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Smart Marketers Have a FaaS (Funnels as Service) Mindset

If you’re reading this, that means you’re probably interested in selling Funnels as a Service (FaaS)… and that means you’re probably also interested in trying to create or scale a Funnel Marketing Agency.

So over the next few posts I am going to answer a few of the common questions people have about Funnels as a Service, including…

  • What is FaaS?
  • What does it mean to run a funnel agency?
  • What does a funnel agency look like?
  • How do you actually grow a funnel as a service business?
  • How do you find and attract your dream clients?
  • How do you close clients and charge them premium prices?
  • How can I make sure my clients are happy by delivering the funnels that I sold them… without working myself to death?

… You know, all those burning questions that you maybe didn’t know you have about FaaS Agencies.

But before we get to all of that, I’d like to talk about the absolute first thing you have to do if you want to launch, grow and scale Funnel Agency.

Because before you get to all of that, you have to have the right foundations. You have to get into the right mindset to grow a Funnel Agency.

What is the Funnels as a Service mindset?

If you want to make your FaaS business a success, you need to start at the ground floor. If you’ve been in digital marketing for awhile you might think you already know what I’m going to say, but stick with me here…

Because it’s really important that we’re on the same page with the fundamental principles of selling Funnels as a Service, and what kind of mindset you need to have to be successful.

You may have already heard about FaaS from my company, Funnelytics.io, or from one of my previous blogs about it.

You my have even registered for my FaaStrack webinar and had a chance to learn all about the four-step FaaS Framework:

  1. Attract
  2. Close
  3. Deliver
  4. Retain

If you’ve already taken that masterclass this might all be old news to you. If not, stick with me while we dive into the foundations of Funnels as a Service and the FaaS mindset.

First of all…

The aim of a FaaS Marketing Business is to sell funnels as a service to the business owners all over the world who want to generate leads and sales for their business.

That’s the key to FaaS… and also exactly what business owners are looking for.

More than anything else, business owners are willing to pay premium prices for a system that will turn strangers into leads and clients for their business.

A generic stock image that represents excellent ideas, systems and chalkboards.

And that’s where having a FaaS mindset comes in.

Developing the right mindset to sell FaaS is really important, because if you are still caught up in selling individual digital marketing services — in providing generic digital marketing services to your clients — you aren’t looking at the bigger picture.

You aren’t thinking like a Funnels as a Service provider.

And that means you’re leaving money on the table.

Because here’s the deal…

As a FaaS provider, you need to be prepared to sell any and all parts of a system that converts strangers into customers for your clients. That can mean the funnel strategy, the landing pages, the ads, writing the emails or doing the entire build…

But the more services you can bundle, the more of a “system” you can give your clients, the easier it is going to be to attract and close clients.

And if you can package up everything they need to turn strangers into customers, then deliver your system easily in a way that you can refine funnel to funnel…

That’s when you can start selling funnels for premium prices.

So that’s what I mean by Funnels as a Service. It’s extremely important that you understand this, because it differs from selling generic digital marketing services in one critical way… it’s not a commodity.

It’s a system, a repeatable way that you can deliver results to the business owners in your niche.

“But Mikael, [insert protest about digital marketing here]…”

If you’re shaking your head right now, that’s fine… I’ve already written an entire blog on why you should stop selling digital marketing services that you should probably check out.

Because digital marketing is a commodity, and smart digital marketers know it. Smart marketers are turning to selling Funnels as a Service because it gets real results, and it keeps confused clients from having to choose where to start.

How many times have you had a potential client come to you and say something like:

“I hired someone for [insert SEO, Facebook Ads, social media management, any generic digital marketing service here] and I didn’t get results. I felt like I was wasting money.”

– That client we’ve all had a billion times

Business owners trust digital marketers – especially freelance or contract marketers – a little less every day. And they always have someone to compare you to as a marketer, some one else who says they can do what you do… but for less.

This guy either sells digital marketing or hires his nephew's BFF to run his social media, I'm not sure.

When you make the leap to selling Funnels as a Service, you escape that trap. You bridge the gap between what a business owner THINKS they want to delivering what they actually need. And if you can do it repeatedly, if you can show your clients real results and help them make real money… that’s worth everything to them.

And it’s definitely worth a lot more than whatever generic marketing service your client might think they want — or that you might think you need to sell to keep your business afloat.

But it does require shifting your mindset from being a generalist or a generic digital marketing provider to being laser-focused on selling funnels as a service to a specific type of client…

A client that you KNOW you can help.

Before I move on, let me drive this point home a little more with…

A Quick List of Things Business Owners Think They Care About

Here are a few things that a struggling business owner thinks they care about – and that generic digital marketers might think they care about – that they don’t actually care about.

  • Search Engine Optimization
  • Facebook Ads
  • Content Marketing and Blogs
  • Google Ads
  • Having 10,000 followers on Instagram
  • Posting to Facebook 2x a day
  • Redesigning their website (again)
  • Complicated Google Analytics Views
  • Other stuff like this…

You get the drift. The average, struggling business owner – especially the kind you would want to work with as a FaaS Marketer – they don’t actually care about this stuff.

What they do care about is turning strangers into customers. They care about finding their ideal customer, wherever they are hanging out on the internet, and turning them into leads and sales.

That’s it.

But to actually be able to turn those dream customers into leads and sales… that’s a little harder. And let me tell you something about this from experience:

Just because you can do it in one market doesn’t mean that what you’re doing will work for everyone. And if you try, you will make yourself miserable.

This will be you if you don't pick a niche for your funnel agency. I promise.

The Importance of Finding a Niche

WARNING: This is the hardest part for people who are coming from selling digital marketing services, so please pay attention.

If you want to be successful as a Funnel Marketer, if you want to be able to sell your system to your own dream clients for premium prices, you need to identify exactly who your dream client is.

Start by asking yourself a few questions.

  1. Who is YOUR dream customer?
  2. What is the result I am helping them achieve?
  3. What funnel do you need to implement to help them achieve that result?

Once you have answered these questions – who your dream customer is, what they need, and what system you will use to help them achieve it – only then will you be on your way to the FaaS Mindset.

Because here’s the deal…

If you don’t define your dream customer and know:

  • Exactly what they do
  • Why they do it
  • What they need to be able to sell whatever it is more effectively

… You are setting yourself up to fail.

I’m going to write a whole blog in the next few weeks on the importance of finding your niche and how to do that, but here’s the short version:

All funnel customers are pretty much always looking for the same results – either leads or sales. But all leads and all sales are not the same.

Leads and sales for a course on Funnels as a Service are very, very different from helping someone fill up their local gym with new customers.

While the broad fundamentals may be the same – we are running Facebook Ads, we are building an optin page, a sales page, an email automation – those pieces look very different for a gym owner than they do for a marketing coach.

And while you CAN sell to anyone and everyone who wants a funnel… if you do, you will never be able to scale into a successful, profitable Funnel Agency.

Why?

Because every time you sell a new kind of funnel as a service, you are going to have to start from scratch.

One day you’ll be trying to figure out an effective lead magnet for a dentist, the next you’ll be building out an hour-long webinar funnel for a financial consultant… but you won’t have a system that you can repeat again and again to get results for your clients.

That’s why it’s so important to understand who your dream customer is, what they do, and what result they want.

It allows you to create a funnel structure, an ad structure, an email structure that will work again and again. So instead of planning and building the whole thing from scratch every time, you’ll already have the framework in place to let you move forward quickly…

Which means you can start getting results quickly.

And when you can show your clients results, you’ll keep them coming back for more.

That is the key to success in this game. You need to stop selling individualized services and start selling funnels… funnels that will help your clients achieve the results that they want. It makes every step, from attracting clients to retaining them, so much easier and simpler.

This smart marketer is super happy she found her niche and is selling a system to happy clients.

Creating a FaaS Assembly Line

I’m not saying that you can never branch out and sell funnels to anyone else… but when you are just getting started, it is extremely important that you sell one funnel to one dream client and do it over and over again.

When you’re first building (or transitioning to) a FaaS Agency, if you don’t structure it like an assembly line from the very beginning you are setting yourself up for long days and a whole lot of stress.

So I want you to think about your FaaS Marketing Agency like a car assembly line.

If you look at an assembly line, you see all the robots and the people and the checkpoints… all the little belts and arms and robots and processes that work together to build this car. And as it goes down the assembly line, all the pieces are put together.

And at the end, you have a nice, beautiful sedan.

That’s what you need to do with your Funnel Agency when you’re first starting out, whether you’re already an agency owner or currently a marketing freelancer or contractor.

When you go and find your dream client and start building their funnel, it’s like the car at the beginning of the assembly line. It’s your job to create the process, the system, the funnel that gets them the result they want.

By the time you’ve figured out the best possible way you can help this particular customer, you have spent a lot of time and effort to build this system and turn it into something that really works, that gets awesome results for your client.

Unfortunately, a lot of funnel builders stop right here. And that’s where they go totally wrong (and end up wanting to bash their heads against a wall).

This wall would have been a good one for me to bash my head against when I didn't pick a niche with I started WhiteCoat Digital... the grass would have been nice and soft to break my fall.

When most funnel marketers get to the end of a project, they go find a whole new client… and they don’t care about what industry they’re in or what they need.

And that means they have to build a whole new, fully custom system and funnel.

But take a second and think about it logically…

Why would you want to spend all that time perfecting your funnel — building a perfect assembly line — and then just throw it out to start over with something new?

To come back to the car analogy for a second… you cant put truck parts on the sedan conveyor line and expect to be able to build a car. Your assembly line would come to a screeching halt.

This assembly line robot firmly believes in automation and thinks you should, too.

That’s not an efficient way to build a car… and it’s not an efficient way to build a marketing agency, either.

Because once you know you can provide results to a certain type of client, you can find other clients who are looking for funnels just like that one.

And it will be really easy to sell, because you have proof it works.

When you choose a niche, you get to repurpose those foundations, those checkpoints, the little steps and pieces and robots that you’ve already designed again and again.

So if you want to be able to scale and make more money without pulling your hair out, pissing off your clients, abandoning your wife to wander around San Diego by herself while you’re on vacation because you’re chained to your laptop in the hotel room…

Which makes her REAL HAPPY, let me tell you…

Anyway.

If you want to be able to grow without going crazy, you need a niche. That allows you to create a system, a product, a funnel machine that you know in and out that you can sell again and again.

Then you can attract and close your dream client, deliver your product, keep your clients happy so they want to keep buying services from you…

And grow and scale to the point you can step away from the actual operations of your business and be able to focus on the things that you really love to do.

Then you get to feel like this guy every day.

So what do you think?

Are you ready to develop a FaaS mindset, or are you still pretty sure digital marketing is where it’s at? Head on over to Facebook and let me know one way or another.

If you’re ready to take the next step, you might want to check out my free masterclass on Funnels as a Service. It’s an hour and some change of pure value — I’m not selling anything during the webinar, though I do present an opportunity at the end that you might want to stick around for.

And to be totally transparent, I also talk a bit about how you can use Funnelytics to make mapping, testing and reporting on your funnels a whole lot easier.

I built Funnelytics because it’s what I wished I had when I was building and scaling my OWN funnel agency, so if that sounds like the kind of tool you’d be interested in, check it out for free right here.