Network Marketing, also known as Multilevel Marketing (MLM) or Direct Selling, is a business model that requires you to build a network of people to make your sales. Unlike affiliate marketing, in Network Marketing, you do not have to drive traffic to the online affiliate link. Network Marketing involves person-to-person sales, and that is the reason why it becomes easy for you to sell to your friends, relatives, or colleagues. However, Network Marketers do not stop there; they go online by creating a virtual store and build their sales funnels to give rise to a full-fledged business. This write-up discusses a sales funnel and its importance in Network Marketing.
About the Sales Funnel
The sales funnel is a marketing term purely. It is the journey that potential customers go through when making a purchase. Typical sales funnel, for any business, usually has three stages – the top, middle, and the bottom. Let us try to understand each of those stages using an example. Consider your store. When people walk by your store, they are considered at the top of the sales funnel. When a few of them decide to walk into your store, they are considered in the middle of the sales funnel. And finally, when they pick your product and check out, they are at the bottom of the sales funnel.
Need for Sales Funnel
A sales funnel lets you know what your prospects are thinking or doing at each stage of their purchasing journey. By getting insights, marketers can strategize and invest in the right marketing activities and, accordingly, create relevant communication with their prospects during each stage in the hope of converting them into paying customers. In a Network Marketing business, your sales funnel creates awareness about your products or services, generates interest to compel people into buying, evaluates leads based on their feedback or interest, engages with potential customers, and finally converts them into customers. Defining a sales funnel in simple marketing is a step-by-step process that brings potential customers a step closer to your offer and makes a purchasing decision. The steps involved include marketing strategies like auto emailing, video presentations, content, and attractive landing pages to sell your product or service.
Options to Grow your Network Marketing Business
Many people find it difficult to market their business. However, when you step into the Network Marketing business, you have a couple of options to grow your business.
• In the first option, you may either continue relying on hope, i.e., waiting to get leads via referrals or word-of-mouth, or visit networking events and interact randomly with people hoping some of them will become your customers. This hoping option can test your patience and cannot be relied upon. It cannot accelerate your Direct Selling business growth at the fast pace you desire.
• The second option involves a systematic approach. Here you build a system to attract a relevant group and target to convert them into paying customers. Most businesses that succeed have devised this strategy using a sales funnel to acquire their customers. Identifying your target holds the key, followed by figuring out where and how to reach them.
Businesses that use a sales funnel have a marketing strategy to cultivate the leads and turning them into customers. They further have a plan that induces their customers to buy more and systematically introduce a referral scheme that helps them to grow their network of people.
Understanding the Phases of your Sales Funnel
When you talk of Network Marketing, its sales funnel consists of four phases – awareness, relationship, sales, and upsell.
- The Awareness Stage lets people know about your existence. You can reach your target audience and build brand awareness via content marketing, video presentation, online paid ads, word-of-mouth, and referral schemes.
- The Relationship Stage – Once you make people aware of your existence and tell them about your products or services, you need to build a relationship with them. In the. In the Relationship Stage, you devise ways to build trust and authority that enables your prospects to feel comfortable associating and buying from you. To effectively communicate with your target audience, channels include email services, social media, webinars, or sponsored videos.
- The Sales Stage – A well-designed Relationship Stage will enable you to build trust among your prospects and selling to them becomes easy. The Sales Stage leads to the closure of a sale. You can make your Sales Stage stronger using a landing page with a video along with a few featured speakers. Another way to improve your sales is to showcase the need for urgency to buy your products. If you display scarcity, avoid using fake scarcity as customers can sense it and stop trusting you.
- The Upsell Stage – This stage involves your business making additional money by selling related products or services. Apart from generating revenue, upselling can help to improve customer experience. When designing an upsell, know the products or services that can convenience customer interest in buying.
Conclusion: Building strong relationships with customers is the key to success.
A well-designed sales strategy can help you build relationships with the right audience that ultimately leads to growing your business. A mindset that strives to increase the people network can allow you to build relationships. And by providing value, you gain trust and induce them in becoming your loyal customers. That is what Network Marketing is all about. All the best.
