March Issue - Creating Effective Sales Funnels

Issue 3 March 2020

Creating Effective Sales Funnels Your Bio Is Your Brand Tyeishia Timlet

Wear Quality Matters

M. O. M. Life

(Managing Ongoing Mom)

Darian Montgomery Mogul D LLC

Elizabeth Baker

The Benefits of Journaling Michelle Stepheson

4

Your Bio Is Your

Brand

Today I spent a few hours updating my professional brand bio and drilling down on my skills, experiences, and accomplishments.

Before I started writing, I did research on how other industry experts structured their bios and what made one really appealing.

Re writing my brand bio allowed me to sit back and reflect on some of the small wins that I’ve had over the last few years in building my career. After I finished, I felt empowered to embrace my story and show up in a different way. Suddenly after a few word changes and a new format, I instantly went from “Eh, she’s okay” to “Oh, wow. I would like to hire her.” I wanted to share a few tips that I used today to upgrade my bio and spruce it up a bit.

Write in 3rd person It’s something about removing yourself out of the picture and talking as if someone else was introducing you that makes things sound more appealing. This also gives you the upper hand to really think about if you were being introduced at an event, how would you like to be introduced? Be sure to write down any skills or experiences that were pivotal moments in your career.

Include who, what, when, where, and why Take some time to answer the 5 W’s before writing your bio. Who are you? What do you do? When did you start? Where are you based? And why are you doing whatever it is that you do? Once you can answer these questions, your bio will create a better story for the reader to understand. It creates the overall picture of who you are as a brand.

Remember, it’s okay to humble brag This is the time to tell it all. Share all of the accomplishments that you’re proud of even if they are small wins.

Don’t downplay yourself. Were you nominated on the “Best Blogger in 2018” list but you landed in 2nd place?

Share that you were nominated anyway. Were you promoted to a higher position in your company after increasing sales? Share it. Did you graduate on top of your class and participated in a sorority? People want to know. Use this time to really brag about yourself and what you’ve accomplished.

Add fun descriptions and words As a brand strategist, I’m always playing around with fun words. Think of words like dedication, tenacity, mission, purpose. Those words are powerful and will put energy into your bio. Go on google and look up synonyms for words that you want to use and see how you replace it with something exciting.

@tytimlet

Why do we as women let society, and more specifically the entrepreneurial world, dictate when its ‘Our Time’ to succeed at business?

The other night, as I was attending a book reading at a local bookstore, I had the opportunity to speak with a woman that contributed her story to the book we had just read…I was stoked!! She is a professional in the news media world, AND a mom, AND a major contributor to her local community, AND as many ands you could possibly think of. The message she shared was that it is truly possible to do it all; if that is what you feel called to do. So here I was, speaking to this woman that I adore and respect so much, when I noticed a follow fan walking up to us right when I was explaining how crazy my life is and that sometimes I feel like I can’t handle every that I want to accomplish at this time in my life. I have 5 kids all under the age of 9, AND am a sales rep for an MLM company called Zyia Active, AND am currently preparing myself for a new adventure in the entrepreneurial world. At the end of my long introduction, this very well meaning woman, who I know only meant to be comforting, leaned over and with a gentle hand on my arm said, “don’t worry, there is a time and a season for everything. ” I don’t know if you have heard of that saying before, but basically it is the polite way of telling someone that they are in WAY too over their heads and that they should just quit.

(If I had a dollar for every time someone has said this to me, especially when they see me with my 5 very energetic kids, I would probably be on a beach somewhere writing this and not on my make shift desk that is actually a folding picnic table at 2 AM in the morning!!!) In the politest voice I could manage at the time I replied, “True, there are different times and seasons people go through in life, but no one gets to dictate what and when those seasons are – except for the individual who actuall has to live with the regret of not living their life in the way they were created to live it.”

M.O.M. Life Tip You don’t have to loose who you are as an individual to be a really good mom.

Elizabeth Baker

8

That poor woman had to suffer the brunt of my frustration, when she was only trying to provide an excuse for me to quit until my life got a little easier. Let me repeat what I said, but in a more direct way, no one and I mean NO ONE – not your spouse, not your kids, not your very best friend in the whole world – gets to decide what your seasons look like and when they happen because when it comes down to it, YOU are the only one that has to live with the regret of your life’s choices. So do yourself a favor NOW and stop letting society dictate when it’s your TIME to live your best life.

So next time you walk into a bank to present your business proposal to some random loan officer that has NO IDEA what you are capable of because you so happen to have a child on your hip – DON’T YOU DARE let that loan officer deny you because they don’t believe that a woman is able to be a mom AND a business owner at the same time. Or maybe you are feeling a little under qualified because you have been out of the business rat race for 10 years raising your kids…

JUST STOP RIGHT THERE and let me save you from years of regret. You walk into that bank with your head held high and realize that you have 10 years of the best business training anyone can get. You essentially have 10 years’ experience of training the neediest, and more times than not the most ungrateful employees ever all the while loving them unconditionally! You, my friend, are the best boss ever!!

Maybe you are in the reverse situation. You feel like you need to take a step back from your business goals for awhile to care for your children, that is YOUR CHOICE and it is OKAY! Stop letting others tell you what you are or aren’t capable of… If you won’t listen to me maybe you will list to my girl Rachel Hollis. She has two incredible books that will help you tap into that God given potential to be X and Y and Z on your own timetable. Her first book Girl Go Wash Your Face, will give you the motivation to start living your own life on your own terms. While her second book Girl Stop Apologizing, will help you live that life unapologetically.

I have a link to her Amazon page on my website www.momlife.today (Elizabeth@momlife.today), along with other really cool stuff that will help you in your Managing Ongoing Mom Life.

Remember, YOU are doing a really good job!!

9

Wear Qual

Men are starting to care about their personal appearance. It’s more than just putting on a suit to go to work or an event. The average man use to be the guy in a suit with the tie tied just to be tied. Now there are many different ways to wear a suit and a tie. Just take a look at some of the suits from Mogul D LLC. Darian Montgomery specialize in all custom suits. Custom suits is not only for special occasions, but for daily wear. Darian will also come to you and assist you with pairing items in your closet. Yes, that’s right! This is not only for the ladies anymore. It’s all about “Wear Quality Matters” with Darian.

Darian Montgomery Custom Clothier Office: 312-259-5302 Mobile: 312-320-8776 www.moguldllc.com info@moguldllc.com

lityMatters

The Benefits of Journaling Setting and Achieving Goals Journaling is one of those things that I think every person should try because there are so many benefits! I have been an avid journaler my entire life. I can’t remember a time where I didn’t journal. It helps give you clarity, increases your intuition, and de-clutters your mind – just to name a few. Plus, it’s fun!

If you are someone who needs help setting and achieving goals, journaling is a tool that can help you with goalsetting. It will force you to think about your goals, consider the why and how, and delve deeper into the situation so that you can examine all sides of it.

A lot of people don’t take goal-setting seriously and think they can achieve their goals without any kind of strategy or plan. Things are just going to happen on their own. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but A GOAL WITHOUT A PLAN IS JUST A WISH! Do you want to make wishes or do you want to set and achieve your goals?

Here are 5 ways journaling can help you to achieve your goals.

It Forces You to Write Down Your Goals – When you start a journal, it basically is a way to force yourself to document your goals. Whether you write them down on paper or you use technology to get it all down doesn’t matter. Once they’re written, they are ready to tackle.

It Makes You Consider Why and How – As you enter data into your journal, you’ll be forced to face the why and how of your goal. This is especially true if you write down a goal and focus on it in your journal.

It Enables You to Examine the Opportunities and Threats – When you are focused on goal making with your journal, you’ll also explore opportunities and threats coming your way due to your goals. It helps you avoid roadblocks in advance.

It Makes You Develop Steps for Success Based on Your Goals – When you see it written down, you’ll want to notice and pull out any steps you’ve developed in your journal and put them in your calendar for scheduling.

It Provides Accountability – Even if no one else is reading your journal, a private journal can help you become accountable to yourself. If you develop the habit of looking at your journal each day and put something else in there each day, it’ll work great for helping you become more accountable.

I challenge you to try these tips and see how effective they can be. Journaling is an excellent way to work toward achieving all your goals. It will even help you make better goals because the process of entering facts in your journal will cause you to see them in a more logical way that is more useful.

The POWER of Journaling will be released in 2020 as well as her journal collection for breast cancer survivors, caregivers, tween and teen girls, womenpreneurs and prayer warriors. If you’d like to connect with Michelle, you can email her at michelle@vmscommunications.net or on social media!

13

Creating an Effective

Sales Sales Funnel Funnel

Every business needs a sales funnel if they want to succeed in their marketing efforts. So many businesses do not create a plan when it comes to marketing. Instead they do what everyone else is doing or what they feel is easiest or cheapest, without knowing whether or not it actually works. Sales funnels help business owners know how many potential customers they have, here they come from, and how they’re going to be brought into the product cycle.

What is a Sales Funnel?

Essentially, a sales funnel (or any funnel) provides a way for you to look at your model visually. It will show at a glance what steps you need to take to get clients and customers to purchase your products or services. A sales funnel provides a lot of information about prospects, conversion rates, how long your prospects remain in the funnel, what it takes to get conversions and more.

Some funnels just have three main stages: Awareness, Evaluation and Purchase. Others have many more. No matter how you design your sales funnel it’s important to put as much detail as possible into each of the different stages. This ensures you don’t miss out on important information that will help you develop content to move a lead to become a customer.

No matter how many main stages your sales funnel has, it’s what you plug into each stage that makes the real difference. This is what makes a business truly stand out and convert more prospects to customers.

Why is having a Sales Funnel Important?

Well-crafted sales funnels show how you attract qualified leads. With the right information and content it helps you move them through the sales process to make a conversion. It’s a good way to visualize what you’re going to do, have done, and what the measured results are when it’s all said and done. Sales funnels help a business determine how they will grab their audience’s attention, overcome objections, improve engagement and make more sales.content to ensure the right response from the audience.

Quantify the Number of Prospects – Being able to quantify the number of prospects that you have for your product or service and who they are will help you locate and attract them.

Accurately Predict Conversions – Knowing your conversion rate will help you understand more about what you need to do to get the results you desire, including improving conversions and/or improving awareness.

Spot Changes in Metrics – When you pay attention to the details and learn about each stage of the sales funnel, you’ll be able to identify changes in metrics. Perhaps a new marketing campaign is improving awareness but is not improving your conversion rate. Why? What should you do?

Help Point Out Needed Improvements – The data that you can gather to help make decisions will improve your business exponentially. Instead of just doing things because everyone else is doing them, you can identify exactly at what stage of your product funnel you should do it and why, and even how and for how long.

Helps Develop a Content Strategy – Regardless of the stage, content is the fuel that will keep your sales funnel flowing. Every stage needs a different type of

A sales funnel is a valuable tool to help you get deeper into not only how to market, but why and when to do certain things when implementing your overall marketing strategy. It is especially helpful when creating content and products that educate and serve your audience.

How to Plan a Sales Funnel Creating an effective sales funnel is essential to having a long-term business. You want your business to not just last a long time, but also to prosper. Creating a sales funnel will assist you in reaching that goal better than most other things will. Plus, you can learn a lot about your business as you’re creating it. Start with the basic funnel above, or if you prefer divide everything up among the stages to plan out your actions.

Ideas about what to plan for different stages of your sales funnel.

Awareness – This is the widest part of your sales funnel, where you want to bring your audience into awareness about your business’s existence. These members of your audience don’t know about you at all; they need to be made aware via education. For this stage you want to create publicity or entry products that are very general in nature and that educate your audience about the topic.

SEO – Search engine optimization is using keywords and other tactics to encourage the search engines to send prospects your way due to their searches. Using “on page” and “off page” SEO is an important component to attracting new prospects during the awareness phase.

Advertisements – You can run advertisements on social media like Facebook, or AdSense that drive visitors to your website and email lists. You can choose pay per click or banner ads or other listings to get clicks.

Press Releases – Part of good SEO, this is a great way to get content out there so that your audience learns about you and finds you.

Overview Blog Posts – General blog posts that provide decisions and information about the general problem your audience has and ways to solve them.

Informational Whitepapers – Providing objective and useful information about topics of interest to your audience can help drive traffic to your site.

Overview Webinars – Hold a webinar or Google Hangout On Air to address your audience about their pain points.

This is the stage where you want to create calls to action within the content that encourage your audience to sign up for email lists, follow you on social media, and sign up for your RSS feed and so forth to stay in touch.

Interest – Once your audience is introduced, they now know about you and see that you may be able to solve their problems. You know they’re interested because they have signed up to receive your email list.

ECourse – Send a short 7 day eCourse series to them via email list, using a service like Aweber.com to deliver the messages that you pre-schedule.

Blog Posts – Write evergreen blog posts that assume interest by the audience, and that give your audience more information and encouragement, create email associated with the blog post recommending that the subscriber go read that blog post and load it up into your autoresponder series.

15

EBooks & EReports – Either free or paid eBooks given or sold for a low price are good entry products to promote to someone who has expressed interest in your products or services.

Short Videos – Like the blog posts, you can use vlogs that are general and evergreen to educate your audience. Remember to point your email list to the videos with a message loaded into the autoresponder.

Overview Webinars – Invite those who have signed up for your email lists to informal webinars or teleseminars. You can use a service like Instant Teleseminar to automatically replay them so that you don’t have to give a new one each time. These can also be loaded up to the autoresponder to put your marketing on auto-pilot.

Whitepapers – Write an authoritative paper about the problems, products or services designed to educate your audience. Disseminate via social media, email and have available for download on your website.

Tip Sheets, Checklists & Infographics – These are great types of content to use for an audience that is in the interest stage. Giving them more facts to work with will help them move down your product funnel faster.

Keeping the interest of audience members who have given you permission to market to them is a very important part of the sales funnel. If you plan your content and information correctly you can move them faster to the purchase phase.

Consideration – Like above, the client knows they need the product by now, but they need more information to determine that it’s the right product to solve their problem. That involves a lot more information (like the interest phase), but information that’s more in-depth, focused and personalized. Focus more on identifying the pain points of your customers and showing them how your products specifically will solve them.

Describe How to Accomplish Each Goal At each stage, you need to identify the tools, channels and resources that you’ll use to reach your goals. For instance at the awareness phase you may want to use Google AdSense or Facebook Ads, and hire someone to write a series of email messages and blog posts.

Assign Metrics to Each Tactic, Product Idea and Content Format within the Stage Without real numbers you have no way of classifying whether any given plan worked or not.

Give very specific metrics for your goals such as “I will increase website visitors by 100 per week within 60 days by placing Facebook Advertisements.”

Test Your Results Like with most things in marketing you’ll use an educated guess as to which channels are best for you to use to implement the task in each stage of your sales funnel. That’s why keeping track of metrics is important. If something you’re doing isn’t working, you can adjust and tweak it, or drop it all together. If something is working, you can do more of it.

As you can see, there is more to it than just creating the sales funnel. You need to design it, and then enter the results you want to obtain at each level, how you’ll achieve those results, and be able to quantify everything along the way. If you do this, you’ll achieve far greater results than if you practice marketing without any direction.

16

Tools for Creating Sales Funnels You can draw your sales funnel using pen and paper, as well as software that is readily available. Don’t skip this part because having a visual representation will help you make your business stronger, and if you are a service provider then delivering marketing services to your clients can help you identify gaps that need to be covered to improve marketing at all stages.

Create a “To Do” List from the Sales Funnel In your sales funnel report you want to deliver more than just the pretty visual, you want to also write up a report describing the metrics, including how you’ll measure for results and report for results and list the actionable items.

You can use a “to do” list format along with a timeline for your client. In this way, especially if you’re the project manager, you can just gather the approvals necessary to implement the actions.

When creating your sales funnel, ask and answer questions like: 1. What are the ways in which I can let the world know about my products and services?

2. How does my audience like to receive information?

3. Who does my audience get their information from?

4. What format does my audience like to get their information?

5. How can I collect the client information to turn website visitors into true leads?

6. What is the best way for me to build relationships with my audience?

7. How can I interact with and learn from my audience?

8. What can I do to encourage my audience to trust me?

Sales funnels will work for your business, as well as your client’s businesses, because they take the guesswork out of marketing products and services. You will not only understand each stage of the buying and sales process better as it relates to your business and clients, but you will get to know your clients’ businesses a lot better so that you can identify places where you can serve them better in terms of products and services that solve their problems.

Research Tip When researching tools to create your sales funnel pay close attention to the features, pricing, simplicity of creating. You want to get this done, but not at the expense of time.

17

Sucks

Productivity

I really need a resource to streamline our processes.

We waste too much time daily.

We purchased Coffee Sugar Cream. The solutions in this book was crucial to our operations.

Purchase your copy today! amazon.com/author/sya_melissaambers

20

21

Glam It Up Tammy Fitch tammy@theurbanb.info www.theurbanb.store 832-466-6671

Get your time back!

How can this happen? Utilize your devices and change your habits will boost your productivity.

Purchase your copy today! amazon.com/author/sya_melissaambers 22

Now we all have been in Best Buy for a variety of things. Yes, the people on the floor are “suppose” to be there to assist. Most of the time, I do not ask questions because some of them are not as knowledgeable as they should be. Well, let me tell you about my latest experience. All I needed was a portable hard drive. I saw some locked up and wanted to ask a question about one of them. As I stood there looking for someone (believe it or not), I only saw two people that were working with someone. I’m like I know there are more people in this store than this. I started to scan around the store I saw two guys standing up against a display, so I fan them over. Ok, so they didn’t see me…......yea right. So one of the other product guys was in the store and said I would tell them. I said, ok, thanks. As I am looking and he went to get their attention they went in different directions and said they were helping somebody else. Of course, I said bs. I watch them for a couple of minutes before I tried to get their attention. So now I tried another guy, he said one minute and went to the back and never returned. I turned to another and the same thing. Not once did I see them on the floor with anyone. Now I see someone walking around with some keys. I looked at him a couple of times, and he saw me look at him, he turned a couple of times. I did not take my eyes off him, not once. Finally, I asked him was he a manager? He said yes, I am, so I told him what happen, and all I need is for someone to open this case and answer one small question. He stuttered for a bit; then, he finally decided to assist. Now I know I was not the only person in the store, and other people need assistance, but I be dammed if I was not going to push the issue. This is why shopping is done online. Consumers will take the chance on ordering something and returning it just so they do not have to go in a store and get this type of “customer service”.

This is my vent, and I hope Best Buy can get it together.

By Anonymous

23

24

Pre-Order on Amazon Now!