Do You Really Need A New Funnel?

I’ve had my brush with death and narrowly escaped with my life more times than I can count on one hand.

Most of these episodes happened around bedtime. So my system is wired to stay vigilant, especially at night, and over the years, it’s done a number on my recovery. Plus five kids, a wife, businesses, clients.. You get it. (Maybe this is why I often make predictions that help my clients avoid costly mistakes.)

So when I came down with a really bad man cold recently it pushed me to recommit to good sleep hygiene as a way to increase my recovery. I overhauled my bedtime schedule and routine with some simple, common-sense measures. I’ve created a strategy based on my goals and my specific constraints.

But I did end up down a strange rabbit hole.

I started getting blasted with ads and content in my social media feeds promoting all kinds of gadgets, recovery products, and self-care philosophies. Before I knew it, I was watching a video of a chiropractor with his foot on some lady’s nose, smashing it in her face.

Things got weird fast.

I haven’t been sick much in the past few years. I’m sure it had something to do with all the calls (mostly non-clients) I got last month. I could feel the stress through the text messages, phone calls, and computer screens from business owners and their teams looking for solutions. It was like standing across the street from a burning building, feeling the heat and smelling the smoke. Some companies get slaughtered on the ad platforms during Q4 shenanigans (especially in an election year).

Competition for eyeballs is enormous. 

But the truth is I hear the same horror stories year round and have for the last decade. There’s always someone succeeding and someone failing. 

You've got to be able to spot the nonsensical foot-to-face scaling hacks. But then you also have to realize that what someone who’s helped hundreds of businesses scale(me) calls a shiny object and what you might think one is are two different things.

To me, something shiny is anything with a misaligned strategy that is also outside of a business's strengths, momentum, and competencies. It’s usually an attempt to circumvent something very mundane that we don’t want to do or haven't been able to properly find someone else to do it for us. Shiny objects don’t solve the most important bang for your buck constraints. If anything, they just create more of them.

For example, making millions of dollars with a call funnel but switching to a live webinar funnel to cold traffic for the first time because your sales team isn’t performing well and your media buyer isn’t filling the calendar. I handled this recently with a client, and I empathize with them because managing a sales team is hard. It’s a full-time gig on top of all of your other responsibilities. It’s not a job for a founder with multiple businesses, a sales team, and a life. You manage sales when you have maybe 1 or 2 sales reps max. 

Managing a media buyer involves using systems rather than your own grit, knowledge, and vigilance.

The live webinar bombed, like most of them do with cold traffic. They’re not easy, either. Cold audiences don’t show up and convert like warm audiences. It’s something you’ve got to really dial in, and it’s still a gamble. You throw all of this money at it over 7-10 days and pray it converts. It has a long slow feedback loop. On top of that most of the live webinars, workshops, and challenges I’ve seen that crush are either mostly warm traffic (even the ones that say cold traffic) or a blue ocean offer, or both. It’s an investment to nail like anything else.

My advice was “pick your poison” and focus on who you need to hire NOT how to do it. 

Unless you’ve completely penetrated your target market, there’s no need to change a funnel that’s been working. You might need to update your strategy. Part of that might mean hiring someone to figure something out for you. It may mean adjusting the KPIs and communication systems with your marketing and sales teams to get the desired outcomes. 

Unless you love burning businesses down to the ground and migraines, you need to ditch any strategy that reduces anything to you as the bottleneck.

You don’t need to be, learn, and do everything, and you can still hit your targets.

If that seems impossible, then congratulations. You’ve just found the real constraint: your belief system on business, people, communication, and leadership.

Coming face to face with this is the first step in receiving the strategy optimization needed to grow and scale with what has already been successful for you in the past but may not be working anymore.

It’s a people, alignment, and strategy problem disguised as an ad or sales problem.

—Lance C. Greenberg