The goal of a funnel is to guide people through a process that leads to a desired end result. Top performing funnels are designed in such a way that they almost guarantee a certain outcome. They are also designed to consistently produce that outcome. This means businesses can better plan for capacity in the future as they have a good understanding of what will be coming down the pipeline.

So what does this really mean and how do you go about designing and building a high converting funnel. Basically, we first use funnel strategy for the design and then use funnel technology to build and run it.

Let’s start with funnel design. It will sound counter-intuitive, but the funnel is designed by first focusing on the desired outcome and then working back through all the steps in the funnel to see how many people need to enter the funnel to get the desired outcome.

We’ll use a business coach as an example. Say he/she could do with 5 additional coaching customers a month. They offer a FREE Online Assessment which indicates what the program can do for the client. They then offer a $150 Detailed Action Plan Report based the Assessment. And, finally they offer a $1,000 coaching program. That is called a value ladder and the aim of the funnel is to move people up the ladder.

So, from the coaches past experience they’ll say 50% of the people who purchase the Detailed Action Plan Report go on to the coaching program, that means at least 10 people need to purchase that report to get 5 customers on the program. Similarly, if 50% of the people who take the FREE Assessment go on to purchase the report, that means 20 need to complete the assessment so that they get 5 coaching customers out at the bottom of the funnel.

Now that we understand how the funnel works, we can map it out and start looking at what content will be required to for it. This is where the hook, story and offer are fleshed out and all the assets like ad copy, page copy, images/video and content need to be developed before we actually build the funnel using technology. We’ll cover that in Part 2 of this series.