The English language is a rich, versatile medium for expression. No doubt about it, as a language it is described as being a particularly potent, and powerful example of our species striving to generate and decipher ‘meaning’. 

Linguists speak of the innate hybrid origins and broad range of influences which have made English the de-facto language of the planet, this is not to put other languages down, but to merely account for the current status of English being the universal language of business, and diplomacy*

I begin this brief survey of ‘Sales Funnels’ with a statement about English, because the entire concept of ‘Funnels’ that is being spoken about so widely online, is largely a semantic trick.

I know I will probably attract hostile responses to this assertion, because there is a lot of money and attention at stake. Big names in the Internet Marketing community are well known to those of us who are familiar with digital culture, there are personalities who have managed to build their reputation for being successful, and knowledgeable – money talks, as they say!

Russel Brunson is one such name, and he has built an entire community based on this concept of ‘Funnels’, in fact he had a team of developers put together a SaaS platform on which you can build your sequences of pages, and gain access to powerful tools and resources in the one location. This is called ‘Click Funnels’

I am not going to heap scorn on this idea, because it is just another product, another option for certain types of people. I am however going to say that this is nothing new, and we can achieve the same outcomes using existing tools and resources without needing to invest the figures Russel’s community asks for. 

I think Click Funnels presents an old idea, and dresses it up as a shining new technological advance!

A ‘Funnel’ is simply a way of saying something very familiar, it used to be called ‘Sales Process Building’.

We have a wide opening, or sales page which attracts a large number of potential customers, we offer something broadly appealing to them.

From this broad catchment we begin to ‘narrow’ the offer, getting more and more specific and ‘high ticket’, we have more specialized products, or services the further we travel through this ‘Funnel’.

This is all very familiar stuff. The ‘Funnel’ part is a metaphor, or image which simply describes getting lots of people to begin with, and then refining and selectively removing those who are not prepared to spend more on bigger and better things.

Funnels are just presented pages online, where we can finely tune our sales process. Funnel building is just “Web Development”!

So, we can use anything to build our pages. We could use a clunky old HTML editor, or of course any of the slick, modern tools we now have.

Clickfunnels is basically just a web production platform.

So to conclude:

Sales Funnels are simply web pages, videos, text, which are presented to traffic we generate.

Traffic is simply ‘people’. We need to be very specific here, because ‘Traffic’ tends to get spoken about as if it is some magical thing, we get people to look at what we present through setting up advertising.

The best ‘bang for you buck’ advertising-wise is Facebook at the moment.

You need to know what you are doing with Facebook advertising, it is like no other media.

Funnels are web pages, so you need to have a plan.

The plan is all about developing your sequences, building your media.

There is nothing new about sales funnels, but we do have some new tools and powerful media building platforms we can use to make it all much easier, and attractive.

We do not need to invest inflated price tags in order to create modern, effective funnels, this is a mistake.

The trendy, well cashed up mob tends to go for anything which is shiny and new – and Brunson’s Click-Funnels has been successful in attracting that group of folks; those of us who are a little more wise and digitally savvy are not seduced by this approach.

Talk with me if you are interested in compiling your own sales funnels, I use just as effective tools and resources, but you won’t be throwing good money after bad.

So that is Sales Funnels, in a nutshell.