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1-01 Why Sales Funnels? 

Hi and welcome to Module 1 of No Fear Funnels! 

To have any success with sales funnels, it’s vital you understand exactly what funnels are, why we 
build them and why they’re so effective at getting better results from our websites. 

Sure, you could be a wizard at building landing pages, or creating email sequences, or designing 
sales pages. 

But doing any of those individual tactics without a true understanding of why - of the big picture - 
is a bit like building a house on a foundation of sand.  

Coming up in Module 1 

So in this module, Module 1, you’ll learn exactly what sales funnels are and why they work so 
effectively to get much better results from our websites. 

In the next lesson I’ll help you understand and visualise the marketing funnel, from a broad level 
perspective. It’s a big-picture mental model that it’s crucial to understand.  

And in the lesson after that, I’ll break the big picture down into its smaller practical components, 
what I call conversion engines, the actual building blocks you’ll use to plan and build real-life 
funnels for yourself and your clients.  

But before we move on, just briefly: 

Why do we needs funnels at all?  

Well, I think we can all agree: most websites have at least one main objective, at least one end goal 
we want visitors to achieve. I mean really… why bother making a website otherwise? 

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So for some sites, that goal is: we want visitors to buy something, like physical products or digital 
products.  

For other websites, we might want visitors to make an enquiry, hopefully leading to selling them a 
service or some consultancy.  

For others, we might want donations for a non-profit, or sign-ups to become a member of an 
organisation. 

Or, we might even just want visitors to show an appreciation of our artwork or short stories, like a 
social share or an encouraging comment. Yes - website goals don’t ​have​ to be based on money, 
though they usually are. 

So in funnels terminology, when someone comes to our website we want to ‘convert’ them from 
being just a visitor to achieving our end goal, which is usually becoming a customer of some kind. 

Throughout the course, I’ll use the term ‘customer’ for someone who’s achieved our main goal, 
even though I know ​sometimes​ the end goal might not be sales-related. It’s just easier to call them 
customers.  

But the mistake many business owners make is expecting that visitors will arrive at their site and 
will become customers straight away. 

As a graphic, that would look like this..... 

The same number of people who visit the site also perform the end goal.  

Now we know that’s completely unreasonable. But lots of website owners are not only 
disappointed when visitors don’t become customers straight away, but they also don’t know what 
to do about it. They believe there must be some kind of marketing wizardry involved that they 
don’t understand. 

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The truth is, we can’t just expect any visitors to magically become customers, just as we can’t 
expect to ask to marry someone we’ve just met and expect them to say yes immediately. Ok, it 
does happen… but it’s pretty rare! 

Instead, we need to actively and purposefully guide potential customers on a planned journey - the 
‘customer journey’ - you’ll hear that phrase often here - all the way from attracting them to the site 
in the first place, through to the eventual sale. Again, I use ‘sale’ in the loosest sense of someone 
achieving our intended goal.  

You’ll be able to visualise the funnel more fully after the next lesson, and more realistically too, but 
keeping it very very simple for now… 

A marketing funnel is two things:  

1. It’s the simple representation of our customer’s journey we want them to take.  

● From her first becoming aware of our website at all, a prospect. 

● To engaging with our content and becoming a lead by giving us her email address. 
● Through to nurturing the relationship to her becoming a customer. 

There’s definitely more to the customer journey than this simple flow suggests, as you’ll see in the 
next lesson. But this is the very basic idea for now to keep things simple and easy to follow. 

And of course not all prospects will become leads, not all leads will become customers. So that’s 
why we represent the journey as a funnel shape - the most number of people come into our site at 
the top of the funnel as traffic, that’s where the funnel is biggest, gradually dwindling down 
through each stage, with the smallest number of people eventually becoming customers. 

Conversion doesn’t just come right at the end of the process, by the way. We’re actively trying to 
convert people at all stages - converting them from prospect to a lead, then converting them from 
a lead to a customer, etc.  

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As you’ll learn in the next lesson, these days this model is far too simplistic and not a true 
representation of what actually happens in reality. But it’s definitely a good enough mental model 
for now if you’re new to this topic. 

But a funnel isn’t just an overview representation of the customer journey. 

2. The funnel is also the actual tools and processes we use to ease visitors along that ideal journey. 
So, that’s the content that attracts them, the landing pages and offers that convert them to a lead, 
the email sequences that nurture the relationship and build trust and excitement, and the sales 
pages and processes that generate the most sales. So not just the representation and map but also 
the actual tools, tactics and processes too. 

So the original question was: 

Why do we have sales funnels at all? 

Because actively and purposefully planning the customer’s journey, and putting the tools and 
processes in place to ease that journey along, is the best way to encourage as many sales, and 
therefore business growth, as possible. It certainly beats having no plan whatsoever and kinda 
hoping for the best. :) 

One point I need to make before we move on.  

The success of any marketing funnel also requires a great product/market fit.  

What does "product/market fit" mean? 

It’s a term coined by famous entrepreneur Mark Andreesen, and it means that your product or 
service has to have a strong market demand, meaning people somewhere have to want and need 
your product, even if they don’t know about it yet.  

Mark puts it like this: 

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“Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.” 

Or put another way: if your product or service is poor, or it doesn’t actually meet anyone’s real 
needs, then no amount of amazing sales funnel is going to sell it. 

That doesn’t mean your product needs to be mind-blowingly unique or anything like that. Just that 
it has to meet someone’s needs and be something they’d willingly pay for. Luckily, the process we’ll 
follow in this course will help you determine just that. We’ll especially get to that in Module 2.  

Next 

Ok, we’ve covered why we need a sales funnels at all and we now have a simple concept of how 
and why they work.  

In the next lesson, we’ll dive further into properly visualising the funnel, including a more realistic 
representation of how it works in real life. It’ll be fun! 

See you next. 

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