Creating Authority in your Sales Funnel is as Simple as just Adding Value

How often do you scroll through your social media feed and look at an advert and think twice, or thrice, about buying despite it being a product or service you might need?

For me, it’s all about trust.

As we are, so too are our potential customers, and accordingly getting a “buy” button to be pressed is only a matter of building trust and authority.

I say only, but building trust and authority might not be as easy as it sounds.

Ultimately though, the trust you build has the potential to create a lifelong relationship with your customers, which if nurtured, can be mutually beneficial.

Some Pointers on Adding Value

• Stop the sales talk and add value first, and when you have done that, don’t stop adding value.
• Learning about your customer’s pain points, and their burning questions and providing solutions to those questions is paramount to understanding your customer avatar.
• Spend time doing an exercise to understand your customer avatars' goals and values, where they find information to their problems or needs, and also their challenges and pain-points in their current situation.
• A useful resource for this customer avatar exercise is a website called “Answerthepublic” As the name suggests it provides details of questions being asked and based on those questions you can create content around those queries.
• Quite often, you should be poised to give information away. Give out a useful checklist, or perhaps a basic training video, and maybe a library of your best templates. It all goes to creating a relationship of trust first.

Once you understand the questions being asked on a certain subject, you are well on your way to adding value, by solving a problem, relieving a pain point, and creating authority in the eyes of your customers.

So you have added value, and your customer has seen your authority offer. What’s next?

Add some more value! This might be a sales process, but it shouldn’t be a pressing issue. If you have done your homework, you are selling to your niche market, and so the sale process is far easier.

Write your posts or adverts as if you are speaking to your perfect customer. Since you are generally in the pool with your perfect customer you already know a little about who they are.

At this next step, as you have already solved a problem in your first interaction with your customer, asking for their contact details is likely to be met with a positive reaction.

Perhaps you have written a top-notch educational course, and you are presenting it over a period of time. Your customer would be happy to give you his email address for regular learning opportunities and if the customer continues to receive value, he or she is likely to continue to subscribe to your ongoing offer.

And the sales funnel is working for you!

…and your list is growing. You have happy customers. You are adding value and solving problems and answering questions, left, right, and center.

Reciprocity is the name. Mutual benefit is the game. At this point in establishing a trust relationship, you could sell your value add and ideally, the price should be once-off and small enough for your customer to feel that the bank has not been broken.

But beware, you must continue to solve their problems, answer those burning questions, and relieving their pain points. Adding value in the process of moving the client through the sales funnel is neverending.

This type of relationship is for the long haul. It is the best type of relationship too, because this customer will tell their friends, and if you change their life and deliver on your promises to your customer’s friend, you have another customer. And the process continues.

Your customer just purchased an item in your micro offer. Can this goodwill continue?

Yes, it most certainly can. Remember, you have been establishing yourself as a trustworthy authority in your niche. You’ve been solving problems and answering questions and all the while taking care of your customer relationships.

At this point, your customer might feel like he is on the other end of the reciprocity scale and now decides that he can start to really invest in his outcome, with your awesome product or service.

Perhaps he is willing to charge forward and commit to a monthly subscription of sorts. Here at the end of your sales funnel, your core and continuity offers are positioned perfectly for the mutual benefit of your business and your customer.

It starts with adding value and ends with adding value, and all the while in-between, it’s about adding value.

Originally published at https://perpetualpilgrim1006.com.

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