How to build a simple sales program for your business

Is this your plan to implement systems into your business?

I originally started The Why Builder as a digital marketing agency. I had a wide set of skills and a very small team. 1 designer fresh out of school, 1 web developer that I worked with on a few projects, and me. The only thing I knew for sure at the time was that I was ready to build my own company. At least I thought I was ready.

“If you can’t make your sales program work with a simple design then no elaborate complex sales funnel will work and you just wasted a ton of time, money, and energy.”

The first 2–3 years I was just “working”. I thought I was building a business. Revenue was coming in, new clients were signing up, and our team was growing. All the signs that your business is becoming “successful”. And then we hit our ceiling of growth. Till then all of our new clients and projects were strictly from referrals. I’m grateful that The Why Builder was born this way and especially for the people who believed in us enough to send us new clients, but it created a fall sense of success because once the referrals stop coming through my inbox so did our revenue. This made me take a step back and look at what was going on or what was NOT going on. We simply did not have any kind of sales program or system in place. Zero, Nada, Zilch. There was nothing in place to create new leads and close more deals. I was running purely off of what life brought to me. It’s safe to say that if you wait for great things to happen, chances are you’ll be waiting a very long time if not forever.

My first response was to create some elaborate sales funnel that can run on auto pilot and take 500hrs to build.

Now you might wonder how this is possible since we were a digital “marketing” agency. We build tons of automated sales programs and campaigns for clients but the people building it were so focused on doing it for other people that we neglected to build one for ourselves! So what’s the plan here? My first response was to create some elaborate sales funnel that can run on auto pilot and take 500hrs to build. But rational kicked in and all the years of reading personal development and business books reminded me to K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid). So we did.

TL;DR

We created a Hubspot account and set up 3 very simple automated email sequences.

The 3 email sequences were the following:

1. 5 Part Introduction Sequence. This is used when people are referred to us or interested in our services. Goal is to get them to a discovery call.
2. 1 Part Networking/Event Sequence. This is used when we meet people through networking or from an event. Goal is to make a meaningful connection.
3. 5 Part Post Discovery Call Sequence. This is used after we first have a live call or conversation. Goal is to go to the next phase in the sales funnel.

These sequences are a combination of actions to take and emails to automatically send.

Then we updated our website with our new services by adding the least amount of words and minimal design effort. The goal was to only feature the benefits of each service. The total time to setup the hub spot account, build the sequences, and update the website was less than 10 man hours.

Do people understand right away how your product or service can change their lives?

Next we created a simple plan to start attending local meetup events and to start reaching out to our existing and previous clients about our new services by sending 1 newsletter followed up by a personal phone call or email. This was all we needed to build the foundation of our sales program. It won’t end here as we will be regularly publishing new content but the point I’m trying to make is that it was this easy to build and implement a simple sales program. If you can’t make your sales program work with a simple design then no elaborate complex sales funnel will work and you just wasted a ton of time, money, and energy.

This simple and foundational sales program we created for ourselves is one of the new products we are offering as part of our Business Optimization program. We have 6 foundations that we believe all businesses should have and Marketing & Sales Automation is just 1 of them.

Key Takeaways:

1. Always… Keep It Simple Stupid
2. You don’t need a complex sales program to start making money
3. If you don’t have predictable income (sales program) you don’t have a business

To see all of the 6 foundations that every business should have in place, please visit our services pages.

https://www.thewhybuilder.com/services/