Your online business is like a car. It takes you places.

Your sales funnel is like a tire. If you’ve got unicyclist skills, it can take you places.

If not, going faster, changing direction, or focusing on anything else might make you kiss the pavement.

To make things easier, you’ll want more tires. For most online businesses, four tires look like:

1. Marketing funnels that turn strangers into leads.
2. Sales funnels that turn leads into buyers.
3. Delivery funnels that turn buyers into active users.
4. Referral funnels that turn active users into promoters.

You could ride fast and furious with two, or be stylish with three. But if you want speed, reliability and tight cornering, you’ll need four.

But for tires to work their best, they’ve got to work together. They need the right air pressure, balancing and if you’ve been on the road for awhile, you might even need new tires.

Your business, like a car, needs maintenance. If you’re a seasoned pro, you’ve already recognized this as operations management (ops if you’re trendy). Skip it and you bleed money.

Maintenance keeps your car running. But that’s all it does. Like cruise control, it gets you by.

But what if you want to go faster?

To do that, you gotta hit the gas.

How To Accelerate Your Online Business

If you’re gunning for the #1 spot, all 30,000 parts inside your car start to count.

You don’t get Audi R8 performance with Honda Civic parts. But it’s not just what’s inside your car that counts. If you’re leading the pack, then you’re heading into uncharted territory. And the further you’re trying to go, the more your route, weather and road conditions matter too.

That’s where digital strategy comes in.

Before your trip, digital strategy assesses the situation. First we answer critical kinds of questions:

1. Objective: Where are we now? Where are we trying to go?
2. Competition: Who and what are we up against?
3. Product: What are we working with? What will we need?
4. Customer: How can we win?

Once we’ve got a lay of the land, we choose the best way to win. Then, we fine-tune for performance.

During the trip, digital strategy tells us how to execute. As every military strategist knows, no plan survives contact with the enemy. Things will come up. Roads will be blocked. Accidents will happen. And when they do, strategy gives us alternate routes to keep moving towards our destination.

After, strategy tells us how we did and how to make the next trip better, faster and smoother. Sales campaigns are like checkpoints on the amazing race towards your business goals. At every checkpoint, we see how we did and how we can improve. Do we need to switch out tires? Oil change? New parts? We check the car, check the route and keep moving forward.

No matter your destination, no matter your route, no matter your car, digital strategy makes your business drive faster.

What Will Your Digital Strategy Look Like?

Strategy means:

“Providing value to customers with unique products in a way that is different from your market.”
– Michael Port, Harvard Business Review

For your online business, that looks like:

• Product, competitor and customer research strategies to create a profitable plan before you launch any product or service.
• Marketing funnel strategies that spike the heart rates of your 1,000 true fans and beyond.
• Sales funnel strategies that describe your prospect’s problem so well, price becomes a minor detail.
• Delivery funnel strategies that spark buyers into competitive users hell-bent on giving you the best testimonials for future sales campaigns.
• Referral funnel strategies that inspire users to throw new customers at you.

Digital Strategy That Works

If you’ve been immersed in business, the 80/20 rule isn’t news to you. Yes, 80% of your results come from 20% of your actions.

But what happens when we 80/20 your marketing, sales, delivery and referral funnels?

That means 20% of your marketing funnels will give you 80% of your traffic.

That means 20% of your sales funnels will convert 80% of your customers.

That means 20% of your delivery funnels will engage 80% of your users.

That means 20% of your referral funnels will get you 80% of your new revenue without any new advertising cost (we call this pure profit).

What happens when you 80/20 all of your funnels for revenue, not conversion?

I call that concept a business funnel: A funnel that integrates every critical part of attracting, acquiring and keeping your best customers for life.

If you’re interested in how to plan, build and optimize this beast of a machine, then [thrive_2step id=’803′]sign up for my private list[/thrive_2step].

You’ll get strategies I won’t share anywhere else — from the advice I got from Jay Abraham, the $9.4 billion man, to the exact strategies I used to attract 700,000 visitors to my first online business. But first…

Here’s What Not To Expect

I don’t believe a sales funnel is enough. Yes, a sales funnel might get you a sale, but what you really need is a machine that turns strangers into buyers, repeat buyers and promoters.

You need more than a sales funnel. You need lead generation funnels, new customer on-boarding funnels, customer retention funnels, testimonial funnels, referral funnels and more.

You need more than tactics duct-taped together from well-intentioned folks that all have just one part of the puzzle.

You need a complete system.

If you’re interested in a different approach, join us.

[thrive_2step id=’803′]
Go Beyond The Sales Funnel
[/thrive_2step]