Why Your Funnel Isn't Converting (It's Not the Funnel)

0:07And we are back on another episode of the vault unlocked and today I'm actually super excited because we have Alicia Conlon Hurd, who has now known to build over 600 different funnels in 120 different niches, working with billion-dollar brands. We are going to learn everything from what makes funnels work all the way into the sales process and why the sales happen. Without further ado, please welcome Alicia. Super excited. How are we doing today? I'm good. And if anyone starts to think they're having an aneurysm, I just have an Aussie accent, which you guessed straight up. Are you American? Not many people guess their accent straight away.

0:56They go through British and then Kiwi and slowly get to Aussie. Yeah. Well, I think the hate to disappoint you, the reason I probably guessed it is because I'm Canadian. Ah, I was going to say, I did say, are you American? And that makes more sense because Canadians always get it straight away. Yeah. Alicia, for those that are listening right now and they have no idea who you are, what you're all about, please tell us a little bit about your background and where did it come from 600 different funnels? Yeah, well, I'll start with my origin story then, but I'll start where I am now. So at the moment, I run an agency called Persuasion Experience and all we specialize in is booking qualified calls onto sales teams calendars that actually show up and they're educated and they're persuaded.

1:43it. Why? Because the sales process starts in the marketing. But how did I learn this, right? Because marketing is a humbling sport and it takes a bit of time to learn these things. So fresh out of high school, my first job was cold calling. I was very good at it. Cold calling energy, like electricity, never paid a bill in my life. Top rep, top like 10 rep in a 200 call center every week that I was there. Then I went on and did more like telco sales. And then I went agency sales and I started at a company called King Kong. Now I'm a small town country gal, under 800 people. There's like a pub and a cemetery.

2:21You go in, you come out. So I didn't even have a concept of what sales was. To me, I was like, cool, I've got this job. I got to help people. All I got to do is figure out the thing that I'm selling. Is it right for them? Yes or no? If no, catch and release back into the wild. If yes, it is now my ethical obligation to persuade them to get this thing because I can see how it can fix their life. So anyway, I go to King Kong, one of their first team members, and then I build out their sales funnel and CRO team from scratch doing hundreds and hundreds of landing pages and funnels. After that, I go to Founder, or you might know it as Founder Magazine, and I build out their sales funnel and CRO team launching seven and eight-figure course funnels onto email and to cold.

3:04But at the same time, me and my partner, we have this thing called operation freedom and we're really into life design. And we're like, okay, like I, and I never thought I would be a business owner, right? Like I'm a very good employee, very good student, whatever. But I learned about financial freedom and independence. And I was like, right, the only way I'm going to hit my income goals is if I do do this, like if I move into this. So our side hustles overtook our main income. One day over breakfast, We shook hands. We quit our jobs that day. And then that brings me to the start of the story.

3:37We've been running Persuasion Experience not quite for four years. And in that, we sold all our shit and packed our lives into a suitcase and traveled the world for about two and a half, three years of that and scaled to seven figures. And now we're figuring out what's next. That's the story. Wow. That's, that's yeah, I love it. It's inspiring. I love the, the, the small town hero coming to the big, bad world and, and, and not, not losing, crushing. And the reason why is because it's the same. I grew up in a, not as small as that, but I grew up in a small town, right. And we grew, and I grew up in the era where it was like, you're a doctor, you're a lawyer, you're a teacher, you're an accountant, or you're working at the factory or jail.

4:18Like it was like, that was it. Right. So, and then you get in the real world and you see, there's a lot more opportunities than you get on the online world and you go, wow, have I, had I known, I really am interested in diving in here. Uh, understanding, I mean, to, to be safe to say you're behind like 620 funnels, you know, safe to say you learned some stuff. Uh, I think it's super important for us to understand, um, you know, maybe people listening don't even know what a funnel is now I'm thinking about it. Uh, so I don't know if you want to give that a, give that a good stab, the difference between a website and a funnel.

4:52But I really want to start kind of understanding like, what's the difference when we look at funnels of ones that are converting high and the ones that are not the reason why all that. Awesome. So let's, let's talk about funnel versus website. Cause it's true. Not every, I talk about funnels all the time, but I have this curse of knowledge, right? Like even when Matt, my co-founder and I started dating, I would go to his house, we would drink red wine and watch infomercials and break down their funnel. Like that's all I'm doing all of the time. I'm obsessed. However, I let, yes, let's, let's, let's touch on that.

5:26So a website I feel like is more of your, a sales enablement tool. You should never send traffic, especially paid ads to your homepage as an example, because your homepage is more like your front admin person. Whereas your landing page, one of the key parts of the funnel that we're talking about is more like your digital appointment set up or your digital sales person, right? So your website is important. It exists in your sphere of influence. But when we talk about a funnel, it's more like a purposely constructed, this is why we called the company persuasion experience, persuasion experience, where a funnel is not optional.

6:01It's just every single touch point somebody's going to have with you. And so the thing that most business owners miss is that each of the touch points in your funnel is a potential revenue leak, right? It's just it's all economics. Math is psychology, economics, and technology. That's it. So each of these touch points are a potential revenue leak. So when we talk about a funnel, that's all it is. We're crafting an experience we want somebody to go to, understanding that people are like batshit insane and never do the logical step. They're going to go and research you in your sphere of influence, and that's where your content sits, your website sits, your LinkedIn presence, whatever.

6:36Those things all sit in that sphere of influence and can impact the ability of your funnel. So now going into, okay, what makes a good funnel and what makes a bad funnel, right? First, we're gonna talk structurally and then we'll talk ingredients because marketing's just inputs and outputs, garbage in, garbage out. So if you can get the structure correct, awesome. But if you can get the ingredients correct, awesomer. I'll pause there just in case you wanna touch on anything. Otherwise I'll monologue at you for another hour. Yeah, I do. I don't want to cut you off, but I do because there's some stuff that you're saying that I think it requires some weight behind it.

7:16Because the concept you just said, shit in, shit out. How come so many market companies that I've seen, they try to optimize the funnel and they try to optimize the message and they try to optimize everything that's in between the shit in and shit out. but not actually addressing. It does not matter how great the funnel is. It does not matter how great the message is. You can add all the tricks you want with it. If it's shit in, it is going to be shit out. That is not even a marketing for say problem and or a sales problem. That's even, that's before marketing even begins. Yeah. So it sounds like, like the question is people like have these funnels and they're like trying to fix them and they're trying to fix them.

8:01right? But some people might call that CRO, conversion rate optimization, but effectively that functionality, optimization, what does that mean? You're fixing something that's working, but most people don't foundationally build a funnel that's worky at all. Okay. The other problem that most people have is that they are obsessed with ads. They're just spending and spending and spending, but the ads function is only to get the click, right? It's everything that happens post-click that makes all the money. So when you learn about these touch points, so I'll touch on the structure for now. There is your ad.

8:38There is your, let's call it your landing page. Then you might have an application multi-step form. Every question in that can have a drop-off, right? On your landing page, you need to know, sure, like somebody might say to you, our landing page is converting low, but that's quantitative data, not useful. You need the qualitative data, the why. Okay, how are people using the page? Then you have your booking page and then you'll have your thank you page. And we can dive into each of those pages if you like. And then you have all of your automations around it. Each point is a touch point. However, that whole structure is useless except for if, unless you have like what you were just saying, right?

9:14The right input. So those are the ingredients. So when we're doing any marketing, it's research, strategy execution but everybody's starting at execution i'll say that again because i think in frameworks and systems and it helps me to like figure things out research strategy execution if your funnel's not working you cooked one of those phases and it's usually the research because you shipped garbage into the funnel right so those ingredients are your target market can you articulate the target market better than anyone else can? How do they word their before state, their after state, their dream outcome?

9:53What have they tried before? What stage of awareness are they in? What's the conversation going on in their brain? Then you have your messaging and your differentiation. If you sound like the same shit out there, like that they've already tried and failed with, they're not going to buy from you. If you are copying all of your competitors, congratulations, now you have to compete on price because you idiots all just commoditize yourself, right? So the messaging and differentiation, how are you going to stand out from the noise? Then there's your social proof. Everyone sucks at that. Then there is your authority.

10:22So typically we try to pull an authority from the company. So they're not a faceless brand anymore. We have some sort of front facing. And then the most important part, the most important part for getting qualified leads is your offer. But most people get obsessed maybe with their sales offer, but you forget every step in your funnel is like a little micro yes, a little micro yes, and you have to get a lead before you can get a sale. So there's two types of offers we can talk about. I've just info dumped all over you and now you can figure out, choose your own adventure, what sounds exciting. Yeah, thanks.

10:55But there's two types of offers in there, right? And so to your point, like why doesn't anyone's funnels work? Why is everyone's marketing shit? Because they don't try. And it's company's fault and it's founder's fault because, all right, as a very quick rage bait thing, I've worked with like a thousand companies, easy, like hands down coaching in my community, like easy, right? And I just see that the founders who go abdicate marketing, they don't understand it. They don't make any effort to learn it. They struggle. Any that you see, I believe are the exception to the rule. The owners that get obsessed with the marketing and stay in the marketing and the sales, and they understand it, they're very successful.

11:38So at the end of the day, it's just, does your company appreciate marketing enough? Or do they think that it's a magical cure for your shitty business? Wow. Wow. A magical cure for your shitty business. I know. When you say that, what comes up for you? Trauma. It's like a counseling session now for all my past clients. But what comes up is like some people want marketing. and I've been in the agency game for 10 years, right? So if there happens to be any agency owners listening to this, this is a trauma lesson for you so you can fast track your own learnings. But companies will come to an agency or a marketer and expect them to magically fix things.

12:21They think it's easy, right, without building the infrastructure, the systems, the things that they need. But your marketing is just like a magnifying glass. That's all it is. And, of course, you can do really good marketing to a shit product and it works. Like there's heaps of scammy people doing, doing that, right? Like you can, but there's no longevity in that. So the other thing is you have a great product, but your marketing sucks and no one knows about it. So you can't actually help anybody anyway. So what comes up for me when it's like, like marketing can't save your shitty business. It's like, well, you need to have something worth marketing.

12:56And most people don't. It's like, that's the problem. Like there's nothing interesting about you. I've literally been on kickoff calls with clients and said, cool. What makes you different from your competitors? Oh, I don't know. Nothing. How the fuck do you expect me to market your business? Yeah. Oh, wow. That's great. Yeah. That's common, right? So yeah. End rant. Talking stick back to you. Next question. Yeah. No, no idea. It was interesting because that was, there was something or something behind that. Right. But now I kind of, I get what you're saying there. And then you also said something very interesting.

13:29So the, the businesses that you've seen now, is this specifically online businesses or are these like traditional businesses where you said, when I see the founder more engaged in more marketing and the sales, the business is way more successful than when the ones when they're just trying to hand it off to other people. Yes. So I've worked in everything, brick and mortar, online, whatever. Right. And obviously that's like a very broad stroke thing because a million people can point out successful businesses where the founder isn't engaged. And so I'm only talking from the data set I have, which is probably predominantly like on online businesses.

14:11But why is that helpful? Because the founder is, the founder should be obsessed with the market. That's it. Like hands down, should be obsessed with helping people and serving people. And those ideas and that information should trickle into the marketing. So like I'm working with a, I don't know what they're doing, like 50 million finance company, right? And the founder wasn't involved in marketing, not when we were working with them, but it was a marketing manager who just blatantly didn't really know what they were doing. And I see that time and time again, or with smaller companies where, you know, someone will be like, I've been burnt by five agencies.

14:50Like at some point, my friend, you need to learn about marketing and not get bullshitted. Like there's no excuse to not understand marketing, go to YouTube. Like, I'm sorry. Like you need, you need to learn it because it's like the lifeblood of your whole business. And in saying that though, I do believe marketing and sales is, is one machine. So I'm not sure if you have an opinion, what's more important marketing or sales. Um, obviously everyone has different opinions. Um, you know, it's interesting. If you want to go down that road, I'd love, we can go down that road. Cause you're talking to a sales guy, right?

15:23My whole business, everything has always been about sales. So at the core, I would say this at the deep, deep core sales trumps marketing, because I'll tell you why I say that, because it's hard and I wouldn't suggest it, but sales can do marketing over the phone. Where marketing can do sales over the phone. Right. So now if we're talking about low ticket or high ticket. Right. So we're talking about two hundred dollars, five hundred dollars, even thousand dollar offers marketing all day long. You actually don't even need a salesperson. I wouldn't even go near a salesperson for that. Figure out the marketing.

15:56You can scale faster. When we start getting the, as you know, the mid ticket to the high tickets, five, 10, 15, 20, I still believe it deserves a phone call and it needs a phone call and that, you know, deserves a salesperson. But here's the thing. If marketing does their job properly, sales is easy. If sales is doing marketing over the phone, marketing didn't do their job. If marketing is having a hard time and can't figure it out, product development, offer development, advertising, whatever it might be, didn't do their job. It's all part of a system, I believe. And I think that's where it gets very when an agency, when you're working with other people's businesses like I do, that's where I think we talked about before this, like where the fight starts happening, the marketing against sales, sales says the leads are crap, marketing is saying the salespeople are crap.

16:50And it just is counterproductive of what's actually happening and what's needed for success. So for me, I think it's unique in the situation to answer that question. But at the end of the day, gun to my head, sales can trump marketing on the phone. Yeah, you can get your team lined up for cold calling and whatever, right? Like you can get it going. And it depends on offer price, offer price industry market, mass market versus wealthy people, et cetera. But yeah. Yeah. I don't know if I have an answer except for you should just think of it as one system. And I agree. Yeah. So let's talk about that because I think it's really important.

17:32We both can see that, but how many business owners, how many businesses have you walked in? How many funnels have you walked in where that's just not the case? Well, why do you think that is? because it's a good question right because you have to diagnose the problem before you start prescribing things so when I do go into companies and it's like cool the sales director or whoever when like what are the feedback loops you have set up and established with the sales team nothing okay what data are we collecting from sales are we meeting with sales monthly like the sales manager and the top reps are we meeting with them monthly etc no and it's usually because of a past half-assed failed attempt to do some sort of like working together as a team.

18:15So usually when I work with sales teams, rarely, but it's nice when I do, you get sales people who are really like gung-ho, bought in, forthcoming with information, and they know how to give the information to you, right? But that's not always, and that's okay. That's not like, they're not marketers, they're sales people, and we just need them to close deals. And so the marketer has to think, well, why should I talk to the sales team? Like, okay, my job is to get good data to make good decisions. There's quantitative data that tells me the what, but then I need qualitative data to tell me the why and make good hypotheses to test out different things.

18:51And so one of the best inputs you can get is happening in the sales process because that's when the person is the freshest from the marketing. So people might have like onboarding survey set up and NPS and that's awesome, but it's all downstream once you've brainwashed them in a good way. Well, yeah. Once you've got it, let's use indoctrinated them, but yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Let's use indoctrinated them, not brainwashed. The sales process, what we do is we'll just get the call transcripts. We'll usually analyze close calls, calls that didn't close that should have and the bad fit. And we'll have a mixture of those.

19:26And then through our bot, sometimes I'm finding things like that probably the sales managers should like um your team is presenting price too early they hadn't actually made the sale they're presenting price way too early and that's why you lost that deal it's not marketing's fault and so okay to sort of put this into something actionable what do you need to do number one is have marketing and sales agree on lead scoring what makes a qualified lead yeah because you've got to you've got to have something that's black and white and it's objective then we understand from the sales team cool what does make a qualified lead they'll give reverse the three to seven qualifiers.

20:02And if we can, we'll reverse engineer those into questions. So we're screening people and the closers, because that's really who's on the call, pending your size of your sales team, you've got to respect their time. So we need to make sure they're only talking to people most likely to close. We've got to respect their time. That's one of the biggest effectiveness and efficiency hacks, right? And then once you've established that, they take the calls, you analyze the calls. Ideally, they're putting feedback into the sea. RIM correctly. And then that feedback loop just keeps making the calls better and better.

20:34And so for us, even the other day, like we're managing this huge funnel and we had this one ad takeoff and the marketing metrics were awesome. CPL is awesome. So cost per lead, um, booked call rate was awesome, but they weren't closing and something like, and our show up rate dropped. And it was like, okay, if we were like a normal marketer and only caring about that, we'd be like, Like, too bad. The metrics are great. Good luck with that. But our job is to deliver business results, right? Not marketing, ticking boxing. So we had to look and it was like, oh, shit, this one particular ad is causing the no-shows.

21:10Turn that thing off. Like, I don't care about the top of funnel metrics. Like, it's not working in the system. So, yeah, that's why all of those touch points are so important to be analyzing and making good decisions. I think I've talked to a lot of marketers. I'm going to just tell you this. I've worked with hundreds, hundreds of different companies. And I just wish, I just wish all the marketers had the same mindset that you have. Because that's how you actually win this game. To tell you, you know, I have a client, one of my clients right now, they are, their mindset is lowest, cheapest CPL.

21:51Mm-hmm. And then saying, why is the salespeople not closing? And that's when I would be talking about like the shit in shit out. Well, when you're trying to optimize for the lowest cost per lead on the front end, it just destroys everything that comes after that. I said something on a piece of content once and it was like, I don't know, something like CPL doesn't affect the P &L, stop optimizing for CPL. And this guy lost his shit in the comments. Like, you're an idiot. You obviously don't understand business. Like, what are you talking about? And I was like, okay, no, you're right. CPL can affect it.

22:31If you only track cost per lead, it'll affect it negatively because that's fucking stupid. Like you need to be, you need to be looking at all of the other metrics and your North star is, is cost to acquire a customer. That's it. That's what's going to drive the business. So your CPA, right? Yes, yes, exactly. And I have clients that come to us and their agency or their team are running lead form ads on Facebook and they're wondering why nothing closes and nothing shows up. Yeah. Because we haven't ads on Facebook. And that can work for like things like, I don't know, um, roofing and stuff, right?

23:03quick commoditized get me going but not not high ticket coaching and stuff and and then that client we made this system their their lead to sales time because that's another metric that you need to track collapsed from 30 days to two days i shit you not it's a case study on my website right all because we just did it properly like and like a bit more of like the marketing up up front all the sales up front right and so yeah i don't know you got me all worked up and traumatized oh no i love it let's let's keep going so let me ask you this what what type of funnels are you seeing convert uh lately like you know you got the book funnel you got your vsl you got your webinar you got your three-day event you got the the list goes on and on and i got your quiz funnel application funnel you got your two-step just you know as you know opt-in have the setters call and then just qualify right away have you seen any specific funnel working now in today's environment that's working higher than others?

24:02The funnel needs to match the business constraints and the business's strengths. So I'll ask, how good is your sales team? What are they closing at? Blah, blah, blah. Like the marketing has to support the business. So that's like where I always start. But typically with the clients that I work with, we are doing a book a call funnel. We're just finding people that are in market ready to go. And then we're going to scale that as much as we can. Then it's about cool, how do we diversify that and how do we scale it more? So then that diversification might come from a quiz funnel or a lead magnet funnel or a webinar funnel.

24:38Why? Because that's just finding people a little bit earlier in their buyer's journey and warming them up beforehand. Or, and or, we're diversifying that winning funnel and opening it up to more niches and more audiences. So you can kind of scale in those two different ways. So when you say a book, a book, a call funnel? What are the steps in when you say that is a book of call funnel? So typically it's add to landing page application. So those qualifying questions, calendar page, success page, no VSL in there, no long form video to, you could have a VSL on there. I would, I, and we do like some of ours we do, but when don't we, people think VSLs are easy and that means a video sales letter, right?

25:24Like actually once you have a video sales letter up and running now, it's just like, you have to look at the hook rate, the hold rate. You have to like have had already shot a bunch of different hooks. You, you can stuff it up because the person presenting is shit, not charismatic or is just jarring to the audience. There's now there's more things to take in, right? There's character, costume, setting, all of these things. So yes. And it doesn't have to be overcomplicated. So it's interesting because you just said something very interesting. So try to get what I've heard is like in marketing, not only are we trying to be creative and trying to get the attention of the right buyer, we're also trying to eliminate any barriers, like any barriers, factors, anything that we need to that may stop or prevent them from moving forward.