Lead Generation Funnel Strategy: From Idea to Execution

Want to boost your lead conversions instantly? Wondering what makes a lead gen offer irresistible? 

In this article, we’ll explore how to build lead generation funnels that convert.

Why Are Lead Generation Funnels Important for Marketers and Business Growth?

If your business depends on generating leads, you need a high-converting funnel. Without enough qualified leads entering your sales pipeline, closing deals and driving growth becomes an uphill battle. However, many businesses struggle to generate enough high-quality leads to fuel their growth consistently.

So, what exactly constitutes an effective lead generation funnel? And how do you build one from scratch?

Many business owners downplay the idea of “funnels,” seeing them as overly salesy or better left for scammy internet marketers. Marketing funnel expert Alisha Conlin-Hurd argues this mindset stems from fundamental misunderstandings.

In reality, every business has a sales funnel, whether they realize it or not. Your funnel encompasses each touchpoint and micro-interaction a prospective customer has with your brand—from initial ad exposure to booking calls and browsing your website. It’s the sum total of their journey with you.

This means funnels inherently contain leaks where potential revenue is bled. For example, one of Alisha’s clients has a 4.4% opt-in rate. By optimizing this metric to 10%, they could gain an extra $160K per month with the same traffic levels. Funnels allow you to maximize the value of each visitor.

This example illustrates why you cannot scale profitable traffic without funnel optimization. “You can't scale traffic that doesn't convert. And so all of these touch points in your funnel, they're potential revenue leaks… and all of these little leaks, they add up to sink big ships,” Alisha says.  

In other words, Alisha argues that most businesses focus obsessively on driving more traffic while failing to optimize the conversion process. Traffic is easy to get; figuring out how to convert it is much more challenging.

Additionally, your competitors can't take away the power of your lead generation funnels. “It's how you build a competitive mote around your company,” Alisha says.

How to Build Lead Generation Funnels

Alisha shares her proven framework for building an effective lead generation strategy from the ground up. From understanding your target customer's psychology to crafting irresistible offers, Alisha breaks down the step-by-step process that has helped her clients generate millions in pipeline revenue.

The 3 Phases of an Effective Lead Generation Funnel

To understand lead funnels, Alisha breaks them into three distinct phases:

Phase 1:  Attract Traffic and Generate Leads

The opening “attract” phase focuses purely on converting cold website visitors into leads. It’s all of the interactions somebody has with you up until the moment they become a lead. This involves funnel touchpoints like:

• Lead magnets to capture emails
• High-converting landing pages
• Paid ads targeting buyer keywords

The key here is persuading cold traffic to opt in. Without enough leads entering your pipeline, meeting revenue goals becomes impossible, no matter how skilled your sales and marketing teams may be.

Phase 2: Convert Leads Into Customers

Once visitors become leads, they enter the “nurture and convert” phase to guide leads through the sales cycle toward a purchase. Alisha describes this as “sales choreography,” where you coordinate follow-ups, demos, pricing discussions, and more, capped with a strong close.

Phase 3: Ascend and Maximize Customer Lifetime Value

The final “ascend” phase aims to extract maximum value from newly won customers. This means providing excellent onboarding, securing referrals, facilitating upsells and cross-sells, guiding toward repeat purchases, and fueling word-of-mouth and reviews. 

Think about how you can give your clients the best experience. How can you get referrals and case studies by providing value to your clients? Alisha advises planning out each day for the first month and then each month afterward.

Most businesses focus on Phases 1 and 2 while neglecting Phase 3. But high-value paying customers are hard-won—you need to maximize each phase.

Focus first on attracting leads since sales and fulfillment don't matter without them. Then, you can build a lead generation funnel to increase traffic conversion and get high-quality leads. Now, you have a pipeline, so you have predictable leads every month. 

The 3 Core Offers of Lead Generation Funnels

We already know that a lead funnel brings together core touchpoints with a potential customer. Alisha says lead generation funnels have three core offers you can make to motivate action. An offer persuades people to take the next step. You don't want to ask for the sale right away. Instead, you want a series of micro-yesses building off each other based on where traffic is at in the buyer's journey.

The first offer is your “authority beacon,” your lead magnet. It attracts colder traffic earlier in the buyer's journey who may not yet know they need you, bringing new people into your universe. The second offer converts visitors into leads by getting them on the phone with you. Not everyone is ready to talk immediately, so this matches where they are in the buyer's journey.  

The third offer packages what you sell to leads who are sales-ready. Most people wrongly put their sales offer in front of everyone. You need to get a lead before you can make a sale. Alisha says to start with minimum viable, then build on what works.

#1: Research Your Target Customer Psychology

The first step in optimizing the lead generation process is conducting proper research into your target customers' psychology to understand what motivates them. Alisha explains, “If your marketing feels hard or it's not working, you don't have the right inputs. You don't understand the target market's language and what they actually want.”

Understanding your target audience helps you find the bullseye for your marketing. Clarifying who your ideal customer is makes your marketing easy. 

Proper research uncovers your target customers' core desires, who they are, their pain points, what solutions they have already tried, their dream outcome, their preferred language, and more. 

Understanding the target market's language allows you to mirror that in your communication with potential customers. If your messaging uses industry jargon or guesses about customer needs, it won't resonate. 

Successful brands research extensively to understand their target markets deeply. While research can seem tedious, it allows you to speak directly to customer motivations. As Alisha puts it, your copy should feel like you've “ripped a page out of their diary.” 

She offers three easy, free research methods:

Surveys

Well-designed conversion surveys uncover why customers purchase, what else they’ve tried, and what outcomes they seek. For example, a question might be, “How would you describe our company to a friend?” These insights can help you with ad angle ideas, split test ideas, landing page headlines, etc.  

Alisha has her clients survey their existing customers to understand their experience. The survey captures both quantitative data like Net Promoter Score and qualitative feedback.

Customers who rate the company a 9 or 10 are invited to provide testimonials. Then, the company reviews the feedback quarterly to create action plans for improving service and increasing future NPS scores.

Surveys work best when you provide an incentive for people to complete them. How you frame the questions also matters—ask in a way that makes people want to give their opinions. Combining an incentive with thoughtful framing results in quality feedback businesses can act on.

Third-Party Research

Mine sources like YouTube, Amazon, and top-performing social media posts and comments for buyer insights using keywords and content analysis. 

For example, one of Alisha’s clients is a neurosurgeon in Austin. She read Amazon book reviews about healing back pain. People shared heartbreaking stories about everything they've been through. The reviews provided very personal and detailed accounts of their struggles.

This information provides raw data in customers' own words about their struggles and desired outcomes. By analyzing multiple sources, such as online reviews and testimonials, patterns emerge around customer pain points and goals.

Internal Feedback Loops

Your marketing and sales teams, account managers, customer support reps, and social team often have invaluable insights into customer psychology from being on the frontlines. Create systems to channel these insights to marketing.

Alisha recommends scheduling regular meetings for teams to report on customers’ common questions and needs. This feedback helps improve marketing to generate better leads. It also provides market insights so you can adapt and shift messaging to match current customer interests.  

With this understanding, you can create marketing content, like sales pages, that directly speaks to your target customers’ needs and interests—you can craft messaging that describes their problems accurately and in their own words. This builds trust and credibility that you grasp their challenges and can provide solutions. 

Without investing in understanding target customer psychology, most businesses create marketing disconnected from customer needs. You need good marketing inputs to have good outputs. Psychology is a vital input to the entire marketing equation.

#2: Craft a Strategic Lead Generation Offer That Converts Cold Traffic

The next step involves creating a strategic lead generation offer—the core persuasion element designed to convince cold traffic to convert into leads.

As Alisha explained, an offer should motivate a micro “yes” aligned with the visitor's place in the buyer's journey—not try to close the sale immediately. Lead generation offers differ from general promotional offers in one fundamental way: they motivate visitors to take the next logical step in a business relationship, whether downloading an eBook, scheduling a call, attending a webinar, or something else. 

A lead magnet or authority beacon, like an eBook, aims to attract early-stage buyers who are not yet ready to talk to sales. A lead generation offer targets buyers actively looking for a solution to their problem. It motivates them to take the next step of a consultation call to discuss their needs.

For example, an eBook like “Five Ways to Maximize Your Medicare” attracts initial interest. Then, an offer like “Speak with a specialist to customize your Medicare plan” encourages relevant buyers to schedule advisory calls with experts. The goal is to convert interested visitors into qualified leads ready to speak directly with your sales team.

You want to understand the types of leads coming in—where they are in the buying journey and how “hot” they are. Understanding your leads helps you create offers that motivate action and show value. Prospects should feel they benefit whether or not they ultimately buy from you. Effective lead gen offers act as stepping stones that persuade closer engagement only after building trust and authority.

Alisha details a simple formula for crafting high-converting lead offers:

Name the Offer  

Start by naming your offer in a way that communicates tangible value to prospects. 

Alisha offers a cold traffic template: “Discover how to [achieve dream outcome] during a free [valuable consult, assessment, etc] with [your company].” For example, “Discover exactly how you can source your next profitable product from China with your free 30-minute product sourcing plan.”

For warmer traffic: “Apply for your free [their dream outcome] consultation with [your expertise/credentials].” For example, “Apply for your champagne design consultation with Dallas’ top remodeling and additions firm.” 

Using language and concepts uncovered during research hits prospects’ emotional triggers by focusing on the outcomes and transformation your offer enables, not just the offer itself.

The word “apply” shifts the power dynamic compared to a generic call to action. It establishes your business as an authoritative expert people want access to rather than a commodity. This wording attracts pre-qualified leads who have already determined they want to work with you before even getting on a call. It frames the consultation as your exclusive value rather than a sales pitch.  

This lead gen offer concept can work even without a dedicated sales team. The key is matching your offer to where prospects are in their buyer's journey. For lower-price products, an application call may come later after warming leads.

For higher-ticket services, calls are still crucial to qualify interest before putting extensive time into complex sales dialogs. The goal is to only put serious, committed prospects in front of the sales process. Setting an application frame early on screens for prospects ready for higher-touch conversations.

Effective marketing aims to educate and nurture leads over time, so selling becomes almost unnecessary by that point. Leads come informed, pre-qualified, and ready to buy. The offer terms finalize fit rather than push decisions.

Sweeten the Deal 

Then, build additional perceived value by highlighting complementary bonuses prospects receive later, such as assessments, action plans, etc. Avoid calling these deliverables “sales proposals.” Instead, use a euphemism like a “custom marketing game plan.” Spoiler alert: it’s still a proposal to get them to become customers. Remember, though, the goal is providing value, not just selling.

For example, Dallas’ remodeling and additions company could say, “Apply for your complimentary design consultation and champagne tour of our model homes.”

Include bullet points on what prospects will discover during the consultation based on understanding their goals and pain points through research. For example, “During this call, discover how to build your dream home on time and budget,” “Discover how to transform your current home into your dream home while living there,” or “Discover how to avoid hiring the wrong contractor.”

#3: Execute With Optimized Landing Pages 

With a strategic offer crafted, the final step is swift execution. Alisha notes, “Only your target market can tell you whether you have a million-dollar offer.” 

For example, Alisha worked with a home renovation company, Build TX, to create their lead gen offer. Through surveying their customers and market research, they uncovered valuable insights:

• Customers liked that they were a female-led company
• There were lots of contractor “horror stories,” creating fear
• Customers didn't know exactly what they wanted, yet

Competitors all used masculine messaging focused on getting quotes. But customers weren't ready for quotes on undefined projects. What they needed was design guidance and consultations to clarify their visions.

So, they created an exciting offer for a “Champagne Design Consultation.” The offer matched the target customer psyche, mainly women looking for a trustworthy partner in this complex, scary process. The offer resonated so well that it immediately built a multi-million dollar sales pipeline for Build TX.

The key to execution is turning the research insights into relevant, value-driven offers that move customers to the next step. You want to prioritize speed and get the lead gen offer in front of people as soon as possible. 

This means sending visitors to a dedicated landing page showcasing your high-value lead generation offer. Don’t make the mistake of housing offers on your main website—they’ll get lost in the noise. Offers need an evident singularity of purpose on isolated landing pages where every element focuses visitors on taking your desired action. Alisha advises you to have one dedicated landing page with one offer for one target market and one call to action.

Optimize Above the Fold

The most valuable real estate lies “above the fold.” This includes the topmost areas visible to visitors before they start scrolling. Alisha stresses the need to optimize landing pages for maximum conversions ruthlessly: 

• Navigation Bar: Logo (top left corner), phone number/contact info (top right corner), and call to action like “Apply for my free strategy session.”
• Value-Driven Headline: An impactful headline focuses on what you do and how it benefits potential customers—they focus on your prospect’s critical desire/problem.
• Subheadline: Articulate the value of your offer in a couple of sentences. For example, “Speak with a specialized finance expert today, and you'll discover [three bullet points].” Then, add your call to action. 
• Friction Removers: Under your call to action, include testimonials, trust badges, money-back guarantees, etc., whatever addresses customer concerns/objections.

You might also use a video or image above the fold, but Alisha cautions that everything needs to earn its spot when you design your landing page. Again, it’s significant real estate—everything above the fold is an opportunity to improve your conversions. 

With an optimized landing page promoting an irresistible lead generation offer, you have all the elements for funnel success. It's time to drive traffic and start generating leads!

Other Notes From This Episode

• Connect with Michael Stelzner @Stelzner on Instagram and @Mike_Stelzner on Twitter.
• Watch this interview and other exclusive content from Social Media Examiner on YouTube.

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