💡 Hack Your Sales Funnel

Instead of starting from scratch, get a head start and build your marketing funnel by looking at proven funnels from your competitors.

You can look at your competitors’ sales pages, landing pages, price points, emails, retargeting ads, and more to reverse engineer their sales process.

It's crucial to understand the strategies your competitors are using and leverage this knowledge to optimize your own strategies. Funnel hacking is the process of analyzing, learning from, and implementing the best practices of your competitors' marketing funnels.

If you’re not sure how to build a sales funnel, here’s a quick overview of the various stages of a funnel, for your reference:

• Top of the Funnel – Awareness

• Middle of the Funnel – Interest and Desire

• Bottom of the Funnel – Action

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⭐️ How to funnel hack

There are many ways to funnel hack and it will vary in complexity for each stage of the funnel and what type of funnel (sales vs marketing). For example, once you get to the lower funnel stuff, you’ll likely have to buy their product to get a clear understanding of how they’re retargeting.

Here’s a brief overview of a top-of-funnel marketing funnel hack:

1. List out your competitors

Make a list of competitors that sell similar products/services to yours. These can be both direct and indirect competitors (more on that later).

2. Collect Funnel Content

Create a blank document and start collecting your competitor’s funnel content.

Funnels can be pretty complex with multiple steps, the main types of content you’ll want to pay attention to are:

• Front-end landing pages - These can be landing pages from their ads as well as their homepage and main website pages (features, pricing, FAQs, etc). Look at what copy they’re using, the layouts, what CTAs, any incentives and how they are communicating the benefits. You can use tona to monitor your competitor’s landing pages for any changes in content, prices, and new product launches.

• Back-end landing pages - These are pages for upsells, cross-sells, down-sells, thank you pages and so on.

• Organic Content - Use tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush to identify what content ranks the highest for Google and check out their socials to see what sort of content they’re publishing on those. You can also use a social listening tool to keep a consistent eye on this.

• Ad copy and creative - Use Meta, Google & TikTok’s ad library tools to see what types of ads your competitors are running and what copy they are using. If the ads have been live for a while and are still running, it’s likely they are performing very well.

• Emails - Subscribe to their sales emails and make note of frequency, style, CTAs, wording and content. You can use tona to automate this process and keep everything organised in one place (without flooding your own inbox). They also provide insights into your competitor’s strategy.

3. List & Analyze Traffic Sources

Use tools like SimilarWeb, SEMRush and Ahrefs to do track traffic sources. This will help you understand the split in terms of investment and impact and will give you a better idea of what channels you should focus your attention on when looking to increase your website’s traffic.

Traffic sources include:

• Organic Search

• Paid Search

• Referral (Review sites, online listings, news sites, etc)

• Email

• Direct (typing URL, bookmarks, etc)

• Social Media

• Paid Social

4. Implement

By now you should have most of the information you need about how your competitor’s funnel works and you’ll have some idea of what aspects of it work the best. Take the best bits and adapt add them to your own funnel.

Note that this is a very top-line approach and it will vary depending on your niche and competitor - go as deep as you can. As mentioned earlier, if you want to see how they are engaging with existing customers, become one by purchasing their product or subscription.

📝 Notes

Sales vs Marketing Funnel

Marketing Funnel

The marketing funnel is a broader concept that covers the entire process from the first moment someone hears about your brand through to the point of purchase and beyond. The marketing funnel typically consists of the following stages:

• Awareness: Attracting potential customers' attention to your brand, products, or services through advertising, social media, content marketing, and other promotional efforts.

• Interest: Engaging prospects by providing valuable information and content that piques their interest and addresses their pain points or needs.

• Consideration: Nurturing leads by offering targeted content, such as product comparisons, testimonials, or case studies, that helps them evaluate your offerings.

• Intent: Identifying prospects who show a strong intention to buy and sending them to the sales team for further follow-up.

• Evaluation: Assisting prospects in evaluating your products or services and addressing any questions or objections they may have.

• Purchase: Encouraging prospects to make a purchase decision and guiding them through the buying process.

Sales Funnel

The sales funnel is a narrower concept that focuses on the actual process of converting leads into paying customers. It is primarily concerned with the interactions between the sales team and potential customers. The sales funnel usually consists of the following stages:

• Lead: Identifying a potential customer who has shown interest in your product or service and fits your target demographic.

• Prospect: Qualifying the lead further by determining their fit and readiness to buy, often through direct interactions.

• Proposal: Presenting a tailored proposal to the prospect, highlighting the value proposition and benefits of your offerings.

• Negotiation: Addressing any questions or objections the prospect may have, and negotiating the terms of the deal.

• Close: Finalizing the sale, including signing contracts, processing payments, and setting up delivery or implementation of the product or service.

Direct & Indirect Competition

Direct competition is when you compete in the same market for the same customers by offering similar or identical products/services. Think Apple vs Microsoft or Adidas vs Nike.

Indirect competition is when you both target similar customers but offer different products. Think Domino’s vs Mcdonalds - they sell different types of food but to the same hungry customer who wants quick service and cheap price.

📚 Resources

• tona - Competitor monitoring and insights on autopilot (sponsor)

• BuiltWith - This is a Chrome add-on that enables you to see the technologies used to create the website you're visiting.

• Ahrefs - SEO tool that helps you analyze competitor search information

• SimilarWeb - Analyze competitor traffic levels and more

• Meta Ad Library - See competitor Facebook/Instagram ads.

• Google Ads Transparency - See competitor Google ads

• TikTok Ad Library - See competitor TikTok ads