040: Sales Funnels For Your Design Business with Cathy Olson

This week’s guest on the podcast is the talented Cathy from Love Inspired. Cathy has an impressive background with a minor in 3D animation, a major in Art + Design, and taught herself coding, creating her first website 20 years ago.

In 2008 she used her design and web background to create her business, Love Inspired, where 10 years later she’s worked on over a thousand projects for female business owners. For the past 5 years she’s also been teaching and speaking at conferences all over the United States to inspire other creative business owners.

Recently, Cathy learned all about what a difference sales funnels can make in a design business, which isn’t something we get to hear much about. So today we’re excited to welcome her on the podcast to give us a little look at what it’s done for her business and how we can get started implementing our own funnels.

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Cathy’s discovery of sales funnels

Cathy thought what she had set up in her business was a sales funnel, and it’s what a lot of us would consider a funnel, but what the general business owner thinks of when they think of funnels isn’t the whole story.

She had a specific picture of where she wanted her business to go, including how much recurring revenue she wanted. With that option, her options were to hire someone to launch courses for her every month or to automate it all. From there she made the decision to move forward with a more robust sales funnel.

The transformation her business has seen thanks to sales funnels

Cathy’s vision with creating a sales funnel was to allow herself to take about 1/3 of the client’s she’s been taking at a more premium price point. But even with that, she still wanted some additional revenue coming in and the opportunity to build her community of people at a lower price point.

With funnels, she’s able to serve both her 1:1 clients as well as other parts of her community that can’t work with her in that capacity.

The most difficult part of getting started with funnels

A lot of people try to make sales funnels sound easy to set up, but Cathy wasn’t scared to tell us that is anything but easy.

For Cathy, the most difficult part was creating the offer and the product. If your product isn’t great, you find yourself pushing and having to do a lot more hard-selling. But if your product is great, everything else falls into place.

However, making that perfect offer isn’t an easy thing to do.

The difference in sales funnels between product and service based businesses

Cathy recommends thinking of your service as a product, if possible. At least if you don’t want your sales funnel to take up too much of your time. So consider what you offer your clients and find a way to package that up in a way that provides immense value for the people who can’t work with you 1:1.

However, if you’re creating a funnel directly to your services you’ll find that your offer will be at a higher price point and will have to be sold in a different way. For example, the people in your funnel have to be warmed up and then sold to. With products, it’s easier to sell to a cold audience.

From there you’d likely add evergreen webinars and consult calls onto what you hear about with creating sales funnels for product-based businesses.

Action Steps

If you want to get started with your own sales funnel, Cathy recommends the following steps:

1. Know that it’s going to be difficult
2. Determine what you want your business to look like and how a funnel fits in with your current business (rather than adding more overwhelm and stress)
3. Spend time creating an amazing offer, based on your goals and what your audience needs
4. From there, create an opt-in that relates to your product, but doesn’t solve the problem
5. Determine if you need to hire someone to help or if you’ll be learning everything you need to know about putting the funnel together and Facebook ads

Learn more about Cathy

Cathy Olson has been beautifying brands and designing experiences of digital delight for over 17 years, working with multi-million dollar brands like Costco, Best Buy and Disney. Now the founder of Love Inspired, an international branding and web design studio with a boutique approach, she helps flourishing creatives package their expertise in a way that excites eyes, hugs hearts, and cues cha-chings.

When Cathy’s not innovating for talented clients, she shares her multifaceted expertise through Digital Summits, Webinars, e-Courses or on her YouTube Channel. She has a passion for putting the fun in functional, the purpose in pretty, and the meaning in details. Her heart’s mission: To help talented creatives feel proud to share their ideas and passions with others, and inspired to stretch their businesses to new heights.

Website | YouTube | Instagram | Designer For A Day

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