If you're focused on getting leads, I would guess that you want to make the most money possible from your leads. A sales funnel is definitely the best way to do this (at least, it's a hundred percent better than just selling your leads one time and then kissing them goodbye).
However, there are many ways to create a funnel, and if you want to avoid making the top 3 most damaging mistakes, then read on.
Here Are The Top 3 Mistakes to Avoid When Building a Sales Funnel:
Mistake #1: Trying to sell too soon.
It may seem counter intuitive but the best way to begin your lead's journey through your funnel is by not trying to sell them at all, but by giving them things. For example, by giving them free information.
Give your prospects a lot of good, free information at the start, with no charge at all, and when they encounter the first offer in your sales funnel, they will be much more likely to buy than if you try to sell them right off the bat.
This is for a couple of reasons: one, they now trust you, and trust is one of the most important things to establish; and two, if you do it right, they will be very hungry for the next bit of information from you by the time you get to that point in your funnel (There are a few ways to crate ravenous hunger in your prospects all the way down your funnel, but I don't have time to go into all of them here.)
Mistake #2: Not having a squeeze page.
Imagine this: you have a store, and prospects walk into it to buy bread. Even if the customer buys one loaf of bread, they walk right back out again without buying anything else.
Now, you want to put your customers into a "sales funnel" so you try to do so by offering them more things as they make their way to the counter and out of the store. "Upsells" if you will. You try to sell them some milk to go with their bread, and maybe some candy up at the counter.
Whether or not they buy more from you, this is not an effective sales funnel. The reason is that once your customer leaves the store you have no other way of contacting them, thy they have dropped out of your funnel forever.
Having a squeeze page allows you to contact your leads again and again, and to keep them moving through your sales funnel, even if they don't buy the first time (or the second and third time).
There are several ways to make sure you have a squeeze page (and here's a hint: you must have it at the very beginning or your sales funnel)...that captures the most leads, and shoots them right into your sales funnel. Some people don't know how to make a good squeeze page in the first place, and this kills their sales funnel before they are even out of the gate.
Mistake #3: Not testing your funnel.
Some people make the mistake of building what looks like a great sales funnel, but it's really a leaky structure that bleeds money and drops potential customers at every juncture. For example, what if your squeeze page is only keeping 10 percent of your leads? That means you are dropping 90 percent of your leads right at the topl, and losing them forever.
The only way you would know that you are sustaining such a huge loss, and to be able to correct the mistake, would be if you were testing properly from the start. It's not hard to put a couple things in place to test your funnel (and I have a couple tricks up my sleeve for optimizing squeeze pages too) but you have to know how to do it.
Then, you will have built a golden funnel with a nice greased, slippery slope to riches, and not a leaky funnel built out of sand, that bleeds leads (and money) like a sieve.
