Breaking Down The Perfect Sales Funnel [LNIM231]

Ever dream about the perfect sales funnel? In this episode, I tell the story of the perfect sales funnel that I encountered in real life. We break the funnel down, talk about the marketing principles that are used and why they are effective. We also discuss whether or not the owner of the funnel, Tony Polecastro, should feel guilty about using such an effective marketing tool.

Show Notes

I was cruising Facebook and was presented with an ad for an online guitar learning program.

Here are some of my observations about the ad:

Targeting

I learned a few chords and a few songs that I could strum along with but in my mind, I always had this dream of being one guy with a guitar on open night mic and singing a set. But I’m not a good guitar player by any stretch of the imagination and this is something that’s always bugged me a little bit. It’s always been in the back of my mind that I wanted to play guitar.

The ad was particularly targeted at people who have tried to learn the guitar but failed year after year and targeted particularly at older men.

When you first watch the video ad, it asks the question: have you been playing the guitar on and off for the last four decades and never really learned how to play? It went through and named all of my pain points around playing the guitar. The video was niched down to me exactly.

The other interesting thing about this was this is very niched down specifically acoustic guitar. People who identify with this ad are really qualified customers, they’re very narrowly focused. There are going to be a lot of people who see this ad and they’re not going to respond to it. And as an advertiser, that’s good. You want your ads not to appeal to everyone, but to appeal to your ideal customer. And that was certainly the case here. So I clicked on the ad.

Landing Page

I was led to a beautiful but very straightforward landing page that promised me that I could learn how to play guitar consistently. They offer a model that people without a routine get excited, they play for a while and then they get bored and then they quit. And then time goes by and they start again and they repeat the cycle — it was still speaking to me. Their proposed method is to give me a routine and their goal is to put me in a habit of playing the guitar daily and only through this daily guitar habit, I can master the guitar. If I sign up for their free masterclass, they will tell me the three secrets to establishing a consistent guitar routine.

They’ve targeted me specifically, they’ve qualified me as someone who’s the ideal customer for their product, they’ve told me that they understand my problem, and they can solve it for me. And all I need to do to find the solution is to give them my name and email and they’ll give me a masterclass, that will give me the solution. This is brilliant, I signed up immediately.

There’s light testimonials and trust badges on the page. This landing page also takes me to a webinar that starts in about seven minutes – building a sense of urgency. So naturally, I took the master class.

The Masterclass

Tony Polecastro runs Tony’s acoustic guitar challenge in this masterclass. He explains what my problem is and goes through a perfect progression of explaining my pain. He tells me what the solution is and that transformation is possible. He gives examples of students that he’s taught over the years, and how they’ve learned how to play after decades of failure. And then he goes into sales mode where he makes very compelling points. And so I bought the product right there on the spot.

Some interesting things about the video is that you could not exit from it, there was no pause button, you could not get up and walk away, you had to sit there and watch the first about 35 minutes of this video, there was no way for you to interrupt it or stop it. I found that totally annoying, and completely effective.

The other thing is, the ‘Buy’ button didn’t even appear until 35 minutes into the video. He only lets people into the class that have been through this initial video training. He wants to make sure that the people that are in there are all coming in with the same mindset.

There was a non-aggressive upsell after you buy the material (which I bought too) and it was set up with a one click upsell – you didn’t have to put your credit card information in again, it just automatically added that transaction and you didn’t have to do anything else. You just click buy.

And then I was put right into the course.

The Course

What was great was they were able to deliver what was promised – the course was completely beautiful on the inside. It’s organized exactly the way he said it would be in the sales video and there’s a vibrant community. It was an excellent match between the sales letter.

Links Mentioned In This Episode

LNIM Facebook Group
Tony Polecastro
Rick Beato
Free Video Courses on How to Start Your Business Online
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