Hi.

This is Bastian, CEO/Founder of Wild Audience, and today we’re going to talk about Respect-Based Marketing.

Respect-Based Marketing is the backbone of our RF Accelerator Program that often gets 6% conversion rates on products and brings in millions of dollars in revenue each year to businesses all around the world.

It is a uniquely powerful mechanism for converting high-ticket clients and is a fantastic way to approach scaling in a sustainable, smart fashion.

So what is Respect-Based Marketing?

Respect-Based Marketing is a method that combines smart segmentation with compelling storytelling to automate real relationships with prospects.

Not bad… right?

Respect-Based Marketing is a combination of six strategies that all work together to install every key belief prospects need to have before buying.

If you want to scale your high-ticket business this year (which I’m assuming you do), then there is no better way forward than Respect-Based Marketing.

And the best way to bring Respect-Based Marketing to your business is via a Relationship Funnel.

You can think of Respect-Based Marketing like a schema. It’s the big picture, the plan, the strategy. And Relationship Funnel is the engine — the absolute best system for taking advantage of everything Respect-Based Marketing has to offer.

This is what a Relationship Funnel looks like..

But more on that later 🙂

Here’s what we’re going to cover in this article today:

1. The six aspects that make up Respect-Based Marketing and why a Relationship Funnel is your best bet for deploying it in your business.

2. How that applies to our RF Accelerator Program.

3. A case study of Respect-Based Marketing in action.

But before we talk about the six tenets of Respect-Based Marketing, we need to talk about the anchor behind everything — belief.

Beliefs are everything

Let’s have a look at what stitches it all together.

The bones behind Respect-Based Marketing

The overarching strategy behind Respect-Based Marketing is belief installation, and Respect-Based Marketing is designed to install the exact beliefs your audience needs to buy.

In order to sell anything, your buyers have to have a set of critical beliefs.

Beliefs like expertise, authority, and trust.

They need to believe you are an authority on your subject.

They need to believe you and your product are trustworthy.  

They need to believe your product is valuable and priced appropriately.

They need to believe that your product is the best solution for their problem.

Etc.

Without them, you’ll never sell a single thing 🙂

Your prospects will never accept the desire or need for your products.

Prospects will never pull out their credit cards unless they believe in you, in your product, and in your ability to deliver that product.

Think of it this way. Maybe when you were a kid you had an experience with a bad orange. Maybe it was super tart. Maybe you had brushed your teeth recently.  Maybe it was just old. Who knows.

Regardless, you had a bad experience.

So if in the future someone tried to sell you an orange, you’d probably pass.

And I don’t blame past you!  

But what would you need to do to convince yourself that oranges are actually delicious?

Doing away with false beliefs

First up is eliminating your false beliefs. You’d have to convince yourself that your previous experience was an anomaly, and that oranges are actually fantastic and healthy.

Then you’d use social proof of other people who had bad experiences with oranges but now love them, and every message would be designed to convince you to reevaluate your opinion on oranges.

This is a simplified example, but it’s really not that far off from the buying process.

Everyone has their own unique belief system about the world based on their own experiences. It’s how we decide between right and wrong.

But the thing is, those past experiences may or may not result in an accurate story or picture of the world.

Two people can have the same experience and take an entirely different belief from it.

And the best way to dispel false beliefs and install new beliefs in your prospects is through Respect-Based Marketing.

Now that we understand a bit more about beliefs, let’s talk about the first aspect of Respect-Based Marketing, attention.

Respect-Based Marketing: Attention

Just like GaryVee says, marketing is the business of attention.

Attention spans seem to be on a sliding scale toward zero.

Everyone is fighting for it, but grabbing someone’s  attention is only the first step.

Maintaining it is the hard part 🙂

So how do you actually keep someone’s attention?

By actually building a relationship with them.

Think of it like when you first start dating someone. Or when you find a new friend.

We can replicate the same experience of developing relationships in the offline world in the online world, but why haven’t marketers focused their efforts on building relationships?

It’s bizarre that online marketing has been so separated from an underlying truth that everyone knows: it’s the people you know and the relationships you have that bring success.

Why rely on snake oil marketing, interruption marketing, pushing sales on people, and ultimately sacrificing the integrity of a relationship when you can automate real relationships at scale by using smart engagement triggers and deep personalization in your funnels?

Why not let your customers raise their hands and tell you they’re ready to buy?

A genuine relationship will keep their attention, and that’s also what installs that critical belief of trust.

And this approach really works:

All of these results are through the adoption of Relationship Funnel and is proof of a relationship-first mindset.

Read all about Relationship Funnels here.

And now, let’s dig into the secret of how we make automation create authentic relationships — segmentation.

Respect-Based Marketing: Segmentation

The second cog of Respect-Based Marketing is segmentation.

This is where we divide your existing customer bases into as many meaningful segments as possible based on their responses.

This isn’t arbitrary — it’s based on real data from surveys and forms installed with software.

By challenging prospects to qualify themselves, you can increase your conversion rates while getting rid of people who waste your time. This will make your sales team more efficient and able to get more leads in less time.

Think of how many unqualified leads you talked to last year.

It may feel unnerving to add steps to your initial conversion process, but this works when paired with great content and a compelling lead magnet.

Surveying customers in this way also allows our clients to pitch the right products at the right time.

If you’re selling expensive consulting packages that cost $20k minimum, you shouldn’t be pitching your lower course or tripwire products to seven or eight figure businesses. On the flip side, your $20k pitch is going to fall flat when pitching to someone who only grosses $115k a year.

Knowing your audience and what their goals are both educates your sales process and provides data for future markets you could build products for.

If you notice an influx in wantrepreneurs when you’re hoping to find marketing managers working with larger companies, then you know you need to either adjust your marketing efforts or pitch them an appropriate product.

This an example of a form we built:

Notice how each question helps us learn more about the prospect?

By writing questions that get to the heart of why they found your company, you can increase the efficiency of your marketing and sales machines, resulting in more revenue and happier sales teams.

And the use of this segmentation is known as personalization.

You want to cater your conversation topics toward areas of mutual interest. For example, if you like to sail and so does your new friend or partner, then you’re naturally going to cater to them and find mutual ground.

The same principles apply to marketing.

We use this in our emails, our bot sequences, our ads, you name it — every bit of a Relationship Funnel is built with segmentation.

The questions we want to ask are based on who they are and where they want to be.

Questions like:

Where are they now (current situation)?

Where do they want to go next (desire)?

What is stopping them from getting there (problem)?

The goal of segmentation is to bridge the gap between problem and desire.

Then we ask other questions that help us qualify them for our business. Questions like revenue, type of product sold, etc. This helps us and our clients determine which products are most relevant to the product.

And then when we’re armed with these answers, we personalize.

Respect-Based Marketing: Personalization

Next up is personalization — or segmentation in use.

By personalizing all of your messaging and products to a particular persona, you reach them where they’re at and create a unique customer experience.

We cater journeys for our clients, from prospect to sale.

And personalization goes much further than “Hey, Bastian” at the top of the email.

That is personalization at its most basic 🙂

We personalize with ActiveCampaign and dynamic content to create high-converting sales funnels.

For context, here’s a picture of our lead tags for a particular prospect:

And here’s a video digging even more into that if you want to swim in the deep end for a bit 🙂

So you can tag people based on their segmentation answers and automate personalization.

You can build entire customer segments based on these tags.

You can even customize landing pages based on these personalization tags.

Want to discover what this level of personalization can do for your ROI? Go here

Every marketing message you send is specific to a prospect’s problem and addresses specific objection questions — that’s when Respect-Based Marketing really starts to take off.

But… I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

First, what happens when you’re that personal? Well… it increases your relevance 🙂

Respect-Based Marketing: Relevance

So if segmentation gives us the ability to personalize, what does personalization do for us?

Personalization allows us to be relevant.

It gives us the ability to be authentic, and authenticity is what fosters real relationships.

When executed correctly, your clients will feel like they know you. They’ll feel comforted by the fact that you know what problem they’re having and have an appropriate solution for it.

Your leads will feel heard, and that’s when your relationships with them start to grow automatically.

By engaging with the right people, with the right content, at the right time, you can develop bonds that last up to and well beyond a sale.

But being relevant only takes people so far… what businesses need is engagement.

Respect-Based Marketing: Engagement

Let’s say you’re a commercial real estate consultancy.

You may target large companies who are currently looking to expand an existing space or buy up new property, but that relevance is nothing without engagement.

And the key to getting the right leads to engage is through micro-investments of engagement.

We love installing micro investments with our RF Accelerator clients in their Relationship-Building Series or RBS for short.

This initial marketing funnel that ends in our first desired conversion event (typically a call or tripwire) is encouraged through email sequences that utilize key psychological and storytelling hooks (e.g. cliffhangers or challenges).

When executed correctly, a Respect-Based-Marketing RBS sequence can get prospects to actually look forward to and save your emails.

Like this:

Or this 🙂

Think about it. What emails (apart from personal ones) do you save? Forbes? The Wall Street Journal?

Imagine your business being those emails for prospects who have the means to buy your high-ticket product?

That’s the effect of the right RBS, and that’s what we shoot for with our clients.

How micro investments of engagement evolve into real relationships

The way we like to refer to back-and-forth feedback and engagement is relationship building.

By including opportunities to interact and perform “micro investments” of time, engagement, and sometimes money, we can further develop a meaningful relationship.

In every email we can include engagement hooks like open loops, frequency selectors, activation hooks, cliffhangers, and other storytelling techniques.

Maybe we ask a prospect to reply to receive a small bonus or to get an email instantly.

Or maybe we include funnels within funnels and get them to opt-in to a separate funnel via landing pages with additional information.

The more interactive your funnel is, the more opportunities your prospects will have to micro invest.

The goal is to get a prospect used to engaging — for interacting to become the nature of your relationship with them.

And then you take those engagements, track them with software (e.g. lead scoring in Wild Mail), and trigger conversion events once they hit certain thresholds.

Usually, our clients send a virtual sales letter that goes to a qualification quiz OR we send an evergreen webinar.

But by this point they’ve already micro-invested multiple times. Sometimes it only takes two weeks. Sometimes two hours. Sometimes a few months 🙂 But in the end, we know exactly what product to pitch and when.

Pretty awesome, if you ask me 🙂

And all of this combines to affect your ROI & Profits.  

Respect-Based Marketing: ROI & Profits

How many times have you said, “if we could just get them on the phone? That’s all we need.”

That’s the beauty of using a system like Relationship Funnel to install Respect-Based  Marketing — it even makes the CPAs you already rely on easier.

By the time prospects pick up the phone in a Relationship Funnel, they already understand your business and the way you think. They know why you do what you do.

All you have to do is continue the existing relationship that was built for you automatically 🙂

It almost goes without saying the power that automated relationships has on your ROI & Profits.

But the biggest thing it will do is increase your conversion rates.

And increasing your conversion rates from 1% to 3% or 3% to 6% can be the difference between six figures and seven figures. Between a lifestyle business and a business you can sell.

It all works together in the end

Step by step, we fold every principle of Respect-Based Marketing into every aspect of Relationship Funnel and RF Accelerator.

Understanding a new business and applying this model is what we do best, and to show you an example of that, we’re going to take a look at Justin Junier.

With Respect-Based-Marketing, we increased Justin’s visitor to sales conversion rate from 2% to 6%.

It was pretty wild 🙂  

Check it out.

How We Helped Our Client Increase His Sales Conversion Rate By 6X With Respect-Based Marketing

Now that you understand what Respect-Based-Marketing is, let’s walk through an example of how it works.

Remember that Respect-Based Marketing is the unique mechanism that automates relationships, and a Relationship Funnel is the best way to employ Respect-Based Marketing in your business.

Here’s that Relationship Funnel graphic again.

You can learn more about Relationship Funnels and how businesses use them to scale their revenue by reading this article.

How Justin Junier used Respect-Based Marketing to 6x his Conversion Rate

Justin runs a company called Superhero, based out of Holland.

They sell career coaching to young professionals who are looking to switch jobs or jump into entrepreneurship.

His flagship product is a coaching program combined with an online course that lasts between 3 and 4 months. By the end of the program, people walk away with a clear direction of what they want to do with their work lives.

Justin was making a profit, but his conversion rates were low, his leads weren’t where he wanted them to be, and he knew he could do better.

Justin signed up for Relationship Funnel, and after implementing the Respect-Based Marketing tactics things really started to change.

The Results

1. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): 10,000 Euro (6-figure business)
2. Sales Conversion Rate from 0.5% to 2.5%
3. Lead CPA (acquisition cost) decreased from 2 Euros to 1 Euro
4. CLV increased from 500 Euro to 900 Euro (an 80% increase!)
5. New Client Case Studies published jumped from 1/month to 4/month

How cool is that?

What could you do with a 2% increase in conversion rates?

“If you really want to serve your customers in the right way, you need to have a great Relationship Funnel.” – Justin Junier

Justin had a classic sales funnel problem. Low conversion rates made ad spend skyrocket, and he wasn’t satisfied with his sales.

He was still pulling a profit, sure, but with some people getting between 6-8% conversion rates with Respect-Based Marketing, he knew he couldn’t reach his 7-figure sales goal without figuring out what was wrong with his funnel.

Justin’s Respect-Based Marketing Journey

The first thing Justin did was rewrite all of his copy and marketing messaging according to Respect-Based Marketing’s belief installation strategies. And then by following the Relationship Funnel template, he used questionnaires and personalized emails to segment his audience by the types of problems they had and why.

After switching over to the Relationship Funnel framework, people were even emailing him saying that they felt like he was inside their heads and were directly asking for his product.

Relationship Funnels outperform typical sales funnels because they focus on building a relationship with your audience.

The reason is a simple as that, although the implementation  can be a bit trickier 🙂

“It’s become less feeling like “I am the business” to feeling like “I’m working on the business”. My mindset has shifted more towards developing systems for my business whereas before I was more focused on directly operating my business.” – Justin Junier

Read the full Justin Junier case study

Should you invest in Respect-Based Marketing?

That depends.

We’re not here to sell you something you don’t need 🙂

But like Justin said…

If you’re a business that sells high-ticket services like consulting, training, or coaching and are stuck in 6-figure revenues but want to scale to 7-figures, then adopting Respect-Based Marketing and installing a Relationship Funnel into your business is your best bet to get there.

So it’s sort of understood with those profit metrics, but our RF Accelerator program where we help you install Respect-Based Marketing is best for people who already have proof of product market fit. In other words, your product works, you’ve got testimonials, and you know that once people buy, they’re satisfied. It’s the acquisition part that’s tripping you up.

Sounds like you?

Well then this is exactly what RF Accelerator can help you do:

• Solve your customer acquisition problems.
• Get your marketing funnels and sales processes ready for scaling.
• Help you find identify qualified leads and remove bad leads.
• Increase your conversion rates.
• Help you identify your actual CPAs and KPIs.
• Provide a more personalized sales experience and customer journey by using advanced automation techniques.

Ready to automate relationships and solve customers acquisition at profit and scale?

Let’s go

Who else is using Respect-Based Marketing?

Hundreds of successful businesses have used Relationship Funnels to grow their business.

Here are some of our results:

• Mirna invested $1300 into ads and generated $9,000 back within 30 days of running her very first Relationship Funnel. She’s on target now to hit 7-figures soon.

• Joe generates now more than 1 million euro in revenue every single year with his Relationship Funnel. Here you see his current month’s sales pipeline of 310,000 Euros.

• Niklas who is currently buying sales calls for 300 Euros through PPC campaigns and is converting 2 in 3 calls to meet with him personally to close 300,000 Euro deals.
• Mubaid, who is getting a 9-10% sales funnel conversion rate.
• Adam who is getting an impressive 28% click-rate from his sales emails to his sales page and in total converts 3.44% of his leads into paying clients.

Need more proof?

Check out our love page for a whole wall of people changing their businesses with Respect-Based Marketing.  

Ready to solve your customer acquisition problem and finally rely on your sales funnel?

Respect-based Marketing and Relationship Funnels are proven to work and were created by us to help businesses like yours scale high-ticket services.

Look.

Ultimately it’s up to you 🙂

We know this system works — we live and breathe it, and every day we see it working.

Do you want to wake up six months from now still not understanding why your ROAS is so low from ads?

Do you want to wake up to a calendar like this?

Then Respect-Based Marketing is exactly what you need, and there’s no better way to implement Respect-Based Marketing then by working alongside our RF Accelerator team to install a Relationship Funnel into your business.

Relationship Funnel Accelerator is our done-with-you 90 day program to ensure your success and solve your customer acquisition problem.

Are you ready to scale your business to 7-figures?

Click this link to learn more about Relationship Funnel Accelerator and see if you’re a good fit.

Company name: I Will Teach You a Language – www.iwillteachyoualanguage.com
Location: – United Kingdom
Industry: Online Language Courses
Product purchased:  Relationship Funnel Accelerator
Rating: 5

Results Achieved

Olly Richards turned his language blog into a successful business selling language courses but was having a hard time increasing the lifetime value of his customers. He signed up for Wild Audience’s Relationship Funnel Accelerator to grow his backend funnel and turn his customers into repeat buyers.

Through RF Accelerator Olly achieved:

• A 25% increase in revenue
• A 30% increase in segmented leads.
• 3x increase in overall sales
• A process for tracking and understanding his analytics
• A Facebook Ad retargeting structure toto improve front-end conversion
• Systems that can be replicated with every new product they release

Who are you, and what do you sell?

Olly Richards is the founder of I Will Teach You a Language, a blog turned course provider aimed at helping people learn languages at different levels.

What started as a blog in 2013 has turned into a substantial following and customer base.

How did you find out about Wild Audience and what made you jump on board?

After hearing Bastian on a podcast, Olly resonated with Wild Audience’s Respect-Based Marketing strategies. It was similar to what he was already doing with IWTYAL but he knew Wild Audience could help them elevate their current strategy.

“Once a business gets to a certain level, you can’t work with generic advice anymore. I knew Wild Audience would understand the particular nature of my business and could look under the hood and make sense of the numbers.”

– Olly

What was the main problem you wanted to solve for your business?

Olly never had a problem attracting an audience and generating traffic to his website. He actually had more traffic than he knew what to do with.

The main problem he wanted to solve was to increase his customer’s lifetime value.

He had a lot of products that were selling rapidly, but he didn’t fully understand what the value ladder looked like. In other words, he wasn’t sure how best to offer his other products to existing customers (frequency, method etc).

Why did you want to solve it?

Olly recognized that the way we deliver our message to our audience was the same way he wanted to deliver his message to his own following.

He knew that businesses are grown on the backend, by using Relationship Funnels and Respect-Based Marketing tactics to retain customers and turn them into repeat buyers.

If you’re not familiar with Respect-Based Marketing, here’s a graphic describing how it works.

He also knew that constantly launching products to new audiences was unsustainable. He had never been able to offer a series of products on the backend.

What was it about Wild Audience that made you resonate with us and think that this looks like a good opportunity?

Olly was a huge fan of André Chaperon and had already used his methods to spruce up his email copy. And he got tremendous results from it. His emails open rates were 70-80% and click-throughs averaged at 10-20%.

So he didn’t need any convincing on the power of storytelling and Respect-Based Marketing.

That’s what drove him to invest more in learning how to create engaging, valuable content rather than using in-your-face scarcity tactics.

For Olly, RF Accelerator picked up where André left off. He needed to learn how to implement the more technical aspects of these strategies and incorporate them into email campaigns and funnels.

It followed the same respectful ethos that he had learned from André. RF Accelerator incorporated a more technical framework to help him reach the next level of his business.

What results did you achieve with RF?

During RF Accelerator, Olly saw a 30% increase in segmented leads by changing the opt-in process to ask subscribers for segmentation information at the point of signup.

Previously, subscribers needed to check their email after opting-in and take a quiz which would place them into the right email sequence.

Olly worked with the Wild Audience team to put proper tracking and analytics in place so that they could analyze traffic line by line. This allowed them to identify that nearly 50% of the leads were being lost in this opt-in process.

They also implemented a new retargeting sequence which led to a 3x increase in sales. Now everything they’re running on Facebook is more efficient and more profitable.

What exactly changed for you and your business?

Our team helped Olly look at every single thing they were doing in their marketing strategy in extreme detail.

This allowed him to pick up on where things were and weren’t working. It was information he had suspicions about before, but never had the hard data to prove it.

Now, for every new course or product they launch, IWTYAL can use this information to build out a process with a proven record of success.

As they grow, these systems will help them scale quicker and more efficiently.

How much revenue did you make before? How much revenue do you do now?

After optimizing their Facebook retargeting, and implementing frontend segmentation on their website, Olly saw a 25% bump in revenue.

And that was only from optimizing one of their courses. Olly can now apply this same strategy on the rest of the courses they offer and knows it will exponentially increase sales across his entire site.

What is your ROI now? What was your ROI before?

Olly saw a 30% increase in segmented leads after adjusting his opt-in strategy, which effectively made the leads more valuable.

Additionally, the processes that were put in place during RF Accelerator will work for them exponentially in the future. As IWTYAL continues to scale, their ROI on RF Accelerator will continue to grow for years to come.

Can you walk us through your Relationship Funnel

• IWTYAL generates leads through Facebook Ads and organic traffic to their website and blog.
• When users land on a blog post, they are asked to opt-in to a language guide by choosing the language they want to learn and at which level (beginner, intermediate or advanced).
• Users are then automatically segmented into one of 36 email sequences that nurture the relationship.
• At the end of the nurture sequence, subscribers are offered various courses related to the language they want to learn and their skill level.

Here’s a diagram detailing what a Relationship Funnel looks like.

How does the future look for your business? Where would you like to be in 3 years from now with RF?

For Olly, the most significant takeaway from RF Accelerator, (even bigger than the increase in revenue and lead retention) was the systems they were able to put in place.

He knows that these systems can now be replicated at scale whenever they launch a new product in the future.

For Olly being apart of RF Accelerator was about shifting his mindset to re-prioritize and optimize the fundamentals of his business.

Who should invest into RF Accelerator?

RF Accelerator breaks down all of the fundamentals any business owner needs to grow their business. That includes identifying your audience, values, and customer avatar and incorporating Respect-Based Marketing into your copywriting and sequencing.

These might seem like beginner lessons for new business. However, a lot of seasoned business owners skip these crucial steps at establishing a true relationship with their customers.

Olly believes that if you don’t take the time to learn the basics, you’re never going to connect with your customers the way that you need to make them sustainable long term.

The ideal candidate for the 90-day RF Accelerator program should already have a successful product or service that delivers proven results. They have created successful client case studies but are still struggling to acquire customers and increase profits at scale.

The ideal customer has a desire to grow to 7-figures or beyond and is willing to take concrete action and implement the systems outlined in the program.

RF Accelerator can help with the following:

• Solving your customer acquisition problem
• Systemizing customer acquisition at profit and scale
• Attracting the right leads that will actually convert into customers
• Increasing conversion rates
• Lowering lead acquisition & customer acquisition costs
• Gaining clarity & transparency over how much it costs to acquire leads, book sales calls and demos, and how much it costs to acquire customers
• Providing a more personalized sales experience and customer journey by using advanced automation techniques (using Wild Mail)
• Systemizing all marketing & sales processes to scale to 7-figures and beyond

Why would you recommend RF to other people?

Every business owner has blind spots. Things that they put off as being unimportant and that they will deal with later. If you want to grow, then at some point you need a second set of eyes to look at your numbers and give you a fresh perspective on details you were overlooking.

What type of results will a new client achieve if they follow the process and work hard?

RF Accelerator clients will receive guidance in figuring out the backend of their funnel. They will learn how to efficiently capture and segment leads, and use this information to create proper retargeting campaigns.

In addition to the technical steps, RF Accelerator will put in perspective the mindset needed to systemize your business in order to replicate it to scale in the future.

You will create an evergreen funnel that can be replicated across everything you do in your business.

Here are just a few of the incredible results our clients achieved through RF Accelerator:

That could be you.

Click here to learn more about RF Accelerator, and to find out if you are a fit.

Introduction

Are you having trouble scaling your customer acquisition?

Are you trying to improve your profitability from six figures to seven figures… To sell more high-ticket services… all to no avail?

Are you unsure how to consistently improve your sales funnel?

I’ve been there, believe me.

Look ..

You’re only dealing with this because the tide has changed.

Maybe you’ve been following some internet guru who had a flash of success 5 years ago, but has been preaching the same tactics since then.

Maybe you’ve just been unlucky.

Maybe not.

Internet marketing is always changing, and right now there is a massive shift toward authenticity and transparency.

This shift isn’t exclusive to internet marketing, either.

Think about it ..

What do the trends of locally-sourced food, corporations taking political stances, and educational reciprocity in marketing have in common?

A consumer’s desire for businesses they can trust.

Or better yet, a business they can build a relationship with.

To build a sustainable business today you need to use respect.

And if you don’t, you’re going to lose.

Your competitors will outperform you.

You’ll be stuck using the same outdated marketing tactics and wondering why your business is failing.

That’s why I use what I like to call, Respect-Based Marketing.

Relationships are more important than ever in marketing.

Your brand and funnel need to be developing trust — in both your product/service and in you ..

Because of the anonymity and distance the internet provides, online marketers often forget about respect.

Facebook & Google’s algorithms are changing. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing and shady ads. Google is rewarding only the best, most valuable content, and Facebook is doing the same.

And to them, the “best” means the most aligned with the user’s search and/or intent.

I don’t mean to bring the mood down, this is actually a really awesome 🙂

If you start running a Respect-Based business, you will be leagues ahead of so many others who haven’t caught on to this trend yet.

This is why I created the Relationship Funnel – a proven system for taking cold prospects and turning them into sales.

And faster growth starts by automating relationships 🙂

Relationship Funnels dramatically increases your customer LTV & average checkout price.

Plus, it builds a foundation you can rely on for years to come.

This is why 1,100 businesses (and counting) have already used it ..

And want to know the best part?

Everything is automated. Thus scalable.

Respect-Based Marketing doesn’t mean you work longer.

Quite the opposite, in fact 🙂

We use smart funnel automation to actually save time and make everything super scalable ..

(more on this later)

What if I could save you almost all the time you waste qualifying leads?

What if I told you that you can have a system that qualifies leads on its own?

What if I told you that it’s possible to have a funnel that converts at 6% (compared to the usual 1-2%) on products between $100 & $1,000? With email click rates often coasting past 35% (compared to the industry standard 5-10%)?

Imagine those numbers in your own business for a second.

If your current funnels converts at 2% and you sell 20 $200 products a month, you could potentially increase your monthly revenue from $5k to $15k.

That’s the difference between a decent business and the one you’ve always dreamed of.

Well, that system exists, and we’re going to take you through the steps you need to create it for your biz.

Start-to-finish.

It’s the exact 4-phase process that gets results like these ..

Or take our client Mirna.

This is an email from her 🙂

She turned $1,300 in $9,000 with her very first Relationship Funnel.

Yeah. Pretty impressive.

She was a client of Relationship Funnel Accelerator for 90 days.

RFA is our high-ticket program where we install a Relationship Funnel in your business in 90 days flat and help you solve the biggest challenge of all: Acquiring Customers at Profit and Scale.

We love helping successful, high-ticket businesses grow from six figures to seven figures through automated processes and scalable customer profit and acquisition.

You can discover more about our growth accelerator here.

My goal for this article is to break down the Relationship Funnel process, in detail.

But what is a Relationship Funnel?

A Relationship Funnel (RF) isn’t a normal marketing funnel. It uses respect and clever automation to get world-class results.

You can think of it in terms of four main phases.

I am going to show you all of them now ..

This is it ..

We’re opening the doors and inviting you in.

We’re going to cover the four phases that make up a Relationship Funnel. In detail.

It is responsible for wild moments like these:

Or even crazier…

Convinced?

You should be.

And if not…

Just wait 🙂

—

Breakdown: The exact 4-phase process we use to get 6% visit-to-purchase conversion rates

The best way to get a birds-eye view of all the stages is to look at our actual done-with-you Relationship Funnel template ..

This is the same template we walk all our consulting clients through.

Clients with six-figure businesses and multiple case studies looking to scale to seven figures 🙂

Take a moment to look at the individual tasks.

Some will make sense to you. Some won’t.

Don’t stress though, all will become clear.

In short ..

Each phase builds upon the last to create a foolproof, belief-installing funnel. Then we scale it ” />

Phase 1: Funnel Strategy

This is the big picture phase. It’s the easiest to skimp on but the most important to get right.

Phase 2: Funnel Implementation

This is the minimum-viable-product version of your funnel.

Phase 3: Optimization

Once you start directing some test traffic to the doors, it’s time to analyze how people react and adjust accordingly.

Phase 4: Scaling

After the bolts have all been double checked and tightened, it’s time to strike the traffic match (most people’s favorite part).

Ready to see how we do this?

Awesome. We’re going to go through the major steps of each phase and show you all the tools and strategies you can take to:

1. Develop a long-term marketing & funnel strategy,
2. Automate real relationships with people through smart and behaviour-based funnels.
3. Create organic & PPC lead generation systems.
4. Start getting the conversion rates of your dreams and measure that success with advanced ROI-tracking.
5. Revolutionize your business 🙂

Let’s go!

Phase 1 – Funnel Strategy

Phase 1 is all big picture stuff.

Building a Relationship Funnel always starts with an airtight strategy.

This prevents our funnels from “leaking” later on down the line.

Without the right preparation, acquiring customers at profit and scale is not possible.

So, you have to take the time to create and review your strategy. First.

Don’t skip this part.

Here’s what Relationship Funnel’s Phase 1 covers:

1) Business Model

2) Offer Strategy

3) Customer Avatar

4) Positioning

5) Value Ladder

6) Segmentation & Bucketing

7) Belief System

8) Toolset

You should walk out of Phase 1 with a perfect idea of who your customers are, what your offer is, and how you’re going to sell it.

Note: We work with clients who already have product market fit and case studies to boot, but if you aren’t at that point already then your business model analysis is even more important.

For the purposes of this piece, we’re going to focus on the Phase 1 elements that are most important to businesses who are in a position to prepare for rapid scaling.

Finalizing your offer strategy

There may be nothing more important than nailing down your offer strategy as a business owner.

Without a working offer strategy, you don’t really have a business — without it there is no evidence of product-market-fit.

We only work with people who have a proven offer and a client case study to back it up, and that’s because without those you don’t have proof of a working business yet.

Your offer strategy is the relationship between your base pitch, services, and value offered for revenue gained. This can often be tweaked for better results, but if you aren’t selling a product people need and pitching it in a way that conveys its value, then you won’t succeed.

The offer is usually conducted through a sales page. What’s important is to remind people of the benefits they’ll receive — speak to their problem, not your product.

Don’t worry about creating them yet. At this point just think about how you are going to reiterate the beliefs you’ve installed (more on that shortly), while conveying the benefits the customer receives by buying your product.

We use what we like to call the Irresistible Offer Formula.

1. Highlight the pain they’re experiencing (not enough sales, etc.)
2. Name a specific solution.
3. Make a list of the benefits (not product features!) this solution provides.
4. Showcase the value (guarantee, risk-reversal)
5. Establish your position (trust, authority, experience, etc.)
6. Utilize specificity  (avatar-specific copy).
7. Include urgency and scarcity when appropriate.
8. Address objections directly.

We are continually testing this strategy, but feel free to swipe as you please 🙂

Here are a few of our sales pages for inspiration:

See how our process incorporates elements of our formula?

And now, to the actual construction of your funnel.

Value Ladders: the secret behind successful high-ticket service businesses

Before you can start building any sort of funnel, you need to understand what value ladders are.

Value ladders basically a way of structuring your products/services for optimal customer value.

Organizing your products in a value ladder also functions as a big picture funnel strategy. It makes inserting your offerings into a funnel so much easier. And clearer.

So as people “ascend” your value ladder, they can dig into progressively more comprehensive, higher-priced offers.

Here’s what a value ladder usually looks like:

Lead Generation Funnel = To get people into the door.
Front-End Funnel = To qualify buyers & decrease ROI time.

Break-Even Funnel = To reduce acquisition costs and function as a downsell.
Profit Funnel = To sell your main product/service.
Backend Funnel = To upsell existing customers & increase CLV

At first, you just want to nail down your key lead magnet and profit funnel. Then you fill out the rest as you improve your Relationship Funnel.

We started out with just one big lead magnet and our Relationship Funnel course, and then we decided to expand it into this model:

The Wild Audience Value Ladder

(Click any of the product titles to see our landing pages)

Lead Generation Funnel: You’re in it right now!

Front-End 1: Funnel Strategy Mini Course ($12)

Front-End 2: Wild Mail [ActiveCampaign Partner Subscription]  (monthly recurring revenue)

Profit Funnel: Relationship Funnel Accelerator (done-with-you)

Downsell 1: Everyone who can not afford to join Relationship Funnel Accelerator, we down-sell RF Advisory.

Break-Even Funnel: Relationship Funnel (course)

Starter: $600

Pro: $800 (Webinar + Pro Lessons Addon)

RF Advisory: (RF Pro + 1 month consulting)

Downsell 2: Everyone who can not afford Relationship Funnel Accelerator & RF Advisory, we down-sell Relationship Funnel ($600-$800)

Back-End 1: Funnel Fuel ($225)

Back-End 2: Funnel Bots ($500)

Back-End 3: RF Accelerator ($20k)

—

See how it starts off with free content and then goes to a $12 product? And how our core products each have downsells and upsells?

Notice how each product is related to each other? How they build each off each other?

That is what you want.

When one customer finishes one product, they should be interested in the next.

It should make sense to pitch the next product/service to them ..

They’re ascending.

How you structure your products will depend on your business, but start by putting your services and products into that same outline.

As you start aligning your services into your value ladder, keep an eye out for spaces or holes in between services. Maybe you need to add a tripwire, or maybe you need to add a back-end service that is more hands-on.

Or on the other end, you may find that you are overwhelming your customers with choices. Slimming down your product offering may be a better route (i.e. specialization).

In short:

Structure your offers in a way that encourages customers to “journey” or “ascend” through them. This will help you offer more value, increase your customer lifetime value, and organize your funnel strategy.

—

Creating customer avatars

Your next step is to create your customer avatars.

Marketing is all about psychology, and psychology is the science of the mind and human behavior…

So how can you be good at marketing without knowing your customer?

You can’t.

This doesn’t mean you have to go out and actually meet all of your customers face-to-face. Not only would this be impossible, but you would waste a lot of your time.

Interviewing a few can be super helpful, though. The guys from Airbnb went out and met their first few hosts/guests to figure out what they liked and didn’t like about their service, which led to taking professional photos at host houses, resulting in a major breakthrough.

So if we can’t meet all of our customers, how can we understand them?

The secret is through customer avatars.

You may have heard this referred to as buyer personas or customer personas as well.

Customer avatars are fictional characters that represent the stereotypical customer your business is trying to attract.

You should strive to understand these characters ..

To get inside their heads 🙂

The best way to do this is to brainstorm 3-5 primary personas and a few secondary personas if necessary.

The end goal is for your customer avatars to focus your marketing efforts, not scatter them. You need to pick the most critical personas for your business. If you don’t have product market fit yet, just start with one and go from there.

You can draw from past sales and survey data, interviews with a few of your best customers, or just using your gut and intuition.

Like anything in marketing, the key is to start with something and improve it as you go along.

Wild Audience Customer Avatar Example

Everyone does these a bit differently, but the rule of thumb is to fill out the profile until you feel like you have an innate understanding of the customer, and you feel like someone who read through the profile would feel the same.

This often includes elements such as a name, age, goals, fears, typical buying routes, industry, etc.

Here’s that example:

Meet Ted, 42, CEO at Gorilla Marketing (Customer Avatar 1 – High-ticket service business)

Ted worked around 10 years in the corporate world as a sales guy. He is great at selling but after all of this time he’s sick of the corporate world and seeks to run his online business. He started to buy a few online courses to learn more about business and marketing his services. He has always been passionate about parenting so he thought about starting a parenting company (helping parents to become better parents).

His first side hustle while still doing 9-5 didn’t work. But people started to seek his advice about selling without being salesy or annoying. He knew a lot about it as he worked 10 years in sales and constantly studies what’s new.

He decided to pivot aywar from parenting & double down on selling his sales knowledge. He started a Facebook group and over the period of a year, he attracted a strong following (& community) around him. He started to make money. After making more than $100k in revenue, he decided to scale up and build out a proper sales funnel and different assets to scale up his revenue.

His goal is $1mil in revenue over the next 12-18 months.

He has been following Wild Audience & Bastian for quite some time. He thought hiring Wild Audience to scale up his sales funnel once he is ready. After 1 year in business generating more than $100k in revenue through different campaigns, locating the ideal product market fit, and acquiring a few really strong case studies, it’s time to systemize the sales process and build it out properly.

He jumps on a call with the Wild Audience Sales Team purchases Relationship Funnel Accelerator.

—

See how detailed that is?

Do you feel like you know them a little now?

Good.

Personas are even more powerful if you can tie them to actual people who have bought your services.

Whenever you’re making a product or piece of content, you can think… what would Ted like to read? Or what problem is Ted dealing with?

The closer you can get them to real people, the better.

Understanding segmentation & bucketing

Once you have your customer avatars identified and prioritized, it’s time to translate that into action.

Segmentation & bucketing are just ways of fitting your prospects into customer avatar “buckets”.

When you organize customers into buckets, you can send them more specific content and products.

The more specific the content and service are to a customer’s needs, the better your conversion rates will be.

So how does bucketing actually work?

Bucketing is just a series of questions (with the last one being an email address request) that you ask a prospect before a download or offer.

You can build these question prompts in a system like SurveySlam.

And by incorporating this “lead opt-in buckeintg”, you can automatically build a customer profile based on their answers.

Below is what part of our bucketing system looks like.

Users are prompted to self-select after they decide to download one of our lead magnets (more on that later).

You may have completed our survey to get here, so I apologize if some of these look a bit familiar 🙂

Here are all five of our lead magnet bucketing questions:

See how each question helps us fit them into an avatar?

How they help us figure out how we can help them?

I love this step.

It’s the first step the user take to share a bit of themselves with us 🙂

And those answers play directly into what they believe about Wild Audience.

Discovering the power of belief

“Beliefs form the basis of everything people say, think, and do. When people change their beliefs, they change their behavior, which changes their lives.” – Dave Gray

Once you have identified who your prospects are, you need to install your belief system.

This step will help you understand what you need to put into your RBS email sequence and content so that you can get your audience to buy.

Belief systems can be distilled down to one question:

What does your lead need to believe before he or she will purchase your product or service?

In other words, What content do you need to direct them to? What do you need them to understand before they buy?

Remember.

Your goal is to convert someone from a visitor into a paying customer ..

But… here’s the thing.

You will never get a sale without beliefs.

Without making sure each prospect gets the right beliefs installed, you’re running the risk of someone getting to your sales page or hopping on a sales call without the right beliefs.

And when that happens, people don’t always buy.

That means leaving money on the table.

Beliefs are tied to identity — your customers’ identity and how they perceive your identity.

And the best way to promote beliefs is through storytelling.

We can use stories to promote and install beliefs in our prospects, which results in sales happening at the right time with the right people.

So what are the types of beliefs?

The 3 Types of Beliefs

1. Beliefs about opportunity (value, authority, cost, etc.)
2. Beliefs about themselves (own abilities to succeed)
3. External beliefs (time, money, etc.)

Our goal is to predict a prospect’s existing beliefs and replace those with a set of our own through smart storytelling.

Here are some examples of opportunity beliefs:

Authority

Belief Question: Does the person selling me this product know what they’re talking about? Why should I listen to them?

Installed with: Social proof & demonstration of expertise.

Value

Belief Question: Is the product worth what they are charging?

Installed with: Proof of potential ROI. Case studies. Demonstration of the product itself.

Trust

Belief Question: Does this company or person have my best interest at heart?

Installed with: Transparency, integrity, and consistency.

Product -> Solution Fit

Belief Question: Is this product the best solution for my problem?

Installed with: Illustration of process & delivery / social proof of similar problems being solved by your product or service.

See how these are all related to the product?

Now, let’s look at some beliefs people have about themselves in the context of veganism.

Beliefs about themselves

Internal belief: Vegans are extreme. I am not strong enough to refuse food temptations.

Solution/alternative belief: Explanation of food options/recipes for vegans. You need to make them believe that going vegan isn’t as difficult as it may seem.

See how those are related to the person?

And an example of an external belief would be, “I don’t have the time available to take advantage of this product.”

Once you understand what beliefs are common, you can take those and tie them to a specific goal.

This is where a belief system comes in.

We take them from what they believe now .. to what they need to believe before they buy.

Creating a belief system

Here’s how you create a belief system.

1. Start by defining your destination belief.
2. Define your belief starting points.
3. Define the belief steps in between.
4. Create a narrative to tie it all together 🙂  

Your destination belief is the last and most important belief that needs to happen right before the sale.

Once you figure that out, jump to the very beginning and figure out what the first belief you need to address is.

Then you start connecting the dots 🙂

Similar to how you create content with customer avatars in mind, you need to create strategic content that installs these beliefs in order.

And each piece of content you make should install beliefs in the prospect’s own language or style.

This specificity is where the juju is 🙂

Let’s continue with the example of someone deciding to become vegan.

Check out how this spreadsheet matches beliefs to different pieces of content (lead magnets and emails) and begins with the belief of “I love animals” and ends with the destination belief of “I need to become vegan”.

Note: Lead magnets (LMs) are just pieces of content behind email address segmentation fields (more on those later).

By mapping your beliefs out this way, you know exactly what beliefs you need to install in what order. By the end the customer will believe in your process or product.

It’s wielding human psychology to bring about change, and believe me — this stuff is powerful.

Building Your Relationship Funnel Toolset

At this point, it’s time to start thinking about how we’re going to transfer all this to actual content and automations.

When first digging into building a Relationship Funnel, it can be overwhelming to figure out what software to use.

There is no perfect answer to this. The marketing software space is diverse and highly competitive, and sometimes working with an existing but possibly less sophisticated piece of software is better — it all depends.

What’s safe to say is that at Wild Audience, we have tried a lot.

We’ve finally landed on a tool stack that works for us, and everything we cover can be handled with these tools.

Here’s our list, in its entirety — exactly how I advise our RF Accelerator clients to build their funnels.

*Affiliate links below*

Relationship Funnel Tools

Email Automation – Wild Mail 

Lead Opt-in Forms – SurveySlam

Landing Page Builder – Thrive Architect

Survey Segmentation – SurveySlam

Evergreen Webinars – EverWebinar

Automate Tasks – Zapier

Bot Funnels – ManyChat

Sales Calls – Zoom

Personalization – RightMessage

Calendar Booking – Calendly

Scarcity – Ultimatum

—

This is what works for us, but even if you don’t use the same tools, all of the principles and strategies for Relationship Funnel still apply.

For the rest of the tools I use to run my business, including what I use for team communication and analytics, go here 🙂

—

Phase 2 – Funnel Implementation

Phase two is all about getting the MVP version of your Relationship Funnel up and running.

We want it to be functioning, we want it to convert, and we want it set up for easy adjustments.

Here are Phase 2’s steps:

1. Make the ultimate lead magnet
2. Build your automations
3. Install your segmentation
4. Write your RBS Email Sequence
5. Connect your conversion sequence
6. Set up your lead generation ads
7. Throw a launch party!

Make the ultimate lead magnet

Lead magnets are how you collect email addresses and continue delivering value, establishing authority, and installing all of the other beliefs we talked about.

Lead magnets can be anything, although they are most commonly a downloadable PDF, video, or file related to the content the prospect just engaged with.

We like to create content and then turn our absolute best articles into PDFs and then create lead generation videos like this to promote that PDF.

What you’re reading right now is actually a lead magnet 🙂

Pretty cool, right?

We use PDFs most often, like so:

Here’s a link to that article to see the lead magnet in action.

You need to think about what formats and types of content your prospects are most familiar with and use them to shape your lead magnet.

As long as your lead magnet is tangible, valuable, and directly related to your customer’s solution, you’ll be fine.

And the more tangible, valuable, and directly related your lead magnet, the better your conversion rates will be. I promise.

Take another lead magnet of ours ..

This is the landing page for it (which prompts them with the segmentation questions before it can be downloaded):

And here’s the first CTA:

A general guide to “customer acquisition” that describes the power of a Relationship Funnel?

Seems pretty related to me 🙂

Or if you were an online business selling high-ticket consulting packages to insurance companies and wrote a blog on digital inefficiencies of the insurance market, which lead magnet would be more effective?

10 Digital Tactics for Online Growth

Or

7 Proven Digital Strategies Insurance Companies Need to Adopt Right Now To Make More Sales

It’s clear that the second one is better. It is specific to the insurance industry and thus it’s far superior to a vague lead magnet.

Create one awesome lead magnet at first.

It should solve one of your prospects most burning problems.

In the insurance example it is helping them solve the problem of sales.

Yours should do the same thing for your market.

It should be good enough for cold prospects to WANT to submit their email.

Once you get a prospect to submit their email address, then the real fun begins 🙂

Build your automations

We are automation junkies.

I’m serious.

So much so that ActiveCampaign even featured us 🙂

And Mixergy

And Marketing School

And Forbes 🙂

Nothing is more satisfying then turning on a super relevant automation that brings in sales automatically for your business.

Autopilot profit for the win.

And autopilot does not mean impersonal!

Quite the contrary.

With smart automation and a deep understanding of your service and what your prospects need, you’ll be able to create authentic, long-lasting customers.

You’ll be able to create Relationships.

And that’s the key to all of this — it’s why I named our flagship product and services Relationship Funnel. It’s why I built my entire business around this idea. As soon as I saw how well smart, authentic automations worked, I knew I had stumbled across something important.

At Wild Audience, we create all of our automations with Wild Mail. It’s our favorite software for customer tagging and email management.

We tested over 200 automations to see which ones performed best in high-ticket situations. After all was said and done, we ended up with 5 automation sequences we loved.

If you start using Wild Mail today, you’ll get instant access to those 27 🙂

Just go here to get started.

Relationship Funnel automations are automated emailing systems that combine segmentation with personalization to build an experience unique to the prospect.

Here’s what some of our system looks like (in Wild Mail) ..

Youtube link

There are way too many details to cover here (all of those templates and walkthroughs can be found in Relationship Funnel itself), but here are the main pieces you want to have automated:

1. Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a way Wild Mail and other systems can add “points” to types of engagement and fire actions based off certain thresholds.

It’s safe to say that someone who opens 5 emails in a row and has seen the sales page 3x is much more qualified than someone who ignored your last 3 emails.

Your system should reflect that, and it can when you set up lead scoring.

(example of opening an email scoring)

2. RBS Series

7-10 emails that install beliefs and establish a relationship. More on this shortly!

3. Conversion sequence automations

Emails and actions that initiate a sales process based on engagement / behaviour-based pitching (usually certain emails or CTAs).

4. Lead magnet deliveries / evergreen automations

Additional content that continues to engage and feed people into your conversion sequences.

But automation is ineffective without personalization, and personalization is achieved through segmentation.

Installing your segmentation

Context and timing are the secrets of good automation sequences.

And in order to do provide them, you need to install a segmentation system.

You take bucketing questions similar to what we showed you above and just add them in front of your lead magnets.

Our favorite way to do this is what we call the 5-question interview, and it’s the same system we talked about above!

These guys 🙂

If you have a sales team, ask them what the most critical qualifying information is for leads. What is most useful for them to know?

Collect their answers and start building your bucketing questions from there, it’s often the best place to start.

If you don’t have a sales team, then think about what would be most useful to you / what you need to send someone the right content.

This usually includes:

1. Biggest problems.
2. Budget / revenue ranges.
3. Their dreams, desires, and goals.

Etc. etc.!

And once people are bucketed, you can send them a specific Relationship-Building-Sequence (RBS) or other personalized content (by exchanging words, phrases, or sentences in emails) that speak directly to their problem 🙂

Write your RBS

*This section is an excerpt from this blog if you want to continue reading there*

Once your segmentation system is all set up, it’s time to write the actual emails.

This is my favorite part. My absolute favorite part.. Bonding with new leads through email automation.

And I’m telling you .. It’s extremely powerful.

If you know how to do it right.

And today .. I’ll share with you how to write emails that build trust and establish relationships with new leads.

You do this by creating an email sequence. I call this the Relationship Builder Sequence or RBS. An RBS is a sequence of emails you send out automatically.

Yup. On autopilot. ” />

You don’t send them manually.

You use an ESP (Email Service Provider) like ConvertKit, InfusionSoft, ActiveCampaign or Wild Mail. Take a look at my RBS ..

A screenshot of my zoomed out RBS.

That’s the email sequence I use to build trust and establish a relationship with new leads.

It’s a series of 7 lessons to teach new prospects the basics of sales funnels for online business.

My goal is to teach, advise, help and guide my new tribe members to help solve their problems. I want to become their trusted advisor ..

And sometimes I tease them ” />

– I activate people in the first email.

– I ask them to click specific links in order to get the next email ..

– I use engagement techniques like Open Loops, Nested Loops and Cliffhangers to make them wait for future emails.

This has a powerful effect ..

The aim of the emails is to educate and create engagement.

Engagement is important because higher engagement = more sales ..

What should you actually include in the emails?

That’s easy ..

The beliefs you created before.

From those beliefs you will have made a belief map.

Now ..

Break those beliefs into 7  digestible chunks.

Each email will represent one of those chunks.

The goal of the series is to build a relationship first then draw people towards a key conversion event second.

The first 3-4 emails are all about establishing trust through helpful content.

Here’s an example of the first email of our sequence. Notice how it’s all about reciprocity — giving value upfront in return for something (an ask) later.

It’s not until the later emails that we start pitching our conversion event.

We use video sales letters to get people to fill out a quiz and schedule a call for profit funnels and evergreen webinars for our Break-Even funnels.

Here’s how we get people to sign up to our webinar in Email 7 of our RBS..

It’s all about letting people qualify themselves.

Pretty nifty, right?

And this is an example of what your RBS series would look like in Wild Mail on the backend ..

After your RBS series is set up, you need traffic.

Set up your ads

Now, all you need to do is set up your test ads and start generating traffic.

This is the big moment!

When you finally get to throw people into your Relationship Funnel and see how they react 🙂

First, if you don’t have one already, you’ll need to create a Facebook ad account & install your Facebook pixel.

You can learn more about doing that here.

Then, you’ll need to translate your customer avatars into actual audiences.

You can create your audiences when creating a campaign or directly within the audience tab of Facebook Ads.

Refer back to your avatar stories and profiles and try to think about the key identifiers you can point Facebook toward.

These won’t always be available, but let’s say you’re a marketing agency specializing in luxury travel locations for the U.S., Spain, and the U.K..

You might build an audience like this:

So M & F 26-50

Spain, U.K. & U.S.

Works in hospitality AND likes boutique hotels AND likes travel

Remember to use your persona profiles here!

The easiest way to screw up your test is not getting specific enough.

Shoot for somewhere between 25,000 & 500,000 for your initial tests. By continuing to add AND statements into your interest targeting, you should be able to narrow it down.

And don’t forget to restrict it by location if you only service certain locations.

—

Creating your test ads

Always refer to your customer avatars & evaluate competitors who are doing well in their space.

They’re talking to your future customers, after all.

What do your avatars like to see, and what are your best competitors doing?

What do you like or not like? Is there an angle you can take to outshine the competitors?

Once you have an idea, create 10-15 ads with varying copy and images and label them in a way that easily helps you analyze them.

I’d do it all within one campaign so you can see all your results in one place.

Then I’d spend between $500-$1000 on testing your ads, ensuring you complete the learning phase for your ad sets & give enough time to see real data.

The goal with this first set of ads is to find the right hook for the right type of leads at an profitable price. Usually we use image ads because they are faster to create.

Then, once we know the winning hook we create a video ad and hit the gas on ad spend (which happens in phase 4).

We recently did another round of testing like this, and after a bunch of variations, this ended up being our best performing ad.

Feel free to steal any part of this for your own business 🙂

Connect your conversion sequence

The next step is to link a conversion event to your RBS.

By conversion event I mean the next step in your funnel. This could be a deeper form of engagement (webinar, event, etc.). Or it could be a sales page or strategy call.

Part of what makes Relationship Funnel so powerful is the system automatically connects your RBS series to your conversion sequence at the right time.

Selling too early ruins a lot of online businesses, but so does selling late 🙂

With Relationship Funnel, the idea is to never hide your next conversion event (e.g. webinar or products) and pitch them when engagement is high.

For example, we send a separate email that looks once someone has opened and clicked on 5 emails (lead scoring!) 🙂

Then, we send them to our sales page, and the retargeting ads we have set up (more on that later) pull them toward the next step at each stage. These ads are relevant and specific to the product they were looking at.

Here’s our Relationship Funnel Accelerator sales page process:

First they’re sent to a landing page that has an overview video full of valuable information and social proof, and then they’re presented a CTA that leads them to a qualification quiz built with Typeform.

And then depending on their answers, they’re either prompted to schedule a call or directed to an appropriate product.

Remember we built all of these pages with the tools discussed above, and if you want to get all of these templates for yourself, go check out Relationship Funnel.

Last step: Throw a launch party!

Yesssss!

At this point all the battle stations are ready.

All you do is have to hit activate and start pushing traffic toward your brand new Relationship Funnel 🙂

And once you do,  take some time to pat yourself on the back.

Crack some champagne — you deserve it.

—

Phase 3 – Funnel Optimization

Once your Relationship Funnel MVP is finished, it’s time to monitor and improve it as you go along. This cannot be effectively accomplished without setting systems up for iterative experimentation — it must be prioritized within your company.

Here’s what happens in Phase 3:

1. Analyze test ad performance
2. Develop a system of growth-based experimentation
3. Invest in video ads & widen your ad creatives
4. Create an automated retargeting funnel

Analyze test ad performance

Running successful ad campaigns is all about testing a bunch of copy, images, and offers. Seeing what works, and turning off what doesn’t.

Now that your ads have been running for a bit, you should turn off all of the lowest performing ads.

Facebook does a good job of serving up the best ones anyway, but go ahead and disable the ones you know aren’t performing so you’re not wasting money.

Take a look at your CPA, CTR, ROAS, and CPC, etc. for each ad, ad set, and campaign.

The results for these and how good they are vary by industry according to competition and product price, but refer back to your average Customer Lifetime Value to help calculate your ROI.

For example, let’s say your main high-ticket service sells for $10k, but your average customer also signs up for your $50/month membership and stays for 3 months.

This brings your total LTV to $10,150, and if you spend up to that amount in ads to acquire that customer, your advertising is still bringing profit.

ROAS is the easiest way to calculate your ROI, so make sure you iron out your pixel on the front end!

We test different titles of the lead magnets to see which titles get the best CTR and CPAs per lead type. We also test different types of targeting to see which audience profiles match best with our customer avatars — then we hook these up to our top-performing landing pages (also based on testing)

It’s all about careful analysis and deliberate iteration 🙂

Develop a system of iterative experimentation / growth-based evaluation

Experimentation is the key to effective marketing.

With Respect-Based Marketing, that principle remains steady.

Marketing begins with guesses, is met with data, and ends with result-driven efforts.

The earlier you can set the standard, and more importantly, the space to run experiments, the better.

Give your marketing team the time and budget to run consistent experiments.

Have them run them for a week and report on the results the next. Make this a fundamental part of your system, and your ROI will thank you for it. Plus, this is what marketing teams love! They’ll be excited to bring their ideas to the table and implement them in a controlled environment.

In our Relationship Funnel, we run tests for all sorts of things.

You can use this list to get you started ..

1. Swap/upgrade different lead magnets and move them around to different blogs.
2. Try to reduce your CPA for leads with better copy (e.g. we test different lead magnet titles without changing the content of the PDF).
3. Monitor click rates and open rates of emails and improve emails by adjusting subject and cliffhanger lines.
4. Track conversion rates at each step of your sales page & VSL (e.g. analyzing how many people read the sales page -> complete the quiz and then schedule call).
5. Change blog layouts & store UI.
6. Swap different images & copy on ads.
7. Change your RBS call-to-actions.
8. Change the time windows on your automated funnel.
9. Replace your older content with newer blogs in your RBS series.

We usually start with a master, deep analysis spreadsheet that lists all of these tests and do two complete iterative cycles before starting to scale.

And remember, all of these tests are geared toward getting your funnel ready for scaling.

Invest in video ads & widening your ad creatives

IF you have a good product and nail your messaging, then you can start seeing a great return on your test ads / basic image ads.

But ..

Once you start seeing results and are prepping for more tests, then you need to add video ads.

According to Wordstream,

51% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI.

Marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users.

—

The results are in, and the lesson is clear: video assets outperform almost any other ad type.

If your team doesn’t have the time or skill to invest in video ads, hiring a videographer with experience in advertising is an investment worth your time, believe me.

If your conversion rate even bumps by a couple percentage points via the new asset, it will be worth the upfront costs.

And video ads aren’t the only more advanced creative to experiment with. You could also dip into lead form ads, paying for better images, etc.

The point is to reinvest some of the ROI you’ve already seen into strengthening your ad machine.

Now is not the time to sit back.

At least not yet, but it does get a bit easier when you set up one of the last steps of Phase 3, your retargeting 🙂

Create your automated retargeting funnel

Ads usually fall into two camps:

Awareness ads to cold audiences & retargeting ads to warmer audiences.

If you do NOTHING else, then installing at least a few retargeting ads is what I would recommend.

They are cheap, and the ROAS can be amazing!

Retargeting (also sometimes referred to as remarketing), are ads that only target people who have either seen your website (visit) or interacted with certain content (e.g. watched 25% or more of a video ad).

This dramatically lowers your CPC because you’re targeting a much smaller, more highly engaged (or warmer) audience.

Setting up retargeting ads is easy and inexpensive. Depending on your traffic numbers, you should be able to spend <$15 a day and have a big impact on your bottom line.

The key to effective remarketing is dividing up your audiences according to what step or level that person is on.

Think about it this way:

Level 1 – Cold audiences (no brand awareness yet)

Level 2 – Seen your site / interacted with a piece of content

Level 3 – Subscribed / given email address

Level 4 – Visited sales page or added a particular product to their cart

Level 5 – Went to the checkout page

Level 6 – Back-End funnel ads to existing customers

Then, in order to install retargeting, you just fill in the gaps with the goal of getting the person to get to the next level, and once they reach that level you set up excluding audiences to make sure they aren’t receiving older ads.

So you would exclude site visitors from Level 1, and you would exclude add to cart people from the “viewed a particular product” audience.

Let’s walk through each level briefly:

Level 1

So Level 1 is just the cold audiences we discussed above. Your goal is to get them to get to your site or interact with content, so your ads should be focused on that. This is where you deliver your best blogs and lead magnets to people who have viewed your blogs before.

Level 2

For Level 2 ads, you deliver product ads or case studies that are directly related to the lead magnet or content they’ve interacted with.

Level 3

For Level 3 ads, your goal is to establish a relationship and install beliefs through educational content & social proof. So this where you put your middle and bottom of funnel content.

Level 4

For Level 4, you remind people of what they left in the cart / point them back toward the sales page / give them more information about that particular product.

Level 5

For Level 5, you could offer time-based discounts or the chance to speak with a sales representative to help etc.

Level 6

This is where you continue educating your customers on your Back-End funnel products and help them use their existing products.

Make sense?

And what’s awesome, is that once you set these up, they will always be working for you in the background.

This is where all that backend sales revenue comes from. Retargeting can really up your customer LTV when executed correctly.

And if you want to make the ad management process even more automated, you can set up automated rules that adjust the budget depending on ROAS and frequency.

For example, if your ad frequency is low (<2) but ROAS is super high (>5), you could set up a rule that bumps the ad budget by 10% every 2 days to make sure you’re reaching everyone it should.

For more on rules, go here.

—

Phase 4 – Funnel Scaling

At this point, your Relationship Funnel is exactly where you want it to be 🙂

Conversion rates are high and leads are consistent. This is super exciting!

At this point you’re ready to scale, to really invest money into your funnel — aiming to bring in as many qualified leads as possible.

The most important thing is to watch your KPIs like a hawk.

For us, it’s our CPA of sales conversations and cost per sale.

As long as that stays where we want it, we can continue to scale. If it starts to slip, we slow things down and improve our conversion rates before continuing.

With that in mind, here’s what happens in Phase 4.

• Taking advantage of evergreen content
• Expanding your audience with the Bullseye Traffic Framework
• Upping ad spend and sales efforts.

Scaling with evergreen content

What we want at this stage is more leads.

We’ve already established trust in the funnel itself ..

Now we just need to pour more traffic in the top while increasing conversion rates through smart content that directly answers customer objections etc.

Organic traffic and thought leadership are fantastic outlets for inbound leads, and investing in more super strong pieces of content that you can spread around your business goes a long way.

And content doesn’t just mean blogging. The most common awareness generators are: blogging, podcasting, public speaking, and social media.

What you choose to focus on depends on your team and what your audience responds best to, but whatever you do — do it well and do it consistently.

Treat every piece like something you could rely on for years.

Chances are, you will.

For blogging, remember that the time of putting out crappy blogs that are couple paragraphs long are over.

You need to create something valuable.

Not rehashing someone else’s blog or saying something everyone else has said.

It needs to be substantial, and it needs to be useful.

If the content you’re writing doesn’t fulfill those requirements, then it’s not worth doing.

Take Eric Siu’s Single Grain, for example.

They aim for 1,500-2,000 words per blog, minimum.

They only give guest post spots to people they trust (like us), and they work with them to make sure that content is the right quality.

And when you make something good, it can be useful in multiple ways.

Think about it in terms of your Relationship Funnel.

You could use a great blog in:

1. Your site to get organic traffic that installs beliefs and captures email addresses via lead magnets.
2. Your advertising.
3. Your RBS sequence.
4. Your sales conversations.

The list goes on.

It’s also important to create “Middle of the Funnel” and “Bottom of the Funnel” content here, so pieces of content that address:

What is the best solution for my product? (MOFU)

• So strategy analysis/efficacy content, etc.

And why should I choose your company to provide that solution? (BOFU)

• Case studies.
• Your service as an alternative to x, etc.

Talking about general industry topics isn’t enough. You need to think deeply about your avatar and create the content that’s going to convince them that they need your service.

Once you create that content,  you should spread that around with content redistribution strategies and plug it into your overall marketing silo.

Use the bullseye traffic formula to choose your channel(s)

Here’s the thing.

Not all channels work for all businesses.

The bullseye traffic formula was popularized by Gabriel Weinberg of DuckDuckGo fame and Justin Mares, founder of Kettle & Fire, and it makes sure you nail the distribution angle of your business.

Identifying your best channel(s) will make or break your business — even if you have a great product, pitch, etc.

Here are the steps:

1. Brainstorm and research all available channels.
2. Pick 2 or 3 that you think will work best.
3. Run tests on all channels simultaneously.
4. Choose the best and go all-in.

This process allows you to hone in on the channels that will have the biggest impact on your business. For businesses that deal in creatives, that may be Instagram. For education-based consultancies, that could be Facebook groups.

The idea is to test thoroughly, identify confidently, and then go for it.

This is how we decided on blogging and Facebook originally. After that, we added in podcasts because we knew it would complement those original two.

We have three main lead generation channels:

Content Marketing

So things like blogs and podcast interviews.

PPC

Facebook Ads, Google Ads, etc.

&

Social Media – Wild Audience Facebook Group + relevant marketing groups.

I conduct an interview and release it as a podcast, go even deeper on those topics in blogs, and then build share those pieces of content with social media (all of which is super duper related to Wild Audience’s products) to pull the right people into my sphere of influence.

My content serves as a filter to attract only the best kind of people into my funnel. I try to get as specific as possible when producing content. You should always be thinking about your ideal user.

If someone interacts with my content, I know that this person is interested in what I have to offer (since the content is pretty much a light version of my paid products).

Make sense?

My podcasts are usually around 20-30 minutes and my blog posts are usually between 3,000 – 7,000 words long and packed with awesomeness. It’s always about actionable advice and step-by-step instructions. And I always include screenshots, graphics and content upgrades when applicable.

Upping ad spend / internal team expansion

After ROI stays consistent across all content creation systems while spending at least >2k+ in ad spend, it’s time to experiment with the advertising end of scaling.

This usually involves picking your top performing assets across all of your campaigns, optimizing them, and then running high budget experiments to different audiences.

In order to scale from 5k to 20k per month, it’s really important to create different ads for each avatar and use copy that speaks directly to that avatar. That way you attract good leads and discourage bad leads. This granularity requires time and expertise, so if you don’t have an internal member with the experience required, investing in a good advertiser can go a long way.

Facebook advertisers typically charge a management fee + % of ad spend.

So if you spent $5,000 per month and they charged $1,000/month + 15%, you would pay around $1,750/month in management fees.

Good advertisers are expensive (that management fee is probably a bit on the low end), but if that person is making you 10k+ a month from the ads, then it’s well worth it.

Be flexible on your contracts with advertisers. The best relationships are when the advertiser is motivated to run additional tests & keep you top of mind because they’re invested in the revenue potential as well.

And keep in mind that it almost always takes an advertiser a month or so of testing to get ROI off the ground, and there are all sorts of variables that go into this. The more assets and help you can give them, the better your results will be.

And believe me, finding that first ad -> audience fit is so damn exciting 🙂

Keep people in mind for that incoming influx of new leads, too. You’ll need team members specifically devoted to these new leads, so either reorganize your existing sales team or make a hire.

—

The end! What you need to do next…

Well.

You should now have a much better understanding of Relationship Funnels 🙂

On how to unlock the power of Respect-Based Marketing in your high-ticket or online business.

On automating the building of real relationships that generate real revenue by delivering value 🙂

It’s a lot of work, but the results speak for themselves.

If you’re ready to join the Respect-Based Marketing movement and create funnels that can exponentially grow your business, then you could start today.

Here’s the deal: faster growth starts with automating relationships.

There are four different ways you could kick things off:

1. Get us to do it with you: Sometimes a leader’s time is best spent on the business. We live and breathe marketing funnels, so if you want us to help you install your own Relationship Funnel — giving you the system to start acquiring and closing more customers than you ever have before, then go here.
2. You can become a rebel and learn everything about funnels and automation here.
3. You can just run with what’s in this super awesome lead magnet 🙂
4. You can ignore RF and keep wondering why you aren’t acquiring profitable customers at scale.

The choice is yours, but whatever you decide — good luck 🙂

WILD AUDIENCE

You know you do good work and you stand behind your business.

So why does your sales calendar look like this?

Where are the calls? Where are all of the people who want to work with you.

You know they’re out there. But without an automated process in place, you’re left trying to book sales calls along with everything else it takes to run a business.

You desperately want to solve customer acquisition at profit and scale but your time is tied up actually running your business.

You keep putting it off and your business has plateaued.

So you’re left feeling stuck.

Sounds about right?

Getting this system in place doesn’t have to be overwhelming.

But putting it off longer will only put you further behind. Or even worse, cause your growth to stagnate.

Ok, now let’s fast forward 10 weeks.

Close your eyes and picture this.

Your calendar is no longer empty. Instead, it looks something like this:

Your leads are signing up for sales calls like wildfire. You can barely keep up!

You get endless notifications, not from Facebook, or your mom.

But from clients paying you money.

Sometimes even while you sleep. Who doesn’t want to wake up to money?

Your conversion rate is the highest it’s been and so is your ROI.

To make this happen you need to get good at building systems and SOPs to do tasks at scale.  

Most founders don’t experience this feeling for a number of reasons.

It usually comes down to either a strategic problem or a marketing problem.

• You don’t have a proven offer.
• You don’t know your client avatar well enough.
• Your business just doesn’t have the systems in place to grow at profit and scale.
• Your time is spent creating arbitrary blog posts or videos instead of comprehensive client success case studies.

Let’s change that.

By the end of this article, you’ll:

• Know how a Relationship Funnel and Respect-Based Marketing tactics can grow your business at profit and scale.
• Have an overview of our RF Accelerator and how it will work for you.
• Understand the investment required to join.
• See real results that clients have achieved using our methods.
• Realize that the cost of inaction is far greater than your initial investment.

You need support implementing a scalable funnel strategy that will fill your calendar with sales calls and build a real relationship with your audience.

Ok, let’s get right into it.

What Is RF Accelerator?

To understand what we’re offering with RF Accelerator, we need to zoom out and take a look at how our Relationship Funnel works.

Relationship Funnel is all about acquiring customers at profit and scale.

The screenshot below is a high-level overview of what a Relationship Funnel looks like.

That is the core of everything we do.

In order to grow, you need to systematize your customer acquisition process.

This is where Relationship Funnel comes in.

Systemized customer acquisition at profit and scale is best done through Relationship Funnels and Respect-Based Marketing.

Before your customers believe in your product, you need to build trust and gain their respect.

When you’re selling high-ticket items and services, it’s crucial that your customers resonate with you on a deeper level. Which means you need to dig deeper to identify the value that will impact them the most.

We do this with Respect-Based Marketing.

What Is Respect-Based Marketing And Why Is It Beneficial?

Relationship Funnels are like sales funnels on steroids. It’s how you build relationships and install buying beliefs with your audience before selling to them.

These funnels are powered by Respect-Based Marketing.

Respect-Based Marketing is our approach to install buying beliefs within our audience by bonding on a deep emotional level to move their minds, hearts, and wallets.

And guess what? It works.

For years, we’ve used this system ourselves and taught it to other business owners who are ready to put systems in place to grow their business.

See?

They let you remove yourself from the process as they run on autopilot.

Now let’s talk about RF Accelerator.

RF Accelerator is a 10 week Program to automate your processes and put your business in a position to acquire customers at profit and scale.

It’s a done-with-you group consulting service to support you and hold you accountable. It will give you the necessary templates, scripts, strategies and support to set you up for success.

RF Accelerator will force you to stop stalling and take action that will make a massive impact on the future of your business.

When you join RF Accelerator, this is what you’ll get:

• Access to RF Accelerator Training Program (10 week project plan to successfully setup your RF and get your first sales calls scheduled)
• Wild Mail Automation Templates, Landing Page Templates, Email Copy Templates, Scripts for ads, copy for ad copy and Phone Scripts
• 1 Group Consulting Calls per week (Strategy / Technical / Optimization)

Every week, you’ll dive deeper into Relationship Funnel, and follow a no-surprises schedule. You’ll know exactly what’s coming next and how far along in the process you are.

Here’s a glance at the week-by-week roadmap.

Since RF Accelerator is a done-with-you program, you’re not dependent on an agency who vaguely understands your goals and mission.

And you’re never left in the dark wondering what the hell the agency is even working on right now.

You also don’t have to worry about feeling confused and frustrated by trying to implement all of the steps yourself.

You’ll be part of a private community that will hold you accountable, call you out, and push you to implement your new and improved sales funnel. We are in this together. That means if you have any questions throughout the process, or during implementation, we are on your side and here to help.

Weekly group calls will guide you through the process of building a profitable Relationship Funnel and you’ll be able to ask a million questions along the way.

Who Is RF Accelerator For?

Our RF Accelerator Clients are high-ticket businesses that want to grow from 6 to 7-figures. They have case studies that prove they helped their clients get results.

To us, having a ‘high-ticket business’ means that you have an average customer lifetime value of at least 2,000€ ($). In other words, each customer pays you at least 2,000€ ($) each year.

Find out if RF Accelerator is right for you by taking this questionnaire.

A few other things they have in common:

• They’ve put together an email newsletter. Usually not a very good one (that changes quickly after working with us), but a newsletter nonetheless.
• They are founders who are still doing a lot of the day-to-day work like writing blog posts, scheduling sales calls, and managing other marketing tasks.
• They are from all backgrounds and include a range of tech-experts and creatives.

Don’t’ worry about being non-technical or marketing-averse.

We speak your language. Literally. Not only does our team interact with clients in English, Spanish, and German, but we relate and speak to the pain points of your business.

We break down the steps in terms that you understand, without the vague marketing jargon.

Now for the reason you’re reading this article.

How Much Does RF Accelerator Cost?

To get started with RF Accelerator, you’re going to make an investment of  €5800 ($6500) for a 10-week “done-with-you” service. At the end of the program, you’ll have implemented an evergreen Relationship Funnel.

We offer a couple of different payment options to split up the payments.

Now you probably want to know if the money you spend will be worth it to you.

You only need to close 1-5 deals to break even. If you go through the steps we lay out to achieve the results we promise, this turns into the cheapest investment you will ever make.

Just look at what Mirna achieved in her second month of RF Accelerator.

Since working with us, Niklas is buying sales sales calls for around 300 Euros at a 7% conversion rate.

It seems like a steep investment on paper, but let’s break down the lifetime benefits you’ll reap from being on board.

Is RF Accelerator worth the Investment?

There are so many programs out there promising vague results like growth.

Here is exactly what you will get from your investment in RF Accelerator.

Here’s a closer look at what your business can look like 90 days from now.

A perfect implementation of Relationship Funnel means hitting these KPIs.

• Increased Number of scheduled sales calls
• Increased Revenue
• Increased ROI
• More leads are signing up for sales calls
• Leads are high-quality and exactly who you’re looking for
• Your CPA will go down

Just look at how Niklas turned his leads into scheduled sales calls

You Will Have Automated Systems In Place

On completion of the 90-day program you will have the following systems in place:

• Long-Term Marketing & Funnel Strategy
• Smart & Behaviour-Based Marketing & Funnel Automation (using Wild Mail)
• PPC Lead Generation Systems
• Lead Quality & Engagement Systems
• Automated Sales Systems​
• Advanced ROI-Tracking​

The implementation of this automated Relationship Funnel and systems will remove yourself from the process and give you more time to focus on growing your business.

Instead of just telling you it’s a good investment. Let’s take a look at some real-life examples of how implementing our Respect-Based Marketing strategies have changed people’s businesses and lives.  

RF Accelerator Roadmap Will Fast Track Business Growth

It might be difficult to picture exactly what your business will look like at the end of RF Accelerator, so let’s break it down.

RF Accelerator roadmap will fast-track your business in these 4 ways.

1. Funnel Strategy

• You will build a strategy and foundation that include a detailed customer avatar, positioning, offer strategy, belief mapping, bucketing and segmentation, and funnel flow.

2. Funnel Implementation

• Implementing your funnel will include building a lead magnet, setting up automations, funnel pages, an RBS email sequence and a conversion sequence.
• You will also have a VSL (Virtual Sales Letter) and solid closing process in place ready to go when your funnel launches.
• Then your funnel will actually go live!

3. Funnel Optimization

• You’ll learn how to effectively monitor funnel performance and make adjustments along the way to create a retargeting funnel.
• This process is all about finding the winning funnel. The first version of your funnel is usually not the most profitable, and that’s normal! That’s why it’s on us to collect data, analyze the findings and fix what isn’t working.
• At the end of the first month, we should have a winning Relationship Funnel so that by the third month, we can really start to scale.

4. Funnel Scaling

• Once all of the pieces are in place, you are ready to scale your funnel! This means Introducing an evergreen newsletter and creating a traffic framework.
• You’ll have the framework for creating a PPC lead gen system for cold acquisition & retargeting.

What is the cost of inaction?

How long do you think it would take you to figure out how to implement a funnel like this on your own?

Based on past experience, we estimate probably around 1000-2000 hours.

Assuming you pay yourself $50 an hour (this is a conservative estimate of course ..) That’s easily between $50 – $100k worth of your time [$50/hr x 1000 hours].

Can you afford to spend thousands of dollars and man-hours working on something that you’re not an expert in and that you can’t guarantee results?

Probably not.

You can build these systems yourself or hire freelancers to implement each piece of the puzzle.

But you will still be underestimating the impact of having real experts on your side. We want you to win, whereas others are just there to get the job done.

You will still have to put in the work.

But with your expertise and feedback at your fingertips, the process becomes simplified. We’ve worked with enough clients to know exactly what works and only give you the strategies that we’ve found successful.

Don’t underestimate the time and knowledge it takes to build a funnel that actually works.

One that makes your audience yearn for more.

So the cost of inaction is simple.

You can work with us now, for a tiny fraction of that time and cost. OR try and do it yourself, get frustrated, spend too much time and money trying to figure it out. And then work with us later.

The only difference is that when you put it off, you will already be behind everyone else who invested in themselves and their businesses in prioritizing growth at profit and scale.

This is what we do. We have templates in place that will generate long-term ROI for your business over 6-12 months and years beyond.

Let’s do some math, shall we?

If your product costs 10k then you only need to close 1-2 clients and you break even on your RF Accelerator investment.

Some of the people we work within RF Accelerator are closing double that within the first few months of implementing their new funnel. Depending on the length of your sales cycle, you could have calls booked by the end of the second month, and actually close sales by the third month of RF Accelerator.

Let’s use John as an example.

John currently receives 10 leads per day and has a 0.5% conversion rate. His average order value is $2000, so his projected revenue is $36,500 per year.

After implementing Relationship Funnel we guarantee that his conversion rate will increase to at least 1.25%. That’s $91,250.00 in revenue.

And that’s us being modest. Many of our clients get conversion rates as high as 2.20% which would mean a revenue of $160,600.00!

Without RF Accelerator, you’re missing out on as much as $124,100 every year.

Think about the entire life of your business. What you invest in RF Accelerator now, is a grain of sand compared to the lifetime value your new funnel will continue to generate.

We are building a long-term system that generates steady, sustainable growth.

Need more proof? See how we used Relationship Funnel to help Justin from Superhero increase his conversion rates by 6x.

We can keep going. John and Landon made $20k in sales after tweaking their offer and tailoring it to better serve their customers.

And they’re not the only ones.  

In Summary

Your one-time investment in RF Accelerator will continue to work for you way after the program is over.

It’s not about miraculous growth quick fixes. It’s about building a relationship with your audience and installing buying beliefs so that you can close higher sales than you ever thought possible.

And we have the client success case studies and hundreds of customer testimonials to back this up.

You’re putting systems in place that will benefit the future of your company.

Wild Audience is trusted by hundreds of clients who are already implementing Respect-Based Marketing and Relationship Funnels into their businesses.

Your favorite influencers like Todd Herman, Bryan Harris, Ryan Deiss and more all know about Respect-Based Marketing and the massive value it adds to their customers and their brand.

Now, it’s time to find out if RF Accelerator is right for you by taking this questionnaire.  

Here’s the deal. If you don’t buy now, that is completely your choice.

But 9 months from now, your business will be in the same place as it is now. Nothing will change for you unless you take a leap of faith.

If you start today, your business will look radically different in 90 days and will only keep getting better.

Introduction

Do you want to make 2019 a year to remember?

To finally climb from your healthy six-figure business to a seven-figure powerhouse?

To walk into 2020 thinking, “We absolutely killed it this year.”

I hope so 🙂

That’s what we’re planning on at Wild Audience, and I’ll let you in on a secret.

The way that can happen for you is through a content marketing strategy template.

2019 is the year of content.

The marketing world knows it.

Everything is pointing toward it.

Here’s how we think about it:

Smart content + effective distribution + Respect-Based Marketing funnels = more qualified leads.

And more qualified leads means higher ROI and more profits for your business.

It’s easy to understand… a little harder to execute 🙂

But that’s exactly why there’s more opportunity than ever.

If you can master the art of intelligent, relationship-building content..

Well… you win 🙂

The stats speak for themselves:

One in ten blog posts are compounding, meaning organic search increases their traffic over time. (HubSpot)

84 percent of millennials don’t trust advertising and sales messages.

Compounding blog posts make up 10% of all blog posts and generate 38% of overall traffic. (HubSpot)

47% of buyers viewed 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep. (Demand Gen Report)

55% of business professionals say a great story captures their focus and keeps them engaged with content. (Prezi)

96% of B2B buyers want content with more input from industry thought leaders. (Demand Gen Report)

Sources: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics) & CMI.

It’s promising, yeah?

But the power of content marketing goes beyond lead generation.

Great content yields a great audience.

And do you know what a good audience is?

Loyal.

They trust you.

They trust your voice, and they will help you create better products for them.

It’s reciprocity at its finest 🙂

This is how Wild Audience started. How Nathan Barry started. How Rand Fishkin grew a multi-million dollar business.

With trust. With education. With content 🙂

I built WA off of content, but in 2018 I really stepped up my game, and the ROI has been amazing.

It’s how we’ve been able to trade ideas with the best marketing minds in the world — people & companies like Todd Brown, Todd Herman, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign and Rand Fishkin.

We make podcasts, turn them into amazing articles, create accompanying videos, and help successful business owners like you build incredible sales funnels every day.

You’re reading a piece of this strategy right now — this article stems from an amazing conversation we had with Rand Fishkin of Moz & SparkToro fame.

He built Moz and Sparktoro through content, and we’re going to cover exactly how he did that in a bit.

Anyway.

Here’s what you can expect from this article:

1. What is content marketing?
2. Why Content Marketing is the lead generation silver bullet
3. How content marketing made Rand Fishkin the SEO king.
4. The 2019 Content Marketing Strategy Template: How to build a future-proof business
5. Your next steps for an amazing 2019

Heads up: We think it’s worth demonstrating these tactics through Rand’s story, but the most actionable part of this article (The 2019 Content Marketing Strategy Template: How to build a future-proof business) where we walk through WA’s content machine is toward the bottom.

You jump directly there by clicking here.

Ready to discover the lead generation silver bullet?

Let’s roll.

What is Content Marketing?

Quote by CMI

Some people say if light touches it, it’s content 🙂

That’s a bit much, but the point is that content can be anything that you use to drive customer action.

These pieces of content are also usually what we call “inbound” content. Or content that isn’t strictly interruptive (commercials etc.)

Things like..

• Blog posts
• Podcasts
• Lead magnets
• Interviews
• Virtual summits
• Emails
• Ads*
• Social media
• Event marketing
• Experiential marketing
• Radio
• TV

*Digital ads have a wide variety of uses outside of strict interruptive advertising. E.g. they can be used to retarget and amplify existing content.*

Chances are, you’re already doing some of this in your business. There’s no end to your options as a business owner, but whatever you do, you need to make sure it’s good.

What makes good content?

That answer changes for every business. No matter what industry or what audience, each business-to-audience fit is unique, and your content should speak to that 🙂

With that in mind, good (and by good we mean sustainable content that reliably converts) content:

• Is specific to an audience.
• Is relevant
• Tells a story/builds a narrative
• Builds trust
• Establishes authority
• Has an original angle or perspective
• Spurs action

“Before you ever create content, ask yourself, ‘who will help amplify this, and why?’ If you don’t have a great, specific answer to that question, reconsider whether you should create it at all. Content that doesn’t earn links, shares, email forwards, word-of-mouth, press, etc. probably won’t stand out, won’t rank, and won’t be worth your energy to build.” – Rand Fishkin via Forbes

And that space between average content and great content is where your success in 2018 lies.

Here’s my bit of advice on this:

Do not rush or underestimate the time it takes to create good content.

It’s different for everyone, but whatever it takes to put out genuinely interesting and compelling content, pursue that — regardless of how frequency may suffer. Even if you have to start slow, putting out quality content will always be a differentiator worth investing in.

And then over time, you can start to build up what we call the content growth machine.

This your team and process. How you can reliably and consistently put out content your audience will respond to.

If you already have a system in place but aren’t getting the results you want, I guarantee it’s the existing system that’s incorrect — not content marketing itself.

Why Content Marketing is the Lead Generation Silver Bullet

Content Marketing is one of the best ways to grow a sustainable audience (and therefore business)

There’s no wrong way to grow or start a business, but there are smarter ways 🙂  

Content marketing is a fantastic method to invest in. By writing and producing content that speaks to your audience, you can begin to gain an audience and install important beliefs.

If people trust you, are entertained by your company, and look to your content for a type of interaction on a consistent basis — and your product is related to that content, then you’ll succeed.

Here’s the thing, though.

Content marketing is not a quick-win scenario.

It takes time, dedication, and effort.

Via Marketing Land

This graph by Marketing Land does a nice job of summing it up.

Content marketing is an exponential curve. It takes time to stoke the fire. You have to lay branch after branch and strike flint after flint before it catches. But once it does, you’ll find yourself in a rapidly growing business 🙂

Notice how the investment required starts high and climbs up and through the slog. You may find yourself a bit down 6 months in. Maybe you’re only getting a few downloads or reads for the enormous effort you’re putting in.

Under no circumstances should you give up then 🙂

That’s when most people do.

“Don’t assume SEO works right away. It’s the total opposite of advertising. It requires a large, upfront investment of creativity, technical investments, and elbow grease, and the returns will initially be small or nonexistent. It’s only after months or years that SEO begins producing great value, but when it does, it can dwarf the ROI you get from paid investments. The high upfront costs and challenges are what keep the field thin enough to make standing out a true competitive advantage.” – Rand Fishkin via Forbes

The more content you put out, the better at creating content you’ll be. And the better you get and the more content you put out, the more you will be rewarded from an SEO and audience perspective.

And here’s the thing. There is so much to do while you’re creating content and fighting through the slog — that’s also when you’ll be improving or building your product and designing a Relationship Funnel or other sales funnels.

A.k.a. Your conversion strategy.

A typical content-marketing funnel typically falls into segments like these:

Top of the Funnel (Reaches new people)

Blogs, podcasts, interviews, conferences, etc.

Middle of the Funnel (captures email)

MOFU blogs, how-to guides, lead magnets, downloadable PDFs.

Bottom of the Funnel (leads toward sale)

Case studies, blogs on company culture and unique mechanisms, explanations of process, etc.

We’ll cover more on funnel segments (TOFU, MOFU, BOFU) later on.

Content creates authority and builds trust

The secret of a successful content marketing and funnel strategy is the installation of key beliefs.

Beliefs about your company, product, value, etc. all play into a lead’s decision to pull out their credit card.

They need to believe you know what you’re talking about — this is the belief of expertise or authority.

And they need to trust that you are charging fairly, will deliver the product appropriately, and are generally trustworthy.

There are many more beliefs than authority and trust, but content is a fantastic medium for installing these two crucial beliefs.

Content — especially blogs and podcasts, demonstrate expertise through “performance”.

Words let readers inside the writer’s head.

And reading lets the writer get inside your head 🙂

If you read an article or blog and are impressed by the thought process and expertise displayed in the article, you start to believe that the author knows what they’re talking about.

This is how content builds authority.

Trust is a bit more nebulous. Trust may be developed by consistency. If each and every piece of content you interact with is impressive and interesting, then you know a business isn’t a one-shot nobody.

And if the overall branding, style, and community resonates with you, this also plays into the trust.

Make sure you’re thinking about these beliefs when writing content, and you can learn more about belief installations here.

Content takes on a life of its own.

One of my favorite aspects of good content is how it will crop up and reach people you don’t expect.

For example, our Todd Herman article was recently used by Ryan Deiss of DM fame during a high-profile client conference.

He used our content as an example of what investing in content should look like.

And those same methods that got us there is what we’re discussing here. Everything you read here you can take and use for yourself.

The best content is reusable for years to come

One awesome thing about content is its ability to be redistributed and used in different mediums and portions of your funnel.

One blog can be used as the inspiration for a podcast, Facebook video, and Instagram posts. You could create a downloadable version and use that as a lead magnet.

You could use that blog as an ad to attract new subscribers.

You could take a portion of that and use it as an email hook in a marketing automation sequence — using it to both attract new customers through organic traffic and engage with existing subscribers.

And if you have a great piece that you’d like to still use but is getting outdated, then an update is all you need to doctor up an aging piece.

There’s really no limit here.

Why you should invest in Content Marketing alongside PPC

Content marketing drives consistent traffic and conversions without the hard costs of advertising.

And articles with proper keyword research can continue to serve you for years to come.

They can become evergreen 🙂

Think about that in terms of how much you spend on paid advertising.

If you are spending $2 per click on “vegetarian recipes”, then you’d spend $1,000 getting 500 people to your site.

But… if you spent that same $1,000 on a really great, comprehensive article on your favorite vegetarian recipes, it could potentially bring thousands of visits per month for free. If you even got 1,000 people to your site over 3 months it would be more than worth it.

And what if it really took off — attracting over 1,000 visitors a month. This would cost you $2k/month to buy minimum.

That’s what is known as the PPC equivalency. It applies to any form of paid advertising in relation to content marketing.

This also isn’t taking into account the probability of a great long-form piece of content ranking for multiple keywords and being used in other marketing capacities (email content, social content, etc.) — even more so reducing your spend.

Now let’s talk about how Rand built Moz into an SEO empire off the back of good content.

How Content Marketing Made Rand Fishkin the SEO King

There are many entrepreneurs/businesses to look at when searching for examples of businesses built with content.

Seth Godin… Neil Patel… Ryan Levesque… Wild Audience 🙂

And one of the most impressive examples of this model is Rand Fishkin.

Rand Fishkin is the co-founder and former CEO of the SEO giant Moz.

Founded alongside Gillian Muessig in 2004 as a consulting firm, the two of them shifted to SEO software development in 2008.

Rand has since left Moz to found SparkToro (more on that later), but the last full year he was there (2017), the company reported revenues of $47.4 million and averages of nearly 3 million website visits per month.

Rand and I recently spent an hour together discussing his story.

And when I tell you that Rand built his company off content, I really mean it.

Moz was a popular blog for 4 years before the launch of their software. And once they launched, they earned $400,000 in 6 months.

What’s the main lesson?

You have to start early 🙂

The worst idea is to wait until your product is finished to start marketing.

You will destroy your odds.

Rand first grew his audience almost entirely through his blog and a weekly medium Moz dubbed “Whiteboard Fridays”.

Every Friday Rand or another member of the Moz team would set up in front a white board and talk about an in interesting lesson, stat, or technique.

They’d post the video along with a transcript and audio version of the talk.

Whiteboard Fridays eventually became the go-to resource on SEO for thousands of marketers and business owners around the world — even saving the once struggling agency early on.

But why?

Why did this work for Rand and didn’t for so many other entrepreneurs working in and around content marketing?

It’s because his content is sharp, encompassing, consistent, and valuable.

All of the boxes of good content we mentioned earlier, he filled 🙂

And he’s using a similar strategy to build his latest venture, SparkToro.

How Rand is using Content Marketing to fuel his next venture, SparkToro.

SparkToro is a “search engine for Audience Intelligence.” It’s not released yet, but Rand is already doing a bunch of work on promoting it (more on that in a second).

SparkToro looks really promising.

Companies can put keywords and audience information into an engine that will pull out a variety of influencers across a variety of channels.

One thing to note:

Sparktoro is not a traditional influencer marketplace, nor does it play favorites.

Instead of focusing on Instagram influencers like many other companies, SparkToro equips entrepreneurs with influencers in less saturated spaces — namely blogs, publications, print magazines, etc.

That doesn’t mean SparkToro is ignoring Instagram, but they are focusing on blogs, podcasts, subreddits, events etc. instead.

The idea is to solve the “discovery” problem. No one likes sourcing influencers for days before a campaign.

And just like Moz, Rand is starting with a variety of content marketing strategies for building his audience.

Here’s everything Rand is doing with SparkToro:

1. He’s using his status as a prominent blogger by letting that audience live on Sparktoro.com through consistent blogs and updates.
2. He’s building free tools that are directly related to his future product.

Trending – It’s like Reddit or Hackernews for tech marketers. Trending counts all the URLs you and the community tweet as votes, so you can see what the web marketing world is talking about today.

SparkScore – Figure out your level of influence by measuring your fake accounts etc.

Fake Followers audit – Fake Followers Audit looks at 25+ factors correlated with spam/bot/low quality accounts to return a percentage of followers that are thought to be fake.

3. He’s using his book release engagements to talk about SparkToro.

4. He’s accepting interviews (like this blog!) and other PR/speaking events and plugging his new venture.

By combining these free tools, blogs, speaking events, interviews (like the one that sparked this article), and utilizing his existing Moz/personal brand audience, Rand is already building an audience of buyers before SparkToro is released.

So everything he does points back to his company in some form or fashion, but how does Rand define the success of these efforts? What do you need to be monitoring when building your own business with content?

Here’s how Rand defines content marketing success for SparkToro:

1. Branding and awareness increase is evident.
2. Email list growth
3. Free tools become well known.
4. Baseline level of traffic pretty solid.
5. SparkToro’s existing audience knows what they are building.
6. They develop a list of potential buyers.

Simple and easy, right?

As we mentioned, Rand is launching all of this marketing before the product is finished. This method is known as audience-first, startup second or “minimum viable audience” companies, and it’s one of my favorite topics 🙂

Go here for more on building minimum viable audiences

And here’s how Rand thinks about audience-first businesses.

How Rand Fishkin approaches “audience-first” content marketing

For Rand, it’s all about story.

You need to know the story of the problem you’re solving, and you need to be able to distill that into a solution.

That’s where you start.

Then you need to transform that story into something that is accessible and amplifiable 🙂

Start or improve your content marketing strategy by asking yourself questions like:

How do we build things that are consistently engaging and useful until we have the product? How do we both attract and retain future buyers?

That’s the goal, after all.

You also need to know the type of business you want to build on the onset

For Rand, he’s building SparkToro like a zebra instead of a unicorn.

Unicorns are profit-focused — with few succeeding but those who do almost always disrupt society. These are the Facebooks, Ubers, and AirBnBs of the world.

Zebra companies are alternative, more sustainable business models and can be described as such:

“These alternative models will balance profit and purpose, champion democracy, and put a premium on sharing power and resources. Companies that create a more just and responsible society will hear, help, and heal the customers and communities they serve.” – Sex and Startups

It’s slower growth coupled with more cautious investing that prioritizes social impact and culture above profits.

It’s about launching a profitable business out of the gate and having that same business be a place that is genuinely rewarding to work at while building a better world simultaneously.  

And for that to happen, you need a low-cost CPA, a good pricing model that means your paid costs are low, strong organic marketing, and to know what culture you want from the beginning.

This doesn’t mean unicorns are inherently evil or that you can’t pursue rapid growth, you just need to know what you want from the get go — that mentality will ultimately shape both your personal life and business culture in profound ways.

Even if you’re already running a healthy business, thinking in terms of lean, smart growth via content marketing is a useful exercise.

Now that you’ve seen a bit on how Rand is approaching SparkToro, let’s take a closer look at building a content marketing machine in the context of the business we know best, Wild Audience 🙂

Scaling Content Marketing: How to build a reliable and rapid-growth content machine

When it comes to building future-proof, audience-first businesses, we have a lot of experience at Wild Audience.

It’s how we built this business after all.

In this section, we’re going to open the doors and show you exactly how we run our content machine.

Then, you can take this system content system and apply it to your own business immediately by using our content marketing machine blueprint.

It all started with one blog

When I say you can start a business with one blog, I mean it.

For us, it all came to down to this blog.
(actually this article)

That’s it 🙂

But it took a lot more than writing it.

Because that blog was built on months of market research and Facebook group relationships.

I spent hours and hours building up to when I would actually release the blog.

For more on building a “minimum viable audience” business, go here.

When Wild Audience first started, blogging was our main traffic driver. These days… it’s a bit more diverse 🙂

But before we look at our evolved content marketing machine, let’s cover the concepts you’ll need to understand it.

The segmenting theory behind successful content marketing

One of the biggest hang-ups with content marketing is knowing what to create and when.

Do you need more case studies? More awareness blogs? More videos?

Sometimes you can feel confident in most mediums but always feel like you don’t know if you’re creating the right content at the right time.

The easiest solution to this is by fitting your content into 3 main stages.

These three funnel stages are based on a customer’s typical journey — aimed at answering the right questions at the right time.

They are split into three branches:

Top of the Funnel (TOFU)

Buyer Question: What exactly is my problem? What is its nature and scope?

Example: I’m not getting enough revenue. I think that’s because my conversion rates are too low, but I’m not sure.

Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)

Buyer Question: What are the possible solutions for my problem? Which ones are best for my business and why?

Example: Okay. So it is my conversion rates. What’s better to focus on? Building a marketing automation system? Swapping out designs? Split testing? Okay. Right now it looks like creating a marketing automation is my best bet.

Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU)

Buyer Question: Why should I choose your business to provide that solution?

Example: Why is Wild Audience’s Relationship Funnel my best bet for increasing conversion rates? What makes them better than doing it myself or using a different system?

—

Each piece of content you create should be focused into one of these stages. Typically you have a lot more TOFU than MOFU or BOFU, but down the line you may find that your BOFU content isn’t specific enough and needs reworking or that people always go from TOFU to MOFU but never transition into BOFU.

Different types of content lend themselves to different stages. Check out the graph below for some ideas on how marketers fit content where it works best:

And now to Wild Audience’s current marketing machine.

Wild Audience’s 2019 Content Marketing Strategy Template

Copy and swipe anything as you wish 🙂

Step 1: Start with one awesome piece of content

For Wild Audience, it’s interviews.

And we’ve had all sorts of awesome conversations with people like:

• Rand Fishkin (obviously)
• Todd Herman
• Todd Brown
• Buffer CEO Joel Gascoigne
• And many more 🙂

You can hear those conversations here.

I conduct all of those interviews and focus on topics we’re currently trying to rank for via our content marketing machine blueprint.

Also known as a funnel silo, it’s the brains behind our entire operation.

This spreadsheet has all of the topics and keywords we’re trying to rank for, what’s been done, who is assigned what, the competitive articles we need to build, and more.

It’s what keeps us sane 🙂

The spreadsheet is designed around umbrella topics. These “topics” are short-tail, high-traffic keywords identified through keyword research.

So things like sales funnel, marketing automation, or any highly competitive keyword that would be fantastic for us to rank for.

Having structure is what will absolutely make or break you in content marketing. Do not rush into this world without a plan in hand and actual structure to back it up.

You can grab the spreadsheet and watch a video of us explaining exactly how you can take this content marketing strategy template and start using it to grow your lead gen efforts below.

Step 2: Turn that interview into a podcast

Podcasting is a great way to speak directly with your audience and earn enough credibility to attract public speaking gigs and other public opportunities.

We’re not alone in thinking this 🙂

17% of marketers plan to add podcasting to their marketing efforts in the next 12 months. (HubSpot, 2018)

For us, our podcast is a curated version of our interviews.

For example, we interviewed HubSpot’s VP of Sales and talked for an hour on everything sales and sales funnels.

Then we took that and edited it into a podcast to start with.

Now have a strong piece of content to start working with 🙂

Step 3: Match the interview with an umbrella topic and identify multiple blog opportunities.

Once we have our interview, we listen down and try to pick out the biggest lessons and most interesting conversation pieces. Then, we open up our content marketing machine blueprint and see where it fits in.

Our HubSpot one is pretty obvious.

Sales funnel, right?

Boom.

We have our umbrella topic 🙂

Then our team takes a few minutes to think of one long-form (5,000+ words) article on the umbrella topic and as many shorter-form blogs (1,500-3,000+ words) as we can.

The key is to link back to your longer-form piece with your shorter-form pieces. This strategy uses internal linking to boost your SEO and authority around a topic 🙂

Take drip coffee from our content marketing machine blueprint example.

Drip coffee is a short-tail, high traffic keyword. There are tons of blogs on this topic, and it would be great for our fictional drip machine company to rank for this.

Our first step is to create an ultimate guide for making drip coffee. This is a comprehensive, long-form blog that goes into great detail about how to make great drip coffee — mentioning our product as an ancillary piece or potential option.

Then, we split “drip coffee” into a bunch of other blogs ranking for longer-tail keywords that still have drip coffee in them. Things like: “drip coffee machines” or “best drip machine filters” or “drip coffee temperature”.

These give us the opportunity to explore those topics in a bit more depth, link back to our main article, and rank for those longer-tail keywords.

And sometimes these interviews point us in new keyword directions as well — always be keeping an eye out for new keyword opportunities.

Step 4: We write!

Armed with our blog topics, we write our long-form piece first. This often takes a lot of research and time, but the idea is to create something above and beyond anything else that is out there.

We’re going to be using this piece a lot, so the trick is to do whatever it takes to make it a really strong piece 🙂

So we write, write, and write until…

Huzzah!

We have a finished product.

Our blogs reference both our videos and podcasts (which you may have noticed in this one).

Notice how everything ties into each other but also offers different ways and avenues for exploring a topic?

That’s content distribution at work 🙂

Step 4: We hook everything up to our Relationship Funnel.

After we finish writing, we take the blogs, interview, videos, etc. and hook it all up to our Relationship Funnel.

The screenshot above is high-level overview of what a Relationship Funnel consists of.

We use emails, Wild Mail automations (you can get our automations here), lead scoring, Facebook messenger, multi-channel retargeting on social platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Youtube) and more to develop real relationships with prospects and earn their trust before asking for a sale.

Including individual emails like this one 🙂

Relationship Funnels are smart automation systems that regularly convert >$100 products at 6% or more.

If you’re looking for ways to grow from six figures to seven figures, just imagine what even a 1% higher conversion rate would do to your monthly revenue.

I recorded a video all about building your own Relationship Funnel, and you can find it down below.

Step 5: Adding fuel to the fire with Retargeting and PPC

Once we have everything prepped and / the Relationship Funnel is ready, we set up the final step — the retargeting and PPC campaigns that will really set things in motion.

PPC can be an incredibly powerful tool when used wisely.

But using it wisely is the catch 🙂

There are two types of advertising we always use in our content marketing 🙂

Retargeting and PPC.

Let’s talk retargeting first.

Retargeting increases engagement and pulls people through your funnel

Retargeting is widely known through Facebook Ads and Google Adwords targeting.

The idea is simple:

When someone visits a specific page on your site, you can then send them curated ads and communications.

This is like Pandora’s box for marketers 🙂

Let’s continue with our HubSpot example.

If someone reads our blog but doesn’t download the HubSpot lead magnet we have, we can encourage that user to take the next step by showing them an ad that is related to the HubSpot article and/or send them and ad that pitches the lead magnet.

We know they were interested enough to read a bit of our article, now we just need to enroll them in our Relationship Funnel by getting their email.

This almost always leads to cheaper CPA costs and higher CTRs (click-through rates).

And retargeting can get extremely sophisticated — moving audiences in and out of ad campaigns to avoid ad fatigue and wasted money by making sure that an ad that a user converts on isn’t shown to them again.

A.k.a. If someone enters our email automation system, we don’t need to show them the lead magnet again 🙂

Retargeting is also an awesome way to engage your existing audience. By uploading customer lists to your ad platform, you can show exact segments of your customer base specific pieces of content or upsells.

Retargeting also opens up some pretty amazing storytelling possibilities through ad sequencing. Ad sequencing is when you set frequency caps and arrange pieces of content to be shown to your audience in a particular order.

So once a lead sees one ad, they will see the next one in the sequence. And once they have seen that ad, the next will be triggered by FB/Instagram/Youtube — it’s a multichannel retargeting effort.

You can also combine this with super specific ad scheduling for really clever ad sequences:

For example, if there was a conference with a bunch of potential customers, you could hyper target the conference location across peak hours advertising your talk, booth, and follow-up contact details in that order.

The possibilities are pretty cool.

We do a lot of retargeting and sequencing with our RF Accelerator clients, which you can learn more about here.

But what about advertising to people who haven’t been to our site?

PPC and lighting the fire

While you have to be a bit more judicious on your spending with PPC, paying for cold clicks can be a great way to reach new audience members or build up social proof for your new content.

If you see great organic results already (high session time, low bounce rate, lots of shares on social media etc.) on a piece of content, then it’s probably worth investing in PPC a bit.

By taking subscribers and customers who you know are already engaged, you can create a lookalike audience that finds people similar to the ones who already enjoy your content.

Then, we take the videos that did well organically and send it that new lookalike audience. Take this Facebook video we did, for example 🙂

This is is only the tip of the iceberg with the power of PPC, but identifying those top performers and amplifying them is a great place to start.

Step 6: We release everything EVERYWHERE

Once everything is set up, we roll out.

Here is an example of how far we take this:

We take one interview with an influencer and turn it into…

5,000+ word article (this article, e.g.).

2 podcast episodes per interview.

One ten minute video for YouTube.

One ten minute video for Facebook.

Three 1 min videos for Facebook & Instagram.

Three 15 second stories for Instagram and Facebook.

And that’s just the organic platform posts. We also post on relevant industry sites like Growth Hacker 🙂

In total we publish 6 social media posts per week on across channels like personal Facebook profiles, Facebook pages, our Facebook groups, the Wild Audience Instagram, LinkedIn, and Youtube.

That’s a lot of opportunity to reach people 🙂

The idea is to be consistently ubiquitous and engaging with each piece. This helps you encourage both share ability and depth of value — allowing you to entertain both your internal tribe and pull new audiences into your Relationship Funnel.

Step 7: Repeat

After all is said and done we do it all again.

Good thing we love this stuff 🙂

We currently release two of these articles and all of their ancillary components (interviews, videos, etc.) a month.

And in order for you to maintain consistency like that, you have to have an established content process.

We spent years fine tuning ours, and it’s the same process we work on with our RF Accelerator clients 🙂

You can learn more about that here.

Quick tip: We’ve found content banking to be super helpful. The more articles you can have in your backlog, the better.

So try batching at least 1 interview a week over a few months. This should give you enough time to prep for each interview, keep up with your other responsibilities, and be consistent. Overdoing it just sacrifices quality of work and life 🙂

There’s no better feeling than knowing you have 3 months of content stacked up and ready to go.

Conclusion

Remember that a content marketing machine is only a piece of the puzzle.

Content marketing brings in traffic and can convert on its own in small ways if CTAs are presented, but content marketing is never going to be fully utilized without a sales funnel behind it.

And nothing is better than a Relationship Funnel.

Here’s a link to that Relationship Funnel blog again.

We covered a LOT here, so as a recap we learned that:

1. A content marketing machine is one of the best tools we have for lead generation.
2. Rand Fishkin got where he is today through content.
3. A content marketing machine consists of keyword research, centralized content, and smart outreach.
4. A content marketing machine is simply the organic traffic generator for your sales funnel.

Ready to discover what a Relationship Funnel can do in your business?

We love working with smart, passionate entrepreneurs who already have a successful high-ticket business and client case studies but want to grow into a sustainable seven-figure business.

Sound like you?

Get in touch and make 2019 a year to remember.

Best of luck!

Bastian – CEO/Founder of Wild Audience

HubSpot’s Entire Online Sales Funnel Uncovered. How They Convert Cold Prospects Into Customers. This step-by-step sales system (you can easily steal) built a $375.6 Million a Year Online business.  

Have you ever struggled or thought about any of these questions?

• • How do we sell?

• • Who do we sell to?

• • How many markets do we go after?

• • How do we cross-sell vs selling to new prospects?

• • How many sales reps do we need?
  • Can we create a more efficient sales process with automation?

If you’ve had any of these problems, this may be the most important article you will ever read.

We’re going to uncover exactly how HubSpot sells …

All the way from A to Z.

This is everything from taking an anonymous visitor all the way to the close. How to get convert cold leads into paying customers. The entire process Hubspot uses to continue this insane growth.

If you even implement 1% of what we talk about, you could build a $300,000 a year business with the right product / service.

This is the “best example” you can follow for establishing a profitable relationship with customers. Using inbound marketing and your existing sales funnel.

Note: this doesn’t mean you have to have a corporate structure to learn from this article.

In fact, a lot of what we will talk about will be even easier to install if you don’t. As long as you have SOME sort of online sales funnel, you’re in the right place.

At the end of this article, you’re going to understand how to:

1. 1. Have a more personalized sales experience.
   2. Have a more automated sales process.
   3. Increase your sales call close rates.

You’ll get the most out of this article by outlining your own sales process beforehand. Then looking for ways you can “plug in” what Hubspot is doing into your own business. Not everything will fit, but there are a bunch of cool techniques we’ll talk about that you can start implementing right now.

Almost everything we’re going to talk about came out of an amazing conversation I had with Hubspot’s VP of Sales Strategy and Operations. Channing Ferrer.

You can check that out below 🙂

Video Summary

Listen to the Podcast

Let’s dive into the steps ..

What we’ll be covering:

1. 1. How to turn prospects into leads.
   2. How to use Key Engagement Indicators to help movement through a sales process.
   3. Using specialized sales reps and pathways to match leads to sales reps.
   4. How to handle a discovery meeting.
   5. How to run a perfect demo/sales meeting and how to use that momentum to close the sale.
   6. Using proper evaluation and incentives. To build a sales machine that is efficient without sacrificing humanity.

Are you ready? Let’s do this 🙂

In order to have a functioning sales machine, there is one thing you need above all else: prospects.

Also known as visitors.

Also known as traffic.

If you don’t have your primary traffic generator, you should.

If you don’t know the conversion rates for that traffic source, you should.

(more on how to calculate this later ..)

There are many common sources: social media, ads, organic traffic, etc.

For HubSpot, their main traffic generator is content.

More specifically, their blogs.

Their content machine is almost too big to believe 🙂

They are currently fifth in the online marketing space for overall traffic rank and attract over 25 million visitors per month.

Yeah. Pretty cool huh?

This was accomplished through:

• • Writing new content

• • Hosting guest posts

• • Rehashing old blogs

• • Releasing free tools (e.g. their Website Grader) that are useful to their target market.

• • Webinars (both educational and demonstrative)

• • Events and Conferences
  • Certifications

Hubspot’s blog machine is impressive. They create hundreds of articles every month and are constantly switching and matching lead magnets with the best blog posts. They keep a consistent eye on which blog post / lead magnet combos are converting the best. All the way from first-touch to sale.

This style of mix-and-match experimentation is super important for increasing your conversion rates.

You need to evaluate everything.

Your best traffic sources. Your best blog posts.

Weight them accordingly ..

.. And measure them regularly.  

Don’t stop at evaluating conversion rates based on sources. Sure, you should know your conversion rates on social, organic traffic, and advertising, but your analysis shouldn’t end there.

HubSpot weights different blogs and white papers as varying levels of ENGAGEMENT. Using lead scoring, HubSpot puts more weight on prospects reading a research article over a short blog post. E.g. a 2,000 word, long-form blog on the effectiveness of blogging in 2018 over a lighter 600 word blog post like 10 Funny Blogging Headlines.

They give the 2,000 word long form blog post more weight.

While both blogs are on the same topic, one is clearly for those digging a bit deeper. Take a close look at your content, and see which pieces demonstrate more depth and weight them accordingly.

When it comes to blogging in your business, it’s all about consistency and quality.

HubSpot recommends a minimum of 1 quality, well-written, 600+ word article per week. These should offer better information than your competitor’s, for the same keywords. Your traffic numbers will only continue to go up as you increase frequency.

These constraints are due to Google’s algorithm placing more value than ever on relevant, informative content. Gone are the days of just keyword stuffing and rehashing other articles without adding any value.

Once you have consistency and quality, you can get a bit more granular with your approach while beginning to scale.

HubSpot’s go-to habits for converting prospects into leads:

• • Match your blogs with the most relevant lead magnets or next step CTAs. Mix and match these to see which ones work best with which blog posts. An ideal lead magnet conversion rate is between 4 and 10%. If your numbers are lower than this, it’s time to change something!

• Use emails to warm up prospects and identify their interests while installing beliefs. This is our favorite thing to do at Wild Audience 🙂

Learn how to use install beliefs to dramatically increase your prospect ->   customer rate with our VideoFruit case study.

• Use a lead scoring system based on user behavior to rank your prospects. You shouldn’t treat someone who has read 5 blogs and 1 blogs as if they’re the same quality. And again, different blogs can indicate different levels of engagement.
• Take your unicorns and amplify them with social advertising. Are user retention, conversion rates, and organic traffic super promising on a new piece? Don’t let that momentum go to waste! Spread that blog around using strategies like GaryVee’s content distribution methods and complement it with Facebook advertising to capitalize. This might be your chance to go viral 🙂
• Create a community for your prospects and customers to interact in. Allow your customers to learn from each other.
• Don’t hesitate to reach for keywords that aren’t directly related to your product. As long as they are relevant to your audience, then it can be used. For example, HubSpot has a released a bunch of Excel guides. Is this relevant to their product? Not really, but they know that marketers and the people using their product live in that world.
• Never cold call! Make absolutely sure a prospect has raised their hand either by responding to an email or requesting more information. Before you reach out.

—

Apart from the internal data and analysis behind the scenes, there’s a lot to be said about the blog and page design. Considering the sheer amount of time HubSpot spends working on conversion rates, keeping an eye on what they do is a smart move.

Let’s look at how they convert prospects on their site:

What Your Business Can Learn From HubSpot’s Prospect-Converting Website

Tip #1: Use short sidebar forms to get readers into your system.

HubSpot has one initial goal: to get people into their online sales funnel. They worry about collecting information later.

The first step is just getting people involved, and that means keeping forms as short as possible — just an email address will do.

Note: This can be adjusted based on the amount of “noise” in your online sales funnel. If you’re swamped with low-quality leads and don’t have the ability to automate that selection process with software like HubSpot, it may be smart to increase the barrier of entry by including more form fields.

Tip #2: Offer a lead magnet after someone signs up for your blog

Always provide a simple and relevant next step. Someone signs up for your blog? Offer a relevant eBook or lead magnet immediately. Someone signs up for your lead magnet? See if they want to see a case study. Someone views a case study? Send them a demo or free trial. You get the idea.

Tip #3: Put your key offer on the top of your page

Whatever your best offer is (free trial, schedule a demo, free tool), etc., offer it above the fold. HubSpot knows that getting people to try the software is their main priority because it’s a key engagement indicator (more on this later).  

Tip #4: Give people options to take the next step immediately if they want.

If someone signs up for your free trial, don’t hide the fact that they can go directly to a demo or purchase.

Don’t force it on them, but make it obvious. You’ll lose revenue if you prevent people from moving at their own pace.

Tip #5: Ask bucketing questions after users agree to try your initial offer.

At Wild Audience, we’re super fans of bucketing and segmentation 🙂

Bucketing questions help your marketing team send the right materials via automations (using Wild Mail) and help your sales reps better understand your leads in order to figure out which services are best for them / which pain points are most important to them.

You can also use these to qualify your leads. For example, if you don’t work with anyone under $10k/month in revenue, then you should have budget as a bucketing question! If they don’t meet that standard, then you know to keep them in your marketing funnel until they’re ready so you don’t waste your sales reps’ resources.

But how does HubSpot decide which offers and upsells are most important to them?

That’s based on something they like to call KEIs. We go into detail on this in the next section 🙂

So what do you do with your prospects once they’re coming in? How do you sift through them, and when do you know when they’re ready to talk to someone?

One of the coolest things we uncovered in our interview with Channing is the idea of key engagement indicators 🙂

Sales is a science. Not an art.

If you know what key actions end up converting your customers at the best rate, then you have the opportunity to increase your close rate. Plain and simple.

To do this you need to know your numbers and what HubSpot calls your key engagement indicators (KEIs).

Key engagement indicators are the most important engagement steps that your prospects take to prove they are ready for your product.

The kinds of questions you need to ask are:

1. 1. What one engagement step do all or most of our buyers take?
   2. What happens to the sales cycle when they perform this engagement piece? Does it speed up but decrease close rate? Or does it slow down but increase our close rate or vice versa
   3. Does prospect source affect the effectiveness of the key engagement indicator we’re discussing?

And more 🙂

KEIs ultimately vary business to business, and it’s up to you to determine what is most important (by experimenting and evaluating with data), but here are some common online sales funnel metrics to keep an eye on.

• Attending an educational webinar
• Signing up for a free trial
• Using a free tool for X amount of time.
• Agreeing to a free strategy call.
• Completing a quiz.

HubSpot’s Most Important KEI

Channing said that they have a 25% close rate when someone invites a team member to collaborate within their software.

You best believe they are paying attention to that 🙂

Especially when you think about how expensive HubSpot’s products can be (they charge on a monthly retainer basis) and usually sign contracts for 6 months to a year.

That’s an amazing KEI, and one that they should (and have) immediately prioritized.

Check out what’s on the homepage of a free trial user:

It’s starting to make a bit more sense why they put that there 🙂

Of course, they’re going to pitch this to their prospects!

Once you have …

Your key engagement indicators identified …

You are experimenting with different prospect lead magnets and upsells …

And getting leads …

It’s time to think about who should reach out and when.

Now that we’ve identified a prospect as a lead (using a lead magnet or KEI), it’s time to reach out with an appropriate next step. At the right time. This next step varies depending on what you know about your prospect and the size of your team.

Here’s an overview of common sales positions as outlined by HubSpot themselves:

Take a second and think through your current sales team. Are any of these responsibilities not covered? Even by one person? Even if you think someone is covering them, it’d be smart to take a look — it could be affecting your close rate.

—

Back to assigning leads to reps and reaching out.

How you reach out and who gets the lead depends on the source and quality of the lead. So let’s start with how your team should evaluate their leads.

How to Evaluate Your Leads and Determine When They’re Ready for Outreach

For HubSpot, someone signing up to their blog is not a lead. They are still a prospect.

Their content machine is just too massive to waste the human capital contacting every single email subscriber. Instead, they let their content and upsells continue to separate prospects based on engagement and pull them toward their KEIs.

If your business is super niche, then this may be different for you. If you know that your blog to close rate is 5%, then your blog subscribers are worth much more to you.

What you need to do is to set a baseline for your sales reps to determine what qualifies someone as Lead, MQL, and SQL.

MQL stands for marketing qualified lead and SQL stands for sales qualified lead. These definitions are unique to each company.

Here’s a graphic that covers this:

For HubSpot, unless the lead is inbound (more on this later), then it’s not smart to reach out directly until someone is at least an MQL or SQL.

Let’s think through how your online business could outline your funnel stages 🙂

1. 1. Prospect/Visitor – Visit to the website
   2. Lead – Downloads a lead magnet OR reads >5 blogs OR views the sales page after reading a blog.
   3. MQL – Downloads >3 lead magnets, attends a webinar, attends a conference, has opened and clicked the last 5 marketing emails.
   4. SQL – Has downloaded a free trial called OR qualified themselves as an MQL by filling out the appropriate budget amount for your service (via bucketing & segmentation).
   5. Opportunity – Has met with a rep and is attending a strategy or demo call next week OR has finished a demo and is in the closing stage.
   6. Customer – Sweet, sweet victory.

Make sense? Take the time to establish these for your company if you haven’t already. Remember they are fluid. After you run with these definitions for a bit, you should tweak them according to the quality of leads that your sales reps are seeing.

For example, if your pipeline is full of people who aren’t ready, then you need to make it more difficult to qualify as an SQL. And if all of a sudden you see a steep decrease in sales rep communication, then you need to relax the definitions a bit.

You should also see if there’s a way for you to be smarter about who you assign leads to. If you work in a consultancy that services a wide variety of industries, it would be smart to send the lead that works in aviation to someone who has spoken or worked with aviation in the past.

Once you get people in your online sales funnel and they qualify themselves as an SQL, all you need to do is assign them to a rep and get ready to reach out 🙂

The next step is to connect.

This step is for your SQLs, and this responsibility depends on the size of your business.

For HubSpot, they have employees whose only job is to get a meeting booked and hand them off to a sales rep.

That’s it.

Their quota is for meetings booked — not actual sales.

For smaller companies, you may start with having the reps handle the entire process from start to finish.

HubSpot hates cold calling, so once a prospect identifies themselves as an SQL, it’s time to send out an email.

Speed and timing is everything in sales. So the sooner after they perform a KEI, the better.

Here’s how HubSpot approaches it:

Your one goal is to get a meeting.

The day after I performed the KEI of signing up for a free trial and exploring the tool, I got this email.

It’s short, it’s sweet, it has blanket bucketing, and it’s entire purpose is to get on the phone and start a conversation — to get to that connect meeting 🙂

If someone doesn’t respond, then you can follow up a week later. If they don’t respond after that, then you should downgrade them to a MQL until that person performs another KEI or reaches out to you.

Speaking of which…

How Your Plan Changes for Inbound vs. Outbound Leads

As mentioned, you want your website to not block people from moving quickly. So if someone reaches out directly via chat, email, or phone, you need to have a system in place for that as well.

This obviously has a lot more variables for what the next step should be, but you want to give certain sales reps on your team the space to field inbound leads. After all, an inbound lead is almost always further along the sales cycle than an outbound lead — they are performing the ultimate KEI! Initiating a conversation 🙂

Your sales rep should first try to understand and answer all of the bucketing and pain questions that usually happen on a connect call. Listen to the customer, establish authority, identify the key decision maker, and demonstrate value. After that, you try to get them into your complimentary strategy call or demo according to their qualification and needs.

Bonus Tip: Develop a Sales Hook for Your Best Prospects

Another really cool thing that HubSpot does is personalize a sales hook for their best leads. For HubSpot, these are the corporate clients, the multi-million dollar companies who have the potential to bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars to the company.

What they do is actually take 5-10 minutes evaluating a lead’s website, shoot a quick screencast (using Zoom or something similar) of what they could do better (SEO is lacking here, design is faulty, no lead magnet there, etc.) and use that delivery of value as the basis point for a conversation.

It wouldn’t be smart to do this for all of your leads, but take a second and think about a scalable sales hook that you can develop for those big fish 🙂

Other misc tips for reaching out:

• • Use your bucketing questions to get an idea of what your lead is interested in, but don’t prevent the prospect from going in a different direction.

• • Use templates to cut down on the ad hoc writing, but always personalize when you can.

• • Use Calendly or Hubspot Sales to make booking a conversation easy on your prospects.

• Don’t be afraid to point prospects toward other pieces of relevant content.

At this point you should have meetings on the books, but what needs to happen in that first meeting? How can your sales team make the most of that first real conversation?

Let’s find out 🙂

Alright! So you or your rep finally has a lead on the phone for the first time. What’s the game plan? Do you even have one?

Well, you should.

HubSpot has this down to a science, and I was curious what actually hopping on the phone with them would be like ..

So I did 🙂

And here’s what happened..

Let the Customer Lead by Asking Why

The initial meeting is all about the why. Why was the person compelled to sign up or display interest in your service? Why are they here? What made them curious? What are their goals for their business, and most importantly, what is making it difficult for them?

Here’s how the HubSpot rep approached this with me. This was her second line:

“Listen. Thanks for booking your call. I’m interested to know what’s driving your interest in HubSpot. What can I help you with today?”

She never pushed or went into some long spiel about the product. It was just establishing a connection, being personable, and listening to what I needed as a business owner. That’s respect-based sales 🙂 If your product isn’t a good fit for someone’s problems, they deserve to know!

Frame your product as the solution

After I responded, she knew I had a basic awareness of the software and its abilities, so she asked based on my goals of growth and formalization of sales, how do YOU see HubSpot fitting in?

This is important 🙂

Do you see what she did there?

She subtly pushed me to internalize HubSpot as the solution to my problem. Letting me work through it on my own. This is a smart technique that you absolutely need to employ.

After I responded, she continued to tie HubSpot’s services to the goals and issues I outlined.

Don’t Limit Your Products Based On Their Engagement

Part of the connect call is learning about the big picture for the lead’s business. Their dreams. Their goals. Be a close, personable listener, and don’t be afraid to mention other products or services that your firm offers that may be a better fit than what the lead originally reached out about.

For example, she referenced the sales product as what makes the most immediate sense for me, but she also referenced a few common problems and HubSpot’s solutions for those.

She’s basing those suggestions off people she has worked with in the past who were in a similar situation. This is a great way to avoid limiting your offerings as a business and incorporate social proof at the same time.

That brings me to my next point.

Discover Their Pain Points & Reference Other Customers in Similar Situations

Repeatedly throughout the conversation, the HubSpot rep would talk about other people and how they thought through the same pain and points and decisions I am. This establishes authority and trust in the process moving forward.

In other words, it establishes these beliefs:

1. 1. HubSpot has worked for other people (social proof).
   2. The rep I’m talking to knows their stuff (authority).

Discuss the Final Conversion Point

Always establish a next step. This changes based on the goals and product fit, but most of the time this is encouraging a free trial or KEI offer and then setting up a deadline for the next point of contact.

“I’m going to send you some information on how partner agencies are set up, and then you can look over things before I reach out next Thursday. Is that okay?

You’ve got options for this depending on how time-sensitive and qualified the lead is.

You can establish that you’ll be handing them off to someone with more expertise in their space (a sales rep that works in a specific industry etc.). You could go ahead and schedule a proposal review call. You can suggest reading materials or a free trial — that’s ultimately up to your rep and business model.

And that brings us to the most important part of the whole process 🙂

The Purpose of a Demo/Sales Call

All you need to do in a demo is prove that your product / service is a good fit for their problem. If you’ve done your job up to this point, then you know this to be true, and proving that won’t be hard! The only time you’ll lack confidence is if your product / service really isn’t a good solution for them.

How to Conduct a Perfect Demo

This is the most critical part of the close, but conducting a demo doesn’t have to be intimidating or difficult.

For SaaS businesses, this is just walking through your product and personalizing it to your opportunity. For online businesses or consultants, this is when you pitch exactly how your firm will solve their problem, typically through a presentation of data and specific steps.

Here’s how to make the most of it according to HubSpot:

• • Confirm the meeting is happening the day of and verify that the key decision maker will be there.

• • Use a personalized slide deck and software like GoToMeeting.

• • Take time to get to know the prospect before hopping into the presentation. Be human!

• • Set an agenda at the top of the meeting.

• • Reference past conversations

• • Explain the product while always referencing their specific pain points and why your product is the solution.

• • Always be open to questions and letting the customer figure it out for themselves.

• • Set expectations & next steps.
  • Record the presentation. This is useful to send to the opportunity afterward and to review internally to see what went well and what didn’t.

If you do most of those, then your team will already be off to a fantastic start.

HubSpot also has a habit of using multiple sales reps on the call to let a newer sales rep learn and be a part of these conversations before taking lead.

After the call is over, it’s finally time to get the sale 🙂

Nothing kills closes more than letting too much time go by. At the end of your meeting, you need to immediately discuss when the customer how the customer would like to move forward.

This is best done by:

• • Validating that they enjoyed the presentation. Make them say it in their own words: “So… how did you like our call? In your opinion, do you think (your business) will solve your problems and help you grow?”

• • Rehashing the problem. Tie your product to the solution (again).

• • Making them understand the cost of the problem they have. This is also known as the cost of inaction. “Your problem is costing you $20k a year, our product costs $5k a year. Do you agree that this is a smart business decision?”

• Offer time-sensitive discounts if necessary. A little extra incentive goes a long way.

After all of that, remember that this is your time to cross-sell if it’s appropriate as well. Think bundled discount on software plans etc. 🙂

After the sale is over (win or loss), it’s time to evaluate what happened.

The thing about your sales process is that it should be constantly evolving based on feedback and experimentation.

Swapping out processes, variables, and techniques HAS to be a fundamental part of your culture, or you will lose out on revenue.

Key Metrics Your Business Should Keep an Eye On:

• Visitor-to-Lead Conversion Rate
• Lead-to-MQL Conversion Rate
• % Sales Accepted Leads
• Lead Work Rates
• MQL-to-Opportunity Conversion Rate
• Opportunity-to-Customer Conversion Rate
• Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rate
• Sales Cycle Length
• Average Cost Per Sale

HubSpot obviously makes it really easy to see these numbers in their software, but with different software or a little Google Analytics digging you can figure out any one of these metrics.

Get the list of key metrics your business should be tracking and their definitions here.

Try incorporating a monthly check-in to review all of them and determine where to focus your marketing efforts for the next month.

Tie Your Sales Team’s Incentives to Customer Success

Traditional sales models are outdated and ineffective. Your business isn’t going to survive if your sales reps keep closing unqualified leads through pressuring tactics — all this means is that your user retention is going to be awful.

HubSpot actually claws back commissions of their reps if their customer doesn’t stay on for more than four months (and sometimes even longer). This forces sales reps to only close people who are actually a good fit, and this makes your monthly revenue more reliable and develops a much healthier customer base.

Conclusion

Well, there you have it 🙂

A look inside how one of the biggest online businesses approaches sales.

There is SO much to unpack here 🙂

To summarize, you should:

• Establish your sales process.
• Determine your lifecycle stage definitions (MQL, SQL, etc.)
• Optimize your blog for prospect conversion.
• Identify your KEIs
• Assign the right leads to the right reps
• Reach out to the SQL
• Conduct a connect call
• Get a demo or sales call on the books.
• Close!
• Evaluate 🙂

Other Bits of Sales Gold from HubSpot

Here are few other awesome things Channing & HubSpot recommend for companies building their online sales funnel:

• • The smaller the business, the smaller the sales cycle.

• • Use form swaps to allow a customer to submit multiple forms of similarity but be flagged as a high engagement prospect.

• • Reps should only be allowed so many leads to ensure the quality of outreach.

• • Hire your salespeople according to a criteria based on company values.

• • Align marketing and sales by communicating as openly as possible.

• Match sales incentives with customer retention.

And here’s the link to the full interview again 🙂

—

Interested in equipping your new sales process with an online sales funnel that converts at 6% or higher?

Imagine what you could do with that level of engagement 🙂

We run a program here called Relationship Funnel Accelerator.

It’s a “done-with-you” service where we take everything we’ve learned at Wild Audience and apply it to your business.

So you can get results like these 🙂

Interested?

Let’s do this.

When I first started my online business I struggled to sell products ..

I was mainly using product launches. And while this old approach made me some money, it was a lot of hard work.

(I will reveal a better way in a sec ..)

Video Summary

Listen to the Podcast

I had to spend countless days, or even weeks, building new launch sequences every time I wanted to make a buck.

Worst of all, it wasn’t scalable.

Results were subpar because I was sending the same emails to everyone.

My marketing wasn’t personalized to people’s individual needs.

Some of the best salespeople (Like Oren Klaff) close million dollar deals because they build rapport with their prospects and customize their sales pitch.

So I thought to myself ..

What if I could create a virtual salesperson that works 24/7/365 that sells on autopilot?

And what if this salesperson could collect data on each of my prospects and send them information personalized to their interests?

A good salesperson can build relationships, create trust, install buying beliefs and then present the right offer at the right time.

Now picture having an entire sales team delivering your message and selling your products to thousands of people.

The good news is you CAN deliver sales pitches at scale by using email marketing. If you use a full funnel marketing strategy and build an awesome sales funnel.

That is what this article is all about. You will discover exactly how to do that here.

But isn’t email marketing dead?

With the ability to reach customers through other channels, many people are focusing their efforts on other areas like social media, SEO or banner ads ..

However, these are NOT the highest ROI channels.

According to a report by McKinsey and Co, email is 40x more effective than social media marketing. The Direct Marketing Association reports a $38 return for every dollar invested in email marketing. It kills every other channel. By a long margin.

Some business owners avoid email marketing because they are afraid to bombard their customers with sales messages. But a survey by Marketing Sherpa revealed that 91% of people actually want to get promotional emails from companies they do business with.

Email marketing is not dead.

Sales funnels that push unwanted products upon your readers are, but email marketing done the right way is alive and well.

You can build sales funnels the right way by using Respect Based Marketing. Use Relationship Funnels and smart funnel automation to send people helpful content and genuine offers. Then results like this are possible ..

We’ve built our email sales funnels with ActiveCampaign in the past (we now use Wild Mail).

In this article, I’ll cover the 4 Stages of an email sales funnel and how to set up each stage with ActiveCampaign.  

Want to learn how I create high converting Relationship Funnels and automate everything?

Then let’s get started!

Overview: 4 Stages of building a Sales Funnel

A comprehensive email sales funnel consists of 4 stages:

1. Awareness Stage – Make prospects aware of your brand and convince them to join your email list.
2. Relationship Builder Stage – Build a relationship with your prospect by doing things like sending them educational content.
3. Selling Stage – After you have built trust with your readers, you can sell them products that help them solve their problems.
4. Upselling Stage – To maximize profits, offer relevant upsells to your customers.

The goal of your sales funnel is to move your prospect from awareness to the point of sale.

In the following sections, I will break down in detail how to use ActiveCampaign to set up each stage of your sales funnel so that you can install buying beliefs, build relationships and sell your products… all on autopilot!

If you would like to see an overview of all the tools we use at Wild Audience to implement our email sales funnel, click on the image below and download your PDF.

Step-by-Step Walkthrough: How to Build a Sales Funnel with ActiveCampaign

Let’s walk through how to build a sales funnel step by step.

Awareness Stage

The awareness stage consists of lead generation and segmentation.

Lead Generation

The email sales funnel sequence begins with lead generation.

Here, you make your target customer aware of your brand and get them to join your email list.

How do you get people to join your email list?

By providing educational content that is interesting to your target customer.

Here are a couple of ways you can do this ..

1. Create a blog post

Blogging is a great way to establish authority and drive organic traffic… for free!

When writing a blog post, be sure to spend time creating a resource that educates readers and gets them excited about learning more from you.

To persuade readers to join your email list, offer a content upgrade. This will provide even more educational content. To get the content upgrade, the reader will need to opt in to your email list.

Consistent blogging works because blogging attracts organic traffic.

Just make sure that your content is top quality and that you have a content upgrade to entice readers to sign up to your email list.

2. Produce an EBook or PDF Guide

Another way to grow an email list is to produce an EBook that targets your prospects’ pain points.

Offer that EBook in exchange for their email address.

Then use paid ads (like Facebook, Google or Instagram) to drive targeted traffic to your landing page.

Creating a useful PDF download and promoting it with PPC is a good way to build an email list quickly.

Segmentation

So you’ve figured out how to grow a targeted email list? Great!

Let’s take it to the next level with segmentation.

Segmentation involves gathering data from your email subscribers so that you can send them personalized content geared towards their interests.

Why is segmentation important?

Because sending content targeted towards your reader’s interests increases engagement. Higher engagement leads to more sales.

At Wild Audience, we segment our list by asking 4-5 questions when they opt in. Qualified leads will take the time to answer the questions. We found that 71.74% of people that click the download link actually complete the opt in.

You can see an example of how this works by clicking on the image to download the Relationship Funnel graphic in this article:

After someone clicks the image, they’ll get a quick survey like this:

Once someone enters the requested information, their data gets stored in ActiveCampaign.

After the sign up is complete, ActiveCampaign will automatically deliver the bonus PDF that they signed up for.

After that, we can start building a relationship with our new subscribers using automated email sequences:

Relationship Building Stage

You’ve got your prospect’s email address. Now what?

You can create a Relationship Building Sequence (RBS) to bond with your readers on autopilot. ActiveCampaign is a great tool to use to implement your RBS.

A good RBS will help you achieve the following:

– Establish a relationship. Business will always be relationships between people. Never forget that!

– Build trust.

– Establish authority.

– Install all the necessary buying beliefs.

– Virtually close your prospects: Make your readers imagine what their life will be like when they use your product or work with you.

– Ultimately, the goal for your RBS is to prepare your prospect to purchase your products or services.

How to Automate Your RBS

You can do this by sending them a sequence of 4-7 emails.

These emails should be written to install your belief system into your prospects’ minds.

You should also optimize your emails to maximize engagement, so you can get results like this:

Why is this important?

Because getting people micro-invested in your content will increase your conversion rates.

Here are a few ways to get people to micro-invest in your content and build engagement.

1. Create an activation hook – One way to get people to become engaged with your content is to simply ask them to reply to your email.

Your new subscriber will be more engaged because you actually took the time to build a relationship with them directly.

Here’s a flow chart of what this automation sequence looks like:

I ask my readers to reply to my email and respond with the word “Ready”. When they do, I send them some free bonuses.

Here’s a screenshot of Matthew replying to my email:

2. Frequency selectors – Let your users decide on how often to receive emails. This simple step prevents people from unsubscribing because you are sending too many emails.

Subscribers can consume your content in their own time. At a pace they are comfortable with.

You can see how we do that in the screenshot below.

If they click A, they get the next email immediately.

If they click B, they get it in 2 days time.

Pretty cool, huh?

3. Cliffhangers and open loops – Get readers excited about future emails with cliffhangers and open loops. Hint at the awesome content that you will be sending in your next email to build anticipation.

If your open loops are working, don’t be surprised if you start getting emails like this:

4. Dynamic content – Use dynamic content to personalize your emails for your readers. Personalization lets readers know that you are talking directly to them!

In this example, our email is personalized for the reader based on their revenue level.

5. Lead scoring to track engagement – Finally, use lead scoring to track reader engagement.

If specific emails in your sequence aren’t receiving strong engagement, you can rewrite them to improve performance. Or simply remove them from the sequence.

For example, you can create a point system to give points to prospects based on the following actions. Actions like purchasing products increases lead scores more than less committed actions like clicking a link.

1.      Clicks a link: 5 points
2.      Replies to email: 10 points
3.      Visits sales page: 20 points
4.      Buys frontend product: 100 points
5.      Buys core products: 200 points

ActiveCampaign automatically keeps track of lead scores and you can even view each prospect’s lead score individually if you want:

When can you start selling?

When you create your RBS, people should feel eager to purchase your product due to the awesome content you are giving them for free.

Focus on delivering value in your RBS. If you do this ..

People will naturally feel pulled towards your products instead of feeling like products are being pushed onto them.

Then you can insert links to your conversion event into your emails so your readers get the opportunity to buy your stuff.

If you are selling a high ticket item, link to your sales page from the first email in your RBS and every email after that. Simpler sales funnels work for high ticket items because buyers that are purchasing these items already have a lot of knowledge about them.

If you are selling a course, start linking to your sales page somewhere between emails 4-7. People interested in courses need a few emails to educate them about your solution and why they need it, before they make a purchase.

Use your earlier emails to educate the prospect, build anticipation for the course and install buying beliefs.

What is the goal of the RBS?

Most people won’t buy during the RBS. But that’s okay, because making sales is not the goal of the RBS.

The goal of the RBS is to install buying beliefs.

If your prospects are not ready to buy yet, then put them into an “Evergreen Newsletter”. This weekly newsletter will continue to educate your prospect while installing more buying beliefs.

You can link to your sales page at the end of each email so that your reader can buy when they are ready. Once they are ready, your readers will enter your sales sequence.

Selling Stage

Now that all the necessary buying beliefs are installed, you’re ready to close the sale!

Choose your conversion event and send your prospects to it. Below are some examples of conversion events.

1. Text-based sales page – A long or short form text-based sales page can be a good way to sell lower priced products.

Here is an examples of one of my text-based sales pages:

https://wildaudience.com/revolution

2. Video Sales Letter (VSL) – A video sales letter is another way to sell your product or service. With video, you can form a more personal connection with your viewers and demonstrate your expertise.
3. Hybrid – Your selling sequence can incorporate both text and video formats. The advantage of having both is that some people prefer text that they can read quickly while others will prefer the interactivity of video.

Here’s an example of a page that incorporates both text and video:

https://wildaudience.com/consulting/

4. Live webinar – Live webinars can be a great format as it allows you to interact with your audience, answer questions and address sales objections. People often use live webinars to sell high ticket items or services.
5. Evergreen webinar – Once you’ve tested your webinar and optimized its selling potential, you can turn your webinar into an evergreen webinar. This will sell your products 24/7. Evergreen webinars run on autopilot and earn you money while you sleep.
6. Application – If you have limited capacity, you may want prospects to fill out an application to work with you. Ask questions that will allow you to pre-qualify prospects so that you can quickly decide who you want to work with.
7. Strategy, sales or discovery call – If you are selling a high priced consulting service or product, then you might want to get your prospect on a sales or discovery call.

High priced services usually have a more complex sales process. With a sales call, you can learn more about the buyer’s situation, overcome objections and see if working together makes sense.

Here’s the landing page I use to direct people to my consulting services:

https://wildaudience.com/consulting/

8. Trial – A inexpensive paid or free trial can be a good way to get people to try out your product, especially if you are selling a site membership or recurring software subscription. If your customer likes your product, then they might become a regular customer.

3 Ways to Close

Now that you know the 8 different conversion events, how do you get your prospects to those pages?

There are 3 ways to send prospects to your conversion event:

1. Link from your RBS to your sales event.

People go through your RBS, they click a link in there to check out your sales page, and then they purchase.

However, the majority of people will convert a little later.

2. Link from your Evergreen Newsletter to your sales event.

They recieve your weekly Evergreen Newsletter, and click a link in one of those emails. This will take them to the sales page as well.

The Evergreen Newsletter keeps you on their mind. Weekly.

So, when they are ready to purchase your solution, they will.

3. Behaviour-Based pitching

Once a user reaches a certain lead score, you can send them through your sales sequence.

Your sales sequence is an automated email sequence that is designed to sell.

You can use scarcity, discounts and bonuses to increase the likelihood that they’ll buy. Just be sure to avoid creating fake scarcity to trick people into buying, because people can often detect that tactic and don’t like it (which could hurt your business long term ..)

Upselling Stage

Getting a customer is great, but if you really want to make money you absolutely need to upsell other products and services to your existing customers.

Your existing customers already have a relationship with you. If you delivered a great experience with their first purchase, they may want to buy from you again.

Just keep delivering value with each transaction!

How to increase customer lifetime value (CLV)

1. Email sequence

You should add all new customers to an email onboarding sequence. The onboarding sequence helps customers get started with your product and get the most value from it.

At Wild Audience, we use a 4-part email sequence for our new Relationship Funnel customers.

Once they’ve received value from their initial purchase, add them into an upsell sequence where you upsell them a more expensive premium product or cross sell them a related product.

2. Call them

With tools like Zapier and Close, you can create webhooks from ActiveCampaign (or Wild Mail) so that buyers of your product are automatically sent into your sales CRM.

You can then follow up by calling them to get feedback, to see if they are interested in purchasing one of your higher priced products or services.

3. Show them ads on Facebook or Instagram

ActiveCampaign actually integrates with Facebook. You can put subscribers into a custom audience from ActiveCampaign automatically. If you do this, these people will see a very specific ad on Facebook or Instagram.

These specific ads form a “retargeting ad sequence”.

These retargeting ads direct buyers to the sales pages for relevant premium products.

Since your buyers are already familiar with your brand they are more likely to click your ad. They are also more likely to buy than cold prospects.

To Sum It Up

I hope you’re pumped about building a sales funnel with ActiveCampaign.

To create a scalable business that runs email campaigns on autopilot, you need a good email marketing automation tool.

You need a tool that can handle the Relationship Building Sequence (RBS), the actual sales funnel and upsells. You need a tool that allows you to segment your prospects based on interests and personalize the experience.

At Wild Audience, we love ActiveCampaign but we prefer Wild Mail.

Here’s why  ..

” /> You can react to your contacts behaviour and trigger processes. Like sending an email automatically.

” /> You can see your contacts “lead score”. This lets you identify the people who are highly engaged. I use this to schedule high-ticket sales calls with hot prospects.

” /> You can segment your list easily with tags. This is great if you are using any type of survey opt-in in your funnel. We use a 5 question interview when people opt in, so this is perfect for us. We can send emails to our “sub-lists” with tags.

” /> Their support is incredible. They have sorted out most of the problems we’ve had on the same day.

These are the benefits we like the most.

We love them so much that we decided to team up with them to offer our audience (read: you!) 1-click automation templates & flexible pricing.

You can discover more about that here..

And if you would like to see a bonus video walkthrough of a Wild Audience Sales funnel which has generated us 6 figures in revenue every year, click on the image below.

What did you think about this article? Let me know in the comments below.

Have a great day!

Quick Summary

Here’s a quick summary of this article so you can decide if you are interested in it or not.

I’m going to explain what Relationship Funnels are and how to create them. Including the following…

1. 1. What is the definition of a Relationship Funnel?
   2. How are Relationship Funnels different from normal marketing funnels or sales funnels?
   3. Do Relationship Funnels actually work?
   4. The strategy behind Relationship Funnels explained.
   5. How you can build your own Relationship Funnel in 9 steps.
   6. Benefits to Relationship Funnels

Video Summary

Listen To Podcast

When I started my own business selling information products, I struggled to even make a full-time income using marketing funnels and product launches.

With this approach, I also had to keep doing launches which were very time-consuming.

I also knew that if one of my launches failed, my cash flow could be crippled. And one day that’s exactly what happened.

That’s when I came up with the idea for Relationship Funnels and quickly grew my business to 5-figures a month!

Relationship Funnels are a powerful tactic. Other businesses have implemented them to boost engagement, achieve higher email open rates, better conversion rates, and significantly more sales.

And the best part is that it can be fully automated!

Do you want to learn how to implement this powerful marketing funnel in YOUR business?

Great! Let’s get started.

1. Relationship Funnel Definition

So what exactly is a Relationship Funnel?

Relationship Funnel is optimized for two things:

1) To establish a relationship with potential customers on autopilot and install buying beliefs

2) Once they are ready, present our offer as the solution to their problem at the perfect time.

Relationship Funnels focus on building a real relationship first. Build trust by teaching and focus on giving value to your audience.

Later, sell prospects the solutions to their problems. If you’ve done a good job of building the relationship, your prospects will be willing and even eager to buy from you.

2. Relationship Funnels vs a Regular Marketing Funnel – What’s the Difference?

Some people might compare Relationship Funnels to typical sales or marketing funnels, but they have some important differences.

Sales funnels often apply sales pressure tactics like scarcity and urgency to pressure prospects to buy now.

Relationship Funnels, on the other hand, don’t rely on high-pressure sales tactics. Instead, they focus on building relationships with prospects by giving value through content and education.

In fact, good Relationship Funnels may even cause prospects to ask you to buy something even before you present your offer.

Don’t be surprised if you start getting messages like this:

People that are exposed to a Relationship Funnel don’t feel pushed or pressured into buying something. Instead, they feel pulled towards buying due to the positive experience that they received through the Relationship Funnel.

A real-life example..

We achieved an incredible 8.66% sales conversion rate with our company Relationship Funnel.

3. Do Relationship Funnels Actually Work?

While most online entrepreneurs know about sales funnels, many still haven’t heard about Relationship Funnels.

Are they new?

Do people actually use them?

Do they actually work?

While Relationship Funnels are newer than sales funnels, they have been around for a while. Relationship Funnels have been featured in top media outlets and marketing podcasts including Neil Patel’s Marketing School, Mixergy, Forbes and many more.

More than 1,100 online businesses worldwide use Relationship Funnels in their business to sell their products or services.

Wild Audience clients have gotten results like this:

• Joe generates 1 million Euros each year with Relationship Funnels 

• Matias achieved an amazing 34x increase in his click through rate from 1.7% to 58%

• Mubaid achieved a 9-10% funnel conversion rate, converting roughly one out of 10 prospects into sales.

And hundreds of other students have shared testimonials, videos and screenshots of their results here.

If you want to see a real-world case study on how a 7-figure online business does this step-by-step, click on the image below and download your PDF.

4. The Relationship Funnel Strategy Explained

The strategy behind a Relationship Funnel can be explained in 4 simple steps.

Step 1 – Get the attention of your audience & maintain it.

Getting attention is hard, but retaining attention is even harder. Figure out the best way to get the attention of your prospects.

• • Select lead magnets that target the pain points of your prospects.

• • Stimulate their curiosity by sharing information they can’t easily find online.

• Test out different headlines and copy. See what works and what doesn’t.

Focus on creating awareness for your brand and and keeping their attention once they are in your funnel.

Step 2 – Segment your people. Understand that each person has different problems and different goals. Figure out how you can help them.

You can use your opt-in form to segment new subscribers by asking them 4-5 questions about their goals, problems and interests.

Here’s an example of how we segment people during the sign-up process. After clicking on an image or button to opt-in, the reader can answer a few quick questions.

When people answer these questions, the email marketing software will automatically tag them or segment them into groups based on their interests.

Step 3 – Use the data to personalize the experience.

With email marketing tools like Active Campaign, you can send different emails to different segments of your email list based on what they are interested in.

You want to send content that is relevant to your prospects because it will increase engagement. Higher engagement leads to more sales.

Help your prospects first. Build the relationship and gain trust. Then sell.

Step 4 – Engage your audience through content

Besides creating a personalized experience, you also want people to engage with you and take action.

So how do you engage your readers?

Here are a few suggestions…

1. 1. Add a CTA within your Relationship Funnel. A simple example might be to ask your readers to post a comment in your Facebook group.
   2. Allow readers to choose how frequently they receive emails. Give your readers a choice so that they can choose their own path.
   3. Use the Gmail-Zapier hack. By integrating Gmail and Zapier, you can send your readers an automated email if they take a specific action.

For example, if they click on the link to your sales page a couple of times, you can send

Then a message like this:

What’s awesome is that even though the email is automated, it looks like a personalized email that I sent directly to one person.

For more ideas on creating engagement, check out these 7 funnel techniques to increase your conversion rate.

Step 5 – Automate the whole thing including the email sequences, advertisements, and the entire sales process. Software tools make it easy for you to scale your business by automating everything.

This is what that looks like inside Active Campaign ..

5. How to Build Relationship Funnels in 9 Steps

Step 1 – Define Your Value Ladder
Start with a lead magnet, which can be a PDF or video or some other type of content.

After that, offer a low-end product that is inexpensive, but has high perceived value. This is called a front end offer.

For example, let’s say you are selling a $10 eBook as your front end product.

Make sure you deliver so much value in this eBook that your customers will be blown away by how much value you gave them for $10.

Focus on creating an experience that will let customers feel like you over delivered and that they got a ton of value for their money.

Why do you want to do this?

Because providing an amazing first purchase experience will get them excited about buying your next product! Since they know you deliver a ton of value in your lower-priced products, they’ll be eager and willing to buy your higher priced products or services.

To break even on your customer acquisition costs have an upsell behind your front end product.

A $50 – $100 upsell can increase the average order value on your front end product. This upsell will help us cover the cost of Google and Facebook ads.

You can then sell your core product to customers who purchased your front end product. Price this product higher than your front end product.

People who purchased your front end product will be pre-sold on this product because you’ve already delivered them a lot of value on their previous purchase.

You can also have additional back-end products that you can sell at even higher prices. For example, a few high-end customers might be willing to purchase a $10,000 done-for-you service or in-person consultation.

Existing customers are more likely to buy from you because they are already familiar with your brand and they’ve already had a positive experience and relationship with you from their previous purchases.

Start with just the core product and lead magnet and come up with your front end product later.

Step 2 – Creating Your Belief System
A belief system consists of any biases or beliefs that a person will have about you and your products.

For example, if a person eats an orange for the first time and has a bad experience because the orange was old and rotten, then they may believe that oranges are bad.

To convince the person that oranges are good, you will have to install a new belief. You may have to explain that oranges are healthy and convince the person to try oranges again to overwrite their old belief system.

What does your ideal customer need to believe before he or she can become your customer?

Write down all ideas that come to mind. You may come up with a few ideas or even a dozen beliefs that you will need to install into your customer’s belief system.

Step 3 – Map Your Beliefs
Ask yourself where you will install each belief. Each piece of content you create should be designed to install a new belief in your customer’s mind.

Step 4 – Create a Lead Magnet
A good lead magnet will filter out the wrong people and lead the right people to you.

Here is an example of one we use at Wild Audience. The article below displays an image that offers a free download of my Relationship Funnel graphic. 

Only people that are interested in Relationship Funnels will click on it, which allows us to build a highly targeted list.

Step 5 – Build a Relationship Building Sequence (RBS)
Your email sequence will build a relationship with your prospects and also install the right beliefs into their belief system. Your RBS should also be optimized to engage your audience so that they get excited, hyped and eager to purchase your product.

Step 6 – Decide On Your Sales (or Conversion) Event
Your sales page can be a text sales letter, video sales letter (VSL) or a hybrid page which contains both text and video. You can also use an evergreen webinar.

Keep in mind that what gets people to buy is not the sales event so much, but everything that happens before it. The RBS gets people excited for your offering. 

Step 7 – Launch Your Funnel
Try to launch to 250 new prospects to test your funnel. Facebook ads or groups can be a good way to get new prospects into your funnel.

You want to get new prospects into your funnel to test it because your existing customers already know you and are more likely to buy. Testing the funnel with fresh prospects is a great way to make sure that your funnel converts.

Your funnel might not be profitable initially and that’s ok. It may take 2-3 iterations to test your funnel and get it ready to scale.

Step 8 – Optimize Your Funnel
Once people have gone through your funnel, look at your numbers and figure out where the weak points in your funnel are. Improve on those areas, fix any mistakes and once you’ve optimized your funnel, you are ready to scale.

Step 9 – Scale Your Growth
Now that your funnel works the way you want it to, you can increase ad spend and maximize other lead generation channels to get as many people into your funnel as you want.

6. Benefits to Relationship Funnels

So what are the benefits of a Relationship Funnel? And why not just use a traditional marketing funnel?

a) Relationship Funnels work better (especially over the long run) because they focus on building the relationship first before selling.

Once people trust you and see that you are someone that delivers a lot of value, selling becomes much easier.

b) Relationship Funnels combine marketing automation (using Wild Mail) technology and human psychology to achieve optimal results. They allow you to get into people’s hearts and minds and ultimately generate sales that will allow your business to grow.

c) Wild Audience customers achieve high click-through rates, open rates, and sales conversion rates. They achieve extraordinary results by engaging with the right people using what we call “engagement hooks” including open loops, cliffhangers, micro investments, and frequency selectors.

For example, Landon Porter achieved a 6% conversion rate and made over $6,000 in 6 weeks from his Relationship Funnel:

d) Relationship Funnels also allow you to scale your business while staying relevant and forming a personal connection with your audience.

e) A Relationship Funnel is a 100% evergreen system that works 24/7, 365 days a year to generate more predictable and consistent revenue each month.

f) Unlike other marketing funnels, you won’t have to rely on repeat product launches and your revenue won’t rely on a single launch. You won’t have to go through the stress and work overload of preparing for launches.

Instead, Relationship Funnels are a well-optimized selling machine that you can continue to improve as time goes on. They use automation to continue to sell to new prospects as they enter your funnel.

g) And the best part about Relationship Funnels..

You won’t feel salesy, fake or slimy from doing them. You can just be yourself and use your own personality to establish a real connection with your audience.

Don’t be surprised if you start getting messages like these:

h) Relationship Funnels are future proof because they work with any platform and human psychology won’t change.

i) Because you are focused on creating real value for your audience and forming a real relationship, Relationship Funnels will also allow you to boost your engagement levels, sales conversions, and ROI.

Focus on bringing the right prospects into your funnel and your sales WILL increase.

j) Another benefit of Relationship Funnels is that they are more cost efficient because you won’t waste money on people who won’t naturally engage with your content.  Focus on creating engagement and you will end up converting more people with less traffic.

You can actually decrease your marketing spend and achieve a higher level of profitability with this approach.

k) With a Relationship Funnel, you won’t have to worry about finding a constant stream of new customers each month. You also won’t have to come up with new promotions every month to sustain your business.

l) Unlike sales funnels, Relationship Funnels will give you predictable cash flow, profits, and ROI each month.

To Sum It Up

Relationships and trust are everything in business. People seek to connect with other people in business, but many businesses focus on selling rather than building genuine relationships.

Be the business that focuses on relationships and you will experience more growth than you ever thought was possible.

To learn more about my Marketing Funnels, read this article.

And if you want to see a real-world case study on how a 7-figure online business does built multiple sales funnels and turns website visitors into paying customers, download your PDF below.

If you enjoyed this article, let me know in the comments below. I would love to connect with you! Peace out!

Summary:

1. [Stage 1] – Start up
2. [Stage 2] – Ramp up
3. [Stage 3] – Build up
4. [Stage 4] – Scale up
5. [Stage 5] – Leader up

This article is designed to give online business owners and anyone involved in entrepreneurship a framework for growth they can take and run with. We’ll dig into the pains and growth opportunities present in each stage of a business and explore how you can apply those to your own journey.

These stages of growth are based off of Todd Herman’s recently updated 5 Stages of Business Growth.

If you don’t know Todd Herman, you should.Todd is many things: an angel investor, speaker, author, and ultimately an 8-figure business owner. He built a powerful network of corporate and SMB clients across a variety of channels and products.

This is also the same Todd Herman who has worked with 86 Olympians (including some who recently competed in Seoul) and over 10,000 athletes.

Todd Herman helps ambitious people perform, period.

Pretty cool right 🙂

In other words, he knows how to build businesses, and he has fine-tuned those systems into a framework you can adopt and apply to your business. Your idea may be unique, but the challenges and growth pains you’ll experience are almost certainly not, and that means you can learn from those who have walked the path before you.  

I had the privilege of sitting down with Todd and talking to him for about an hour or so, and you can check out that super awesome interview here 🙂

—

When it comes to explaining the stages of business, I think we can all agree it’s best to do so with an actual, viable business. We decided to use Wild Audience..

I know… big surprise. 🙂

If you’d rather see how we increased a client’s conversion rate by 6x…

Go here.

I’m going to do my best to cover Wild Audience’s pain points at each stage, the decisions that helped us overcome them, and ultimately how we grew into a network of over 30,000 business owners.

By pairing our story with Todd’s 5 Stages of Business Growth framework, I think you’ll walk away with some really useful stuff.

I’m no Todd Herman, but I like to think I’m on my way. 🙂

My goal is to help save you some time and offer some direction in your business. Having an idea of what is coming while analyzing the present and learning from the past is the best pathway to success.

Each stage will begin with a little video talking about where I was at that stage, and then I’ll follow it up with some more insight from Wild Audience’s perspective.

Let’s do this!

Quick note:
I have never worked for or with Todd Herman. Everything below is based on my own experience as founder of Wild Audience and being an actual fan of his work. Take a look at the interview, and you’ll see how excited I was to talk to him. 🙂 Also, Todd is updating their marketing strategy a lot right now so what I share with you below might not be their most recent version.

Stages of Business Growth #1: Start Up

Definition:

The startup stage is the beginning of everything. It starts with your idea — your dream and ends when you release your initial MVP.

Key objective:  

Validate your product & market.

Pain points:

1. Feeling of self-doubt.
2. Getting overwhelmed.
3. Feeling like your business is unique in its challenges.
4. Inertia.

Solutions:

1. Talk to your market
2. Listen to your market.
3. Know WHAT to focus on and WHEN.
4. Just start!

—

The startup stage has two main components: a dream & an MVP.

This is the stage that kills more businesses than any other.

Why?

Todd surveyed over 40,000 wantrepreneurs and entrepreneurs and found that fear of failure was the overwhelming response for why people were scared to take the next step.

Scared of what their families would think if they failed. Scared of what would happen if they lost money.

In other words,

It’s the emotional experience of business that was scaring people away.

Fortunately, there’s a way to handle both fears of failure & make sure you don’t waste money: market validation.

The “startup” stage is all about four goals:

1. Validating your audience
2. Validating your product
3. Building an MVP
4. Acquiring initial sales

The key is to validate your audience and product before you ever build it. 🙂

Start Up Step #1: Build A Minimal Viable Audience

A.k.a. — what are people willing to buy, how many of them are there, and how can I reach them?

Let’s take a little trip back to 2015.

Wild Audience didn’t exist.

I was in Silicon Valley working for a Y-Combinator company called Close.io.

Life was good! Steli Efti was an incredible boss.

I enjoyed it, but I knew I wanted to start my own company.

So I decided to go to Costa Rica. 🙂

I cut my expenses to a couple hundred dollars a month and easily covered that with a part-time marketing gig…

Now all I had to do was build my business.

This is all I knew…

1. I wanted to start my own online business and potentially transition in SaaS.
2. I didn’t have a tech team.
3. I didn’t have the money to build a product upfront.

Not too much to work with. 🙂

I found the best place to find business inspiration is the crossover between the person you have been, the person you want to be, and rough market potential.

Your interests. Your passions. Everything that makes you who you are now… but also contributes to where you want to be 🙂

For me that was marketing automation, AI, and education.

Now, normally at this point in the start up stage, people would advise you to build a prototype of your product, lean canvas, raise some initial funds, build an MVP…

Exciting stuff, right?

Well, yes. But Todd recommends going about it a bit differently.

Here’s how Todd describes this process:

“Getting out into the market and validating the idea with the target group you want to serve is a necessity. If more people would take the approach of the mad scientist in the laboratory, attempt different combinations, and then go out and introduce the idea, product, or service to target people—then we’d have a lot more great things created – and probably a helluva a lot happier people.”

Boom.

Identifying product-market fit before heavily investing and pivoting as needed is the key to building a business you can count on. The product you envisioned and the product your market needs may be further apart than you think.

For Wild Audience, I decided to use education as my testing ground for my product & as a way to finance my eventual SaaS business.

Here’s what my market validation steps looked like:

1) Market Research:

I knew I was interested in marketing AI, and I knew marketing/sales funnels were the crux of that tech. With this in mind, I started thinking about all the businesses that need better funnels.

The answer? Everyone wants better funnels.

It’s the key to building a successful online business—the key to increasing revenue—the key to everything!

Now I just needed to begin building a tribe and identify what problems they needed help solving the most.

Here’s what I did with Wild Audience:

1. I started with one blog. This blog, in fact. 🙂
2. I offered a free email course through lead magnets.
3. I began listening and observing my customers for product direction.
4. I built my initial educational MVP.

How did I learn from my initial tribe?

1. I observed what questions they asked in email conversations.
2. I read & analyzed what they talked about in relevant Facebook Groups.
3. I talked to my customers about my paid educational products.
4. I asked questions. I surveyed. I kept my ears open.

Listen. Communicate. Iterate.

That should be your mantra in the start up stage.

Collect as much information as you can and compare it to your idea for your initial product. Does it match? If not, how should it change?

Improve your idea and take it back to your audience. See what they think.

They’re going to know best—after all they’re your future customers. 🙂

For more on validating your audience, go here.

Start Up Step #2: Build A Minimal Viable Product

Once you know your audience’s problems  and have interest (preferably monetary proof via educational products) in your topics and potential MVP, it’s time to start building.

At this point, you already have a huge advantage over anyone who is building an MVP without an audience: an audience. 🙂

This allows you to:

• Access information and data to figure out what problem to solve
• Build an MVP your audience cares about (because they actually have that problem)
• Get instant feedback on your MVP while you’re building it
• Attract early adopters because you have a list of people who want to test your newest stuff
• Finance your MVP via existing educational products
• Essentially build an MVP together with your audience—ensuring a perfect product market fit.

By having an audience before you build an MVP, you can minimize the risk of building an MVP no one cares about.
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Start Up Step #3: Determine Your Future Trajectory

Okay. At this point you’ll have an engaged audience and an MVP.

Where do you go from here? You need to be thinking long-term.

For Wild Audience, I wanted to eventually create a behaviour-based automation product using AI…

Okay. So I knew a SaaS product was my next step…

But what then…?

Well, I knew I wanted to make enough money from my educational products to fund the creation of my SaaS products.

So in very simple terms, Wild Audience’s trajectory is:

1. Build an engaged audience
2. Build an educational MVP (Relationship Funnel)
3. Scale my educational business
4. Use those profits to fund a SaaS business
5. Convert my educational audience into the SaaS early adopters
6. Scale that business

And just like that, I have tangible steps to work towards. 🙂