Lead To Cash Process Flow For Your Online Business | Molly Ann Luna
Owning and operating an online business can be a daunting task. It would be best if you created or sourced products, set up a sales and delivery process, built a website and infrastructure, and marketed your new business.
But once it's all up and running, it can be a very profitable venture. In this blog post, I'll outline the basic steps of the Lead To Cash process flow for online businesses.
Following these simple steps can streamline your sales process and increase profits. So let's get started!
If you're starting or running an online business, it's essential to have a streamlined sales process in place. The Lead To Cash process flow outlines the steps you need to take to make sales and increase profits.
1. Prospecting: Finding potential customers
You’ll never find potential clients if you keep hiding online. Publshing a website with an about page and a detailed description of your paid services is not enough. It would be best if you actively prospected for your ideal clients everywhere you go in person and online.
On this blog, I share my best strategies for both online and offline techniques to help you generate leads for your business.
A few quick ideas include, but are not limited to:
+social media
+email marketing
+website optimization
+webinars
+review platforms/forums
+content marketing
+guest podcasting
With online business, you can hunt ruthless work to find your clients or take the more innovative approach and fish. Create a tempting offer and casually dip it into someone else pond to pull up a few prospects at a time.
My favorite type of ‘bait’ is a lead gen book.
It doesn’t take much time to create and is a quick win read for your prospect. In my signature program, I’ll teach you how to write and publish an authority-boosting book without writing a word.
Once written, you can more easily get booked for guest speaking gigs because, in most people's eyes, writing a book is hard, and if you have one, you must be an authority on the topic.
For example, get your copy of my latest book, Step Up, by heading to MollyAnnLuna.com/StepUp to see what I’m talking about.
2. Qualifying: Determining whether or not a lead is worth pursuing
Now it’s not enough to attract prospects; to build a financially successful business that you enjoy operating, you must qualify your prospect by taking them through a series of steps or questions to determine whether they are a lead worth pursuing.
A qualified prospect need wants, can use, and afford your paid offering.
When ‘fishing,’ you must pull up people interested in achieving your paid offer's results but aren’t motivated enough to use it and succeed, or maybe they would, but they can’t afford your product or service.
In that case, you might be tempted to discount your rates, but I highly recommend you don’t and that you know your value and you keep fishing for a more qualified prospect.
In an automated online business, I specialize in helping you build; you can use an email automation sequence, survey, or an application to achieve this step. If you’re offering a high-ticket program, you might consider adding a phone call or video conference call to this process to ensure that you’re attracting the correct type of people to your paid offer.
3. Converting: Turning leads into paying customers
To convert a lead into a paying client, you must ‘know’ your ideal client inside and out.
What are their major pain points? What do they want to achieve? What’s holding them back from having that level of success now? What do they need to know about you, your business, and your offer before they can say yes?
Then you want a solid marketing strategy in attracting and a nurturing sequence to engage further, educate, and inspire them to the YES.
Your marketing, messaging, and media must be congruent with your paid offer.
If any of those three are confusing at any point, you won’t convert leads.
In online business, you must be willing to work and refine your marketing strategy to convert leads into sales. You also must understand that lead conversion is a numbers game.
If you’ve built a marketing sales funnel that qualifies leads to your business automatically, and it’s not yet converting to sales, it could just be that you haven’t had enough new eyeballs to see your offer.
On average, for every hundred people who see your offer, 1-2 will opt-in.
Set a sales goal, reverse engineer the math, and set your target on getting your offer in front of as many people as you need to get a lead conversion.
In Denise DT's book, Chillprenuer, she breaks down her numbers from the last few years of launching your paid offer. Despite skilling up and becoming a better marketer over the years, the conversion rate stayed the same.
Get out of your head thinking everything needs to be perfect, but rather focus on making your marketing and messaging as straightforward as you can right now, get your funnel built, and promote, promote, promote.
4. Closing: Securing the sale
Now that you know your conversion numbers, have promoted your offer and pre-qualified your prospect, it’s time to secure the sale.
If you’ve done an excellent job in your initial client attracting and nurturing stages of the lead to cashflow process, closing the sale will be a breeze.
Regardless there are three key elements you want to ensure that you add during this conversation, including;
Create a sense of authentic urgency - are there a limited number of seats available, and is enrollment closing at midnight? Will the price be going up soon? Be upfront and honest with your lead. People are more prone to make a buying decision when they sense the opportunity won't be around long; just ensure that you’re creating authentic urgency, not fake scarcity.
Find ways to offer more value. - What are a few easy ways that you could add value to offer that don’t cost you out of pocket in time or money to deliver but that your prospect will find to be hugely beneficial? Just make sure that if you offer it, it is something that you can deliver on promptly.
In a recent high-ticket purchase I made for my business, the sales rep promised me that their team would build a robust digital asset for my business. It was the thing that got me to pull out my debit card and pay for the offer in full with cash. Unfortunately, their team wasn’t prepared to deliver on the promise, and it’s left me a frustrated buyer, now questioning my ability to make good decisions. Don’t be this type of closer.
Avoid phrases that assume a done deal.
In closing, tactics such as the ‘assumptive close’ were not talking about that. It’s OK to use those, but be aware that typically in closing a sale, you need two or more firm yesses from the buyer. An assumptive close yes, is a soft yes.
A done deal is never done until the seller has fully delivered on the promise of the offer.
Create space to let them sell themselves on the deal. You can ask open-ended questions and actively listen to their answers.
Need more of an in-depth breakdown on this topic? Be sure to subscribe to the show; I have a playlist of sales training episodes publishing soon.
5. Servicing: Keeping customers happy and retaining their business
Congrats on closing the sale; now isn’t the time to kick back and relax, but rather double down on your efforts to deliver top knots experience to your paying clients. Doing so will make them happy repeat clients who sing your praises and help draw new prospective clients to the top of your lead to the cash process flow.
A few ways you can work to retain your clients include:
Track and analyze churn metrics.
Implement a client feedback loop.
Maintain a customer communication calendar.
Continue to nurture them with a regular newsletter.
Start a customer education program.
Build trust with your customers.
Offer unique services.
Start a customer retention program.