Every single business leader we’ve ever talked to wants more clients, patients or members for their wellness center, their corporate wellness practice, their medical practice or their fitness center.
Yet hardly anyone actually knows why their customer growth has stumbled.
Here’s a clue: most prospective customers have up to 7 critical questions that they need answered–or else they won’t buy.
With those in mind, let’s take a look at your sales funnel and how to fix the most common problems.
Awareness
How to tell: Your weight loss program closes nearly everyone your sales team talks to–but there simply aren’t enough potential customers knocking on your door. That means the top level of your sales funnel is underpopulated.
If you need 100 new customers–but only 200 people even enter your sales funnel–that math will never work, because closing 50% of all those folks would take a Class A miracle in virtually any business in any industry.
This is fundamentally an awareness problem. Not enough people know your business exists. You are essentially invisible to them. And if they don’t even know you exist, they certainly won’t buy anything from you.
How to fix it: Prioritize marketing initiatives that increase visibility and increase traffic. Forget the conversions for now; you need numbers: more website visitors, more visitors to your social profiles, and more exposure to your content in general.
The reason is obvious: if you want more sales tomorrow, you need more potential customers to include your business in their decisionmaking process today.
These examples show you ways to expand the top of your sales funnel and increase awareness of your business and your specific expertise:
- Run “reach” campaigns on Facebook that share attention-grabbing customer stories.
- Implement landing pages specifically designed for leads in the contemplation stage, like FAQs that debunk myths or misconceptions.
- Use calls-to-action that lead people to self-assessment tools that help them assess their readiness to take action.
- Encourage early questions by activating Google My Business messaging, the Yelp inbox, Facebook Messenger on your business page, and website chat. Goal: response within an hour or less (NOT a day or two!).
Consideration
How to tell: If you’ve got lots of folks entering your sales funnel–and very few who ever make it to the buying decision–you probably have a “consideration” problem.
What does this mean? Well, in the middle of the sales funnel, people “consider” their specific options.
They love the idea of a concierge medical practice but they’re worried about access to care when they travel. They’re very interested in yoga but it’s hard to get anyone live by phone. They love the group fitness at that health club but the child care is underwhelming. They’re waffling between a DIY approach to managing their blood sugar and signing up for your diabetes self-care workshop.
If your prospects don’t make it through this stage, you have a mismatch between your sales and marketing efforts, and the problem is actually sales. Either the traffic you generated in the “awareness” stage at the top of your funnel is low-quality–it’s just not a good fit for your business–or the content you’re using in the conversion stage isn’t getting the job done.
We commonly see both issues: for example, Google Ads that target much too broad an audience, plus poor or missing content. Fortunately, Google Ads assigns a “quality score” during the ad setup process and warns you when your ads are probably not going to do the job. And yet, many people “set it and forget it” on their ad strategy without checking to see if their landing pages live up to the promise in the ads!
What’s an example of poor content? An FAQ that reiterates selling features in a Q&A format, instead of addressing authentic and recurring customer questions!
How to fix it: Reassess your target audiences and how you’re reaching them. Double-down on quality content that truly helps prospective clients or patients make a good buying decision.
For example:
- Audit your targeting.
Does it actually make sense, given your programs and services? We routinely exclude demographics that are highly unlikely to need a particular service. Marketing fertility programs to people over 50 is generally a low-ROI proposition. So is marketing Type 2 diabetes management to people under age 30.
- Make sure your marketing channels align well with your target audience.
Don’t rely on Instagram if your target market is career women in their 50s or male triathletes.
- Create a meaningful competitor comparison that explains what’s truly different about your sports conditioning program vs the alternatives.
- Provide a buyer’s guide that explains different approaches to losing weight and helps your prospect decide what’s best for them (even if it isn’t your program).
- Feature uncoached testimonials or stories from real customers in some of your advertising.
The buying decision
How to tell: You’ve got lots of traffic, and plenty of people move from the awareness stage to consideration…but you just can’t close enough new business.
When push comes to shove, the prospects you talk to just aren’t that into you. They make a buying decision, all right — but it’s not your business they choose.
Prospects who show all the signs of serious interest — only to bail during the final stage of your sales funnel — typically have unresolved anxieties about the “buy” decision.
How to fix it: Address and resolve common sources of sales friction — anxieties about actually making the purchase itself.
These examples demonstrate common anxieties and possible solutions:
- I want to register for this program but I can’t pay $2,495 upfront.
A possible solution may be a financing arrangement like CareCredit.
Another approach might be to divide, say, a six-month program up into 3 two-month chunks, and charge $849 for each chunk.
- It sounds good but what if I don’t like it or it isn’t right for me?
Consider no-questions-asked customer satisfaction promises or other “outs” that minimize potential embarrassment, awkward conversions and financial exposure.
[Discover the best call-to-action for health and wellness prospects who are in each stage of your sales funnel.]
[See examples of how fitness, medical and wellness businesses scare off potential clients and how to fix this problem.]
