How can you give something away and still get paid a significant amount of money? While these two scenarios seem polar opposite, the reality today is that you have to give before you receive. Educate yourself here how to identify and create sales funnels in your company.

Sales funnels are everywhere. Your website can attract a large group of people who will find your offer or service relevant. They want to know more. You give them something of value and you give it away for free. This is called a freemium. A certain number of those people will want more advanced features, functionality or related products and services. You provide these at a reasonable price point relative to your competitors or in relation to the amount of money the customer makes or saves. A subset of this paying group will want personalized or specialized products and services, which they will pay a significant premium because of the value it creates for those individuals.

A recent example of a well-functioning sales funnel is a marketing software company. They offer free webinars every week highlighting the latest marketing data and tactics as it unfolds. They have tens of thousands of new people watching these webinars and getting great, free information that can be turned into thousands of dollars of sales. The marketing software company lease software as a service to increase leads and sales through websites for $250-$1500/mo. They publish that they have 4000 customers from the 500,000+ viewers of their free webinars. Giving away information every week to 99% of their potential customers still generates an estimated $1,000,000 A MONTH for a software service that does not cost hardly anything to support additional users.

Figure out what you have that is valuable. Create a version that gives customer value whether it is a “lite” version, limited time, limited capacity, or single user, and advertise the freemium broadly. There will be a natural narrowing down of customers who are willing to pay for a more feature laden product or service. The most profitable customers will then present themselves as they need more personalized service because of the enormous value they receive when you provide your product.