I’d love to know – share with me here

Measure Your Results for Faster, Easier and More Success

When I was studying for my MBA, my most challenging class was statistics. And even though I managed an A- in the class, it took every one of the few analytical brain cells I had to do so.

So when I sit down to analyze the statistics of my business every year, I’m still surprised to find myself engrossed, fascinated, excited and practically dancing for joy. Armed with this critical data, now I know exactly where to spend my time and efforts going forward to receive the highest and best rate of return.

I ran a total of about 10 reports, but let me share some of what I learned specifically from my shopping cart’s reports:

CRM Stats

The backend system I use (Infusionsoft) has the ability to run sales reports in a variety of ways. Below are four of the reports I run, what my results are, and how you can apply the results to your business:

a. My Monthly Sales Totals…

…showed me how many sales I made each month, and from that information, I discovered that my best month financially was November, followed very closely by December, then January.

I reviewed my marketing and sales activities (in other words, the offers I made) for that month, and what I found was this:

In November, I opened the Lively Biz Business Club membership for the first time.

In December, I opened the Lively Biz Accelerator small group coaching program for the first time.

In January, I offered a handful of spots for private Business Breakthrough Virtual Retreats with me, which always sell out very fast.

While the Club has a low price point, I designed and followed a specific launch plan, which resulted in a lot more enrollments. If you only have higher price points in you business model at the moment, consider if you can add a lower-priced leveraged offer to your menu of services.

Both the Accelerator and the Business Breakthrough Virtual Retreats have higher price points, so if you’ve already developed some products or programs at the lower-priced end of your funnel, consider adding a more comprehensive program at a higher price to your offerings to increase your bottom line.

b. My Sales by Campaign…

… showed me which special offers were the ones you were most interested in taking advantage of. Now I know which offers to consider repeating, or offering on another product or program in the future.

This is something you can do as well. Guessing if a special campaign you ran worked well or not doesn’t make good business sense. Tracking actual numbers does, however, and it’s super-simple to do if you have a backend system that has that feature.

c. My Sales by Clients/Customers…

… showed me who my top clients/customers are, what they’ve bought, and how much they’ve invested in my offerings. And since I know that one of the most effective ways to grow a business is to make additional offers to those who have already bought from me, you can bet that not only will I do that, but I’ll do it in a way that makes them feel special – because they are to me – by offering them special access or discounts or additional benefits as my way of thanking them for their continued business and loyalty.

If you track this information, you can do the same and increase your sales and your customer loyalty at the same time.

d. My “Where did you hear about us” Report…

… showed me that even though I thought that some of my online networking efforts weren’t really paying off, mainly because I didn’t think I was focusing enough time on them, I was wrong. It seems even the small amount I had been doing was making an impact.

So now I know the top three places to really focus those efforts going forward. If you’ve found online networking to be a struggle for you, tracking this information makes what can seem like an overwhelming marketing activity (some lists are SO active) into an extremely manageable and once-again enjoyable one.

I gleaned all of this information from just four reports from Infusionsoft. And this doesn’t include the reports I ran for my web stats via Google Analytics.

Measuring the results of your business activities is critical to your success, and anyone can do it (it’s really one of those “if I can, anyone can” kind of things). I really want to encourage you to take a look at where you’ve been over the past 6-12 months, analyze that data, and make some strategic decisions about where you want to focus your efforts going forward to get where you want to be.

I’d love to hear which of these tips you’re willing to embrace today. Feel free to share with me below.

7 Need-to-Know Tips for Your Email Lists

Whether you’re publishing an ezine, sending an ecourse, posting to a blog, or building an email list of clients and customers in another format, there are a few things you need to know to make sure that you’re complying with the legal aspects of sending email as well as for making your list-building efforts that much more effective.

1. Only Use Permission-Based Email Marketing

Simply put, opt-in email (also called ‘permission-based’) is email sent to people who have given you permission to contact them via email. So if someone hasn’t directly requested information from you, they should not be on your opt-in list.

2. Single or Double Opt-in?

Depending on the email list service you’re using in your business, you may have a choice between single or double opt-in email. With single opt-in, someone gives you their email address once and they are added to your list. With double opt-in (also know as confirmation opt-in), someone gives you their email address, to which they then receive an automated response from your list service asking them to click a specific URL to confirm that they do in fact want to be added to your list. Only once they click that link are they then added to your list.

So, which should you use? It depends, but for your main email list, I want to encourage you to use the double opt-in process. It means that you will lose a certain percentage of those people who signed up for your list because they then don’t confirm their subscription, but it protects you from being labeled as a spammer – something you want to avoid at all costs.

3. Post Your Privacy Policy

Wherever you give people the option to sign up for your list, make certain your privacy policy is clearly stated. Something like “We will never share your email address, period” should be fine.

4. Have a Clear Unsubscribe Link

In every email you send to your list, have a clear way for your reader to unsubscribe if they desire. Usually this is in the form of an unsubscribe URL at the bottom of the email. When someone clicks on the link, they should be taken to a page where they can remove their email address from your list. Just make sure your unsubscribe function works!

5. Multiple Lists

In the beginning, you’ll only be setting up one list, most likely for your ezine. But at some point you’ll want to have multiple lists, for different products or programs you offer, to more easily connect with specific people on your list.

For example, I have a list for my ezine subscribers, one for the members of my group coaching program, one for my live event, and several others that perform various functions for me.

When you’re choosing an email list service provider, this is something you want to keep in mind – the ability to create and manage multiple lists.

6. Q’em up

Being able to compose your email messages ahead of time and then queue them to be delivered on the date and/or interval of your choosing is another great benefit to using an email list service provider.

For example, you can set up an 30-lesson ecourse to be delivered once a day for 30 days. Or create 26 issues of your ezine and set them up to go out every two weeks. This is one of my favorite things about using an email list service – it’s the ‘set it and forget it’ kind of marketing – my favorite kind.

I use and highly recommend Aweber as your email list service provider.

7. What about my shopping cart?

Some shopping carts also act as an email list service, but I actually recommend you use both Aweber along with your shopping cart.

Here’s what I mean:

Use Aweber for your listbuilding, autoresponders, ezine (and ecourse) distribution, and any other mailings to your list. Let Aweber be your email list manager.

Use PayPal to process payments (it integrates with Aweber). THEN when you start consistently bringing in $500-$1000/month in income, sign up with a shopping cart That’s when the fees of using a merchant account and a shopping cart become a wash.

Use your shopping cart for selling downloadable products, payment processing (it also integrates with PayPal), subscription/recurring payments, running special offers, affiliate marketing, and housing your customer list (meaning those people who have bought from you).

Only use your shopping cart’s autoresponder system for confirmation emails when a customer buys something from you, and only use their broadcast system when you want to send an email (for a special offer, for example) to your customers.

With this method, your MAIN list of prospects (which will include both those people who have bought from you, assuming they’ve come to your offers via your communication to them via your list, and your potential clients and customers) are always kept at Aweber, so you never have to move (and lose) your list once you migrate from PayPal to your shopping cart.

I’d love to know your thoughts – please feel free to comment below – thanks!

Are you new to building your business online?

Hi there!

I had a email conversation with a potential high-level client several years ago that went something like this…

“Alicia, I have a successful life coaching practice – full client roster, mostly via referrals, steady 6 figures in income, and I want to bring my business online. I’m interested in your Platinum program – can we talk?”

I told her she should consider going through my 21 Easy & Essential Steps to Online Success System™ instead.

My response surprised her. So much so she graciously asked why it seemed she wasn’t qualified for my Platinum program…(because <insert name>, <insert name> and <insert name> had already told her she was for their programs.

I explained it wasn’t that she wasn’t qualified at all. It was that she was already successful offline and she didn’t NEED a $24k Platinum program to bring that success online.

She only needed to implement the 21 Steps (for $297-) to get the foundation of a successful online business in place, and THEN we could talk about Platinum.

Or I could personally lead her through the 21 Steps program for $24k and call it Platinum… 😉 Her choice… You can guess which she choose, thanking me for pointing her to just what she needed next (and saving her thousands of dollars too).

I’m so tired of hearing stories from you about spending thousands of dollars BEFORE you want or even need to, just to get those critical underpinnings in place.

So I want you to have the same choice I gave to her  – and for even less of an investment than that…

I’m offering you the 21 Easy & Essential Steps to Online Success System™ for just $97-.

Click here to get your copy right now:
https://aforest.leadpages.net/21-steps/

This is the final time I will be offering this program, even though it’s been my bestselling offer since 2006 – it’s simply time to make space for something new to emerge.

This $97- deal ends on Saturday, June 6, so don’t wait, ok?

Click here to get your copy right now:
https://aforest.leadpages.net/21-steps/

Cheers,
~ A

PS: The program comes with access to the private 21 Steps Facebook Group as well as 8 Video Trainings of the entire course… it’s a screaming deal. 😉

Click here to get your copy right now:
https://aforest.leadpages.net/21-steps/