Lesson: Sales Funnel Optimization with Hiten Shah

Step #1 Sales Funnel: What is a sales funnel and how does it support you?

In the context any business, I'll go really high level, a funnel is basically the step-by-step process or things that your customer or your user does to accomplish a goal.

All businesses that I have seen, even like ones that are offline, online, mobile, they all have funnels. I believe that every business needs a funnel. Every business, even if they're exactly the same, sometimes they will have different things that their customer or their user has to do. So the steps in their funnels might be different.

If you're not measuring your funnel in your key metrics, you're not able to actually improve your business.

The way I think about sales in a startup, especially a really early stage endeavor, is that the earlier you can get to taking people's money, the faster you'll make money, obviously, but more importantly the more you'll learn about your customer. What they're willing to pay for, you're not going to really understand unless they're actually paying for it.

So I tend to try to figure out how to do sales much earlier now, after a lot of learnings and failures on that process, just because when someone pays you for something, they have a different expectation and mindset than when they're not paying you.