S02 Episode 1: Automating Your Sales Funnel with Franz Sauerstein

04/20/18 • 31 min

What parts of your funnel should be automated? How can you create urgency without building extensive “limited time offer” workflows into your automation? Is it possible to give even better service with less person to person contact? In this first episode of DYF Podcast Season 2 on Automation, Franz Sauerstein addresses all of the various steps in his sales funnel and how he helps others automate thiers. He shares tricks of the trade like getting clients to self-qualify before he even becomes involved. He and Brennan also discuss the next step in optimizing automation: Personalization. Go in depth with Franz as he walks us through his process from beginning to end.

Key Takeaways:
How to create urgency with self-assessments
How to follow up with cooled leads
How to provide a better user experience through automation
The best way to segment leads following sales calls

Franz Sauerstein is a two-time DYFConf EU participant and was a Student Success Coach for the now retired, Double Your Freelancing Academy. His consultancy, Xciting Webdesign, specializes in optimizing European e-commerce stores through automation. By employing tools like Drip (marketing) and Pipedrive (customer relationship manager), Franz’s company primarily takes businesses generating 5 figure revenues and turns them into businesses consistently generating 6 figure revenues. In his own practice, Franz uses automation to find, qualify, transact, and follow up with clients. So how do Franz’s daily workflows break down? Let’s walk through his practices.

In the past, Franz has had a very involved process for drawing in leads. Although the steps of this process have not changed too much, the execution of each component has. Franz’s funnel starts with well-centered blog posts which he pays to have appear on social media venues like Facebook. These posts feature opt-ins with content upgrades including pdfs and ebooks that Franz says teach readers “how they can make their stores more successful and live the lives they want.” Content upgrades Franz has used include things like a guide covering “23 Ways To Increase Conversion Rates.” Because the topics speak to his target clients’ needs and provide relevant, accurate information, Franz is able to draw his leads’ attention and foster their trust in his expertise.

Previously, when a lead would opt in, Franz would nurture them and after a few weeks or a few months they would fill out a qualifying form and jump on a call. In addition to automating several steps along the way, Franz has flipped the script on the qualification process. Franz now offers a self assessment to the client that will show them how much revenue they’re losing by not acting fast to employ his services. Although there are great tried and true methods for creating urgency on the sales side of the equation (offer a limited sale, create limited availability, offer a bundle discount etc), Franz wanted to create a sense of urgency on the customer’s side. He created an online form with Brevity, Zapier and Drip software. When a customer downloads the PDF, Drip logs the event and triggers a follow up for the following day. Although the assessment is standard, the response is tailored to what the reader’s shop needs. The wording in the follow up message changes based on what else the customer has read and what info they’re pursuing, making this one area Franz has optimized for personalization.

The next step in this funnel is that Franz sends a suggestion of a 30 minute free consultation for qualified leads. If the lead accepts, then the workflow is complete and the info is then shuffled over to his CRM. If they don’t take the phone call then he will continue sending automated messages to the lead for 9 weeks with content along the lines of what they’ve shown interest in. These messages build trust with information-rich content and build urgency by asking if the customer has taken action yet. Franz says leads usually respond by the fourth or fifth email but if there is no response after 9 weeks, he will close the file. He says about 50% of the leads who are left by the time he sends the last email do actually respond at that point.

Brennan asks Franz how selling has changed for him now that he’s introduced so much automation into his business. Franz says that for starters, sales calls were awful before he automated. Without the trust and the qualification that he has since built into his automation, Franz found it hard to sell clients on strategy. He was also getting the wrong kinds of leads. Like most of us selling services, he doesn’t want clients who want to DIY. Instead, Franz needs clients who want to focus on other aspects of their businesses while he implements the strategy they’ve agreed to. The self-qualifying questionnaire helps ensure Franz is getting the leads he wants and clients know want to expect from his services before getting on the first sales call.

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Previous Episode

S01 Episode 6: Lead Generation Wrap Up

In this wrap up of Season 1, Brennan synthesizes the many insights from the first five episodes into a single step by step strategy for getting more clients. As a way to bring cohesion to the guests’ different approaches, Brennan follows the outline of DYF’s newest course, The Blueprint: Getting Clients Online.

To get clients online, you’ll need to create a proper sales funnel. You’ll need to develop a service offering, validate it, set up proper marketing for it, and attract your clients. Since sales funnels can be leaky you’ll also need to look at the greater process and track where you’re losing your potential clients. You can start by thinking about what your end-goal is: a technical service offering, a consultation, a physical product sale, etc.

In determining what form your end-goal will take and how to best present it, you should create a positioning statement or proposal. A good proposal takes a client’s need and merges it with the skills or services that you provide. The proposal will be a positioned statement of work/opt in, or service offering. Of course, you’ll want to front-load all of the steps that lead your customer to your proposal into your funnel and automate for something more systematically scalable than a one-off proposal, but starting with this concept will help you build backwards. Eventually, you will create a funnel leads the client to the sales offering from moment one.

Brennan encourages you to ask yourself what “unfair advantage” you have over your competition based on your previous experience, your talents and skills, or your familiarity with your clients’ pain points. This edge, combined with your work history can help you create a positioning statement that will anchor your business. Your statement should answer the questions, “who?” “what?” and “why?” You should identify who your target audience is, what their common problem is, and why you are uniquely capable of solving it. Once you have this statement, you will be able to anchor your business within a reasonable scope and avoid tempting tangents that might be mistaken for growth opportunities. Brennan warns that the funnel should not be the summation of your business but rather just one channel through which you acquire leads.

From here, Brennan’s process involves creating an internal manifesto. This takes the two or so sentence positioning statement and develops it into a set of guidelines. The manifesto will include information about target clients like who they are, how they describe themselves, their language and terms, where can they be found, what are the implications if their problem can’t be solved, what are their business risks, and what is the upside for them if it is fixed? Brennan points out that you shouldn’t speculate on the answers to these questions. He references Joanna Wiebe of Copyhackers who says the best content should be curated not created. She encourages consultants to listen to their target audience, dig deep, make calls and find out what they actually need in their own words. Brennan says your internal manifesto should be a living document that develops as you add new information made up of the actual language and pains that your customers have. Brennan concludes that while the positioning statement is looking outward (“looking at my backstory, I think I can do _____ for you”), the manifesto is a more inclusive expansion of that that features actual production data (language, themes etc).
The next step Brennan recommends is creating a “marketable document” from your manifesto findings. This is document could simply be a google doc, but it will help you normalize the data you’ve come up with to make your service or product marketable. Questions we seek to address in this document include: What beliefs, values and worldview do these clients have? What are their goals? What is the monetizable pain of they’re facing? What common objections do they have? What are they fighting against? What insenses them? By reducing this information into what are essentially the components of a sales letter (identify problem, create the solution and then make the offer) you can create a product that is derived from the customers’ actual need and surround it with the information your customers need to hear to dispel their objections. This document alone could lead to your first sales as you shop it around for feedback, but its main purpose is just to validate your product. You’ll want to get feedback from the people you’ve already talked to who fit the profile you’re targeting. Let them know you’ve been developing the product based on what you learned from them and from other conversations you’ve had and ask what they think about it and if what you have created addresses their pain points in the best way possible. If so, then you’re ready to build your sales offering.

The “sales offering” will become the destination at the end of your funnel --the goal that you are leadin...

Next Episode

S02 Episode 2: Leveling Up Your Automation Skills with Jennifer Nelson

Whenever Jennifer Nelson sees a new innovation for online business, she immediately learns it and apply it to her own work. This passion for finding the best way of doing things is how she became a certified Drip automation expert and a successful independent consultant and coach. Listen to this episode of DYF Podcast to see what strategies and innovations you can borrow from Jennifer and how to implement them into your daily practices. She’ll also discuss communication with different types of clients, managing multiple funnels, and how she gets her conference audiences to pay attention even after her presentation is over.

Key Takeaways:
How to talk automation to business owners
How to become an automation expert
How to win customers with a softer sell
How to maximize your funnel with a variety of lead magnets

As a Drip certified automation expert, Jennifer Nelson has fully automated her own business and now works with others to introduce automation to their routines. Her goal is to enable her clients to focus on the creative work and projects at the core of their businesses rather than spending all their time on marketing or upkeep tasks. Jennifer takes a piecemeal approach when she works with freelancers and agencies to find ways they can delegate day to day tasks in their businesses to machines.

Jennifer wasn’t always an independent automation superstar. She says about two years ago, she reached a point of reckoning. She had been working comfortably at an ad/tech start up, but she needed to see what she could do on her own. Jennifer started a consulting business and began the quest for clients. She started a newsletter which she distributed using the email platform, MailChimp. This helped, Jennifer, but she really got into automation after seeing it in action. Jennifer recalls, “I was following this blogger who I just remember I liked. I read one of her blogs and then I downloaded something. It came immediately to my email as a PDF. I was like, ‘Oh my God. That's cool,’ and how'd she do that? Then I learned that she was using ConvertKit. I was like, ‘Okay, let me sign up for ConvertKit.’"

By then, Jennifer was also following Brennan who sent an automated message that ended with “By the way, I used Drip to send out this email." Jennifer was intrigued. When she attended the Leadpages conference 2 yrs ago, they offered the first ever Drip Certification Course. Energized by the conference and having already spent a lot of money to attend, she decided to shell out another $1000 to get certified. She feels more knowledge is never a bad thing. The course was hard at first because it was so new. She had her doubts but once it came time to test, she discovered she had learned the methods. Excited about automating her own business, Jennifer realized other people would need that service too so she niched herself as an automation specialist.

For her personal business, Jennifer has created three main funnels. She has a site that encourages people to book a call with her, she has a 5 day email course, and Drip promotes her as a certified consultant which also drives leads. When clients come to Jennifer via Drip, she talks about the software, but when speaking with other clients, she generally asks them more open-ended questions like “How do you need to make your life easier?” and then offers ideas. Jennifer’s approach with these clients is to stay focused on the problem and the solution, keeping the talk about marketing in general rather than specific tools. Jennifer’s background in advertising sales helps her talk the marketing game while demonstrating to her clients that she knows what she’s doing.

Brennan agrees that aligning the language you use to the type of business you’re working with is key. He says that for more traditional businesses, the framework will sound more like “Look, we're going to basically package the stuff that your sales team is already doing into something that doesn't require your sales team to constantly show up and do it (though of course, they’ll still be there to close the deal etc).” While you don’t want to talk down to your clients, you also want them to be able to connect with what you’re proposing.

Jennifer created her five-day course, Email Automation 101, about a year ago and it has since become her most popular email series. The course came about because Jennifer had noticed she was mostly meeting clients in person and introducing them to the idea of automation for the first time. As a result, she was spending a lot of time on potential clients, explaining the principles to them before signing a contract or getting any assurance that she would be hired. Rather than continuing to try explaining automation to everyone she met, Jennifer handed new contacts her business card and asked them to check out her course through LeadDigits. Of course the downsides to this tactic are that people tend not to revisit the sta...