We Found a Major Blindspot In Our Funnel (You Might Have It Too)

My team and I just discovered a MASSIVE blind spot in our funnel that’s been quietly slowing down sales, dragging out the lead lifecycle, and potentially costing us thousands every single month. And the craziest part?

We didn’t even realize it was happening. 

In this post, I’ll show you exactly how we found it, and how you can find gaps in your funnel, too.

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Last month, prior to our virtual team retreat – which usually involves a ton of juicy brainstorming, notetaking, and strategic analysis.

My ads manager was tasked with mapping all our funnels in a visual flowchart.

Now the goal of this WASN’T actually to audit our funnels.

We weren’t actively trying to reveal gaps, although now, this is most DEFINITELY part of our regular marketing review process moving forward.

I asked my ads manager to create this funnel flowchart so that everyone on the team could get a bird’s eye VISUAL of all the ways we bring in leads and convert those leads into customers.

Because, like most businesses, not everyone on my team is involved in the marketing side of things. 

For example, my customer support team might KNOW what our free and paid offers are, but how they all work together on the backend? Not so much.

So I thought this would be a cool thing to show the Posse Team.

And here is what our funnel looks like. To be honest, we were all shocked by what we saw.

Before I tell you the MAJOR blind spot we found.

Let me know if you’ve ever been unsure about what your own funnel actually looks like on paper. I’m happy to do another post on how to map out your own funnel like this later.

OK so back to our funnel – or really, series of funnels – that you can see here.

You can see she categorized all of our lead magnets into 6 main buckets that directly correlate with the main content pillars of my business – these are 6 core topics that I train on in both my free and paid content.

They are: Email marketing, social + content marketing, website + brand voice, marketing & sales copywriting, and then I also have a specific funnel for freelancers and new copywriters. 

You can see we have a lot of lead magnets – over 23 total. And to be honest, there are even more that we don’t even have here because we are sunsetting them.

Now you might be wondering why ANY business needs so many different lead magnets? Doesn’t that make building out your funnel more confusing?

Well, yes it absolutely does! And that’s exactly why having your funnel visually mapped out like this can be so useful. 

Let me make it clear that you DO NOT need this many lead magnets to have an effective funnel.

One good, relevant lead magnet per offer is plenty as long as you’re delivering REAL value that helps people solve a problem they are currently struggling with. 

This is key to creating a great lead magnet because it builds trust and makes your audience more likely to want to learn even more from you on the topic. 

And that brings me to the next part of any funnel, which is turning those brand new leads you just “WOW’d” with your free content into paying customers. 

The best way to do this is to present them with a RELEVANT offer that helps them take what they just learned to the next level. 

The content inside the lead magnet should be directly related to what they’ll learn or get help with in the offer. This makes the decision to say “YES” even easier. 

Now, our goal is to make sure that ALL of our freebies lead to a relevant “easy yes” or “Low-ticket” offer which eventually leads them to one of our higher-ticket programs or memberships.

And you can see that all of our funnels do exactly this.

All of these email marketing freebies lead to our low-ticket email marketing mini-course.

Which leads to a higher-ticket offer. 

And this is how all the funnels for each of our buckets looks.

EXCEPT FOR THIS ONE. 

You can see that we don’t have a relevant low-ticket offer for any of our copywriting or marketing lead magnets. 

And ironically, this is the bucket where we have the MOST lead magnets.

The new leads coming into this funnel are LESS LIKELY to become paying customers quickly because the offer they’re being presented with on the back  end of the lead magnet is $97.

Which isn’t a super high-ticket price by any means.

But for brand new leads who don’t know anything about me OR trust me yet. $97 is asking a lot. 

I’m not saying they won’t become customers EVENTUALLY – of course they could and many of them DO. 

But the higher priced the offer, the longer it typically takes.

And we want our new lead lifecycle to be as short as possible.

Getting a new lead to purchase something, ANYTHING from you as soon as possible makes them more likely to purchase something from you later.

As long as you deliver on your promise, of course.

According to this article, offers ranging from $7-$47 work best for converting new leads quickly.

And when you know that our Email Funnel low-ticket sales page converts at 14.33% on a $27 mini-course. Well, it’s clear we’re missing a big conversion opportunity here.

So now my team and I have to figure out what we’re going to do to solve this problem.

Now you might be wondering why we don’t just plug one of these other low-ticket offers here?

I mean, we already have so many! 

Just because we want to encourage a shorter buying window doesn’t mean we should willy-nilly put an offer here that doesn’t make any sense.

In fact, that could actually BACKFIRE and result in these new leads LOSING TRUST in my brand.

Making them UNLIKELY to buy anything from us in the future.  

So we want to make sure we’re showing new leads a HIGHLY RELEVANT OFFER that makes sense with the freebie they just signed up for. 

And that’s exactly what we’re going to do. 

Over the next few months, my team and I will be creating a BRAND NEW mini-course that will fall perfectly into this marketing and copywriting funnel. 

Are you curious about the results and if it does, in fact, make our new lead lifecycle shorter?

Should I make a post to share the results with you once we have the numbers? 

Let me know!

And if you want to see a little behind-the-scenes of my email marketing funnel – on how my lead magnet landing page and low-ticket sales page work TOGETHER to bring in maximum leads and conversions.

Make sure to check out the next post from me here. 

And hey – here’s the nudge you need to do a VISUAL audit of your funnels. You might be surprised by what you find. 

I’ll see you next week with a brand new post. 

Until then, I’m Alex. Ciao for now.

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