Lesson: Sales Funnel Optimization with Hiten Shah

Step #2 Funnel Creation: How do you create a sales funnel?

The way you set one up is you just think about what do people need to do. What are the steps they need to take? It's obvious when it's a funnel, when you know that if someone does one step, not all of those people that do that step end up doing the next step because you have drop-off.

Every time you build a website or even a mobile application, somebody has an idea of the user flows or the design very early on, and design meaning what people are going to do. So, all I like to do is take, some call it a site map, sometimes a user flow diagram, sometimes, it's a spec, so I just take basically that document that shows — and everyone has this in some form when they're building something like a website or mobile app — I just take that and figure out what steps my users have to go through and I use that to identify all the things I want to track. I don't actually think of it as a funnel to start with. I just think of it as things I need to track because people are doing them.

Then a lot of the tools including ours now will let you just track things and build these funnels out later. So, you don't have to necessarily think of the funnels up front, you just want to think about what people are doing. Then the instrumentation is pretty simple. You will need an engineer in most cases to be able to actually track that data.

These days, if it's depending on your budget, the time you have, sometimes I might just suggest you just track it in your own database. That way, you ensure that you have that data. What I mean by track it, is track all the user behavior, so everything they're doing and in most cases, it's usually already in your database. So, if you have a site and people are uploading a photo, your database knows that they uploaded a photo, so it's already tracked.

If you're instrumenting a tool, you want to have a really good plan of all the things you want to track, and then work with your engineers and possibly the vendor of the tool or read up on it, depending on the tool and the cost of it and things like that, on how to track that appropriate information so you can make decisions on it.