What Is The Best Way To Set Up My First Sales Funnel For A Small Business

Jennifer Ressmann
5 min readApr 13, 2022

A sales funnel is a great way to build relationships with clients and customers. It’s also a powerful way to build more leads for your business to ultimately sell your service or product to them. It’s also a great way to retain past customers and sell to them over and over.

Sales funnels can be complicated and difficult or they can be easy and simple. A sales funnel is really just a way to lead people through to buying your product or service. You might have somewhat of a sales funnel for your business already. So, what is the best way to set up your first sales funnel for a small business?

What Is The Best Way To Set Up My First Sales Funnel For A Small Business?

Think about it. How do you go about bringing in leads and closing sales for your business already? It might not be online. I think the online way of creating a sales funnel is what many people think about first. But, it’s not the only way to have a sales funnel.

And, this works for both brick and mortar shops and online businesses.

Let’s talk about a basic system for a small business that has a physical presence.

For example, you own a tax and CPA agency in a local town.

Imagine developing a system for your own sales funnel as we talk here.

Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash

Sales Funnel Traffic

People find you and your business in a variety of different ways.

They might find you through:

• A search online
• You might have a mailer or sales letter that goes out
• Maybe you have an ad running on the local radio or tv station
• And they might even walk by your location.

These are just a few ways you are building awareness for your service and your business. This creates traffic coming by, visiting your website, calling, or stopping by.

Sales Funnel Conversion

From here, the people that are looking for your services start checking you out more. They will probably check out your website and your social media if you have any. If you have a lead magnet on your website — they might sign up for it if it’s something that is attractive to them.

If they sign up for your lead magnet but do not reach out directly for your help, the emails you will send them can help build this relationship and nurture this relationship for a time when they will need your services and will buy from you.

If you have a tax service, as we mentioned above, it can actually be a pretty easy process. It’s a service people are familiar with, but maybe they are hesitant to hire you for whatever reason. You can talk about these reasons to nurture this relationship more and help them through their objections in your email series.

If instead, they reach out to talk with you either over the phone or by email, it can be a similar process.
“Hi, I need a tax person, but why should I hire you?” OR “Hi, I need a tax person, but it’s too expensive.” These are all objections you can handle one on one instead of through an email series.

You can also ask them to join your email series while you are speaking with them to see if you are the right fit.

Sales Funnels Can Be A Long Game

Have a mindset that not everyone is going to fit and that is ok. You can send them information over time and if they like what they see, they will probably convert and become your client.

If they aren’t converting, maybe you need a better more appropriate lead magnet or sales process. But, that’s an entirely other set of articles.

When the people above have decided they like your service and you have converted them into liking your offer they become leads. They are very interested. They have decided they like your business and your message speaks to them somehow.

Selling Through A Sales Funnel

Now, you want to sign them up and sell them what you have to offer.

This is not easy to take someone from the awareness stage through to a sale.

How many times have you been in this situation yourself? You get a flyer from a tax service in town and you toss it in the trash. You hear a radio ad from that tax service one day and you think… oh yeah, them. And, then they have an ad that pops up online and you think, yes them again. And, on and on. You see where this is going?

Plus, mix in all the million other ads, mailers, door-to-door salespeople, and ads on tv. It’s truly overwhelming, right?

Small Business Sales Funnel Success

It’s important to try things, fix things that don’t work, and keep at it.

You see the results online of people having huge successes. But, not a lot of people are crying about how they spent years doing things that didn’t work. Though I love Sahil Lavingia’s article about his journey building the site Gumroad.

It’s not often a quick and easy process. But, it doesn’t mean you aren’t doing what needs to be done.

Setting Up Your Sales Funnel

Setting Up Your Sales Funnel is going to depend on whether you are selling something directly online from a sales funnel or if you want someone to call you.

If you want someone to contact you from your email sales funnel or a more traditional form of marketing, you can develop something basic.

If you want to sell a product through the sales funnel you will need to work through a service provider or an app designed for that. My latest system interest to run a sales funnel on a budget is Systeme.io. Have you tried it yet?!

Need help writing your sales funnel? I can do that for you! Connect with me on LinkedIn and we can chat. Or contact me easily right here!

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Jennifer Ressmann

Copywriter and Content Creator Specialist — Experienced B2B and B2C Writer