Let’s talk sales funnel creation! This is one of the key services I offer for my clients. It’s also something I do regularly for myself. From my experience, I know how overwhelming these types of projects can be. I work with a team that helps me get these big projects off the ground. At first, it can be tough to figure out where to get started and how to delegate it out to your team.
Especially if it’s a big launch and a big sales funnel, you may not be able to do everything yourself and you really shouldn’t have to. If you don’t have a team, consider hiring someone (or even someones!) to help with a project this big.
Delegation is key to sales funnel creation so that you can focus on your zone of genius. That might be recording videos, taking photos, or writing copy for sales pages. There are so many things that go into a sales funnel that it’s not always possible to do the whole thing yourself.
You’re really going to want to be focused on the top-level work. Say you’re launching a course, you’re going to want to be focused on the actual course content creation while your team is going to be helping with those other pieces, such as the marketing pieces that go into the creation of this sales funnel.
If you are going to be creating a brand new sales funnel or launching a course, then this is for you. I’m going to walk you through five steps to delegating work so that you can focus your time on what’s important, finish the project on time, and be successful in your funnel creation!
1. Set a Deadline
The first step of delegating a sales funnel or launch is having a deadline and/or a goal.
For a launch or sales funnel, you’re definitely going to want to have a launch date. Even if you’re not launching a tangible product or course. For example, I’m working on my own evergreen sales funnel right now. Even though there is not technically a “launch date” (because it will be evergreen), I still have a date in mind that I want this evergreen sales funnel to go live on.
Having a launch date or deadline helps give you a frame of reference and gives you a mark to shoot for. Setting a deadline can be really helpful to keep yourself on track, especially if you’re deadline-motivated or you have trouble with procrastinating (not that any of us have that problem, right?? 😉 ).
You may also want to set a goal for the launch or sales funnel. This could be the number of sales, how much revenue you’re going to make, how many people you want to enroll into your program or your course, etc. Having some sort of goal in mind, as well as a deadline, is a great place to start.
2a. Create a Plan of Action
Once you have set your deadline, work backward to create a plan of action. How are you going to do all of the things that need to get done by that date?
Warning: In this step, you may realize that your expected date is a little unrealistic. (This has happened to me before!)
If you realize you have underestimated the amount of work to be done, you can move that launch date at your discretion. But keep in mind that, by the end of step 2, you want to have a deadline you are 100% firm on. Sticking firm to your launch date will help keep you motivated and on track.
Creating this plan of action will allow you to set milestone deadlines for all the different types of work that has to be completed along the way. For example, you may want to set a milestone for completing the deliverable, and that will have its own due date. Milestone due dates should be based on the overall project due date.
Working backwards to set these dates helps you complete work in a timely manner, rather than procrastinating or attempting to cram it all in at the last minute.
It’s also especially helpful when you have a team, as it allows everyone to see what needs to be done and the time frame they have to do it.
Make a List of ALL the Steps
You’ll want to make a list of everything that you need to do in order to complete your sales funnel creation or launch. Down to the nitty-gritty details. You want to have a really in-depth list of everything that needs to get done.
For example, a sales funnel I’m working on for one of my clients right now has over 30 top-level tasks. And each of those tasks could be broken down into many different subtasks. You want to include all of the bigger tasks, as well as the smaller subtasks, in your list.
I can’t give you an exact number of how many things should be on your list. That’s going to vary wildly depending on the project. But sales funnels and launches tend to be pretty large feats with lots of moving parts and pieces. So there should be a LOT of things on your list. Take about an hour to sit down and really consider every single thing that needs to get done as part of this launch. This will make it easy to then delegate those tasks out.
3. Get Organized Within Your Project Management System
If you aren’t best friends with your project management system, it’s time to make nice. Take that brain dump of tasks from step 2 and organize it inside of your project management system. This lets you, everybody else on your team, and anyone else working on the project review all of their tasks and see everything that needs to be done at a glance .
There are two ways that you can organize your plan of action. Option A is to use stages or due dates. For one client, I set up a project in stages, which were completed by certain due dates. Through four stages, there were four major milestones to track if the project was on-time. The stages are in order of the sequence of events. Stage 1 has to be completed before stage 2 can start.
Option B is to organize by type of task. When I do sales funnels, I break them down into four areas: admin, copy, design, and tech. I find that most sales funnels break down in this order. They begin with admin work, then you write all the copy, then the design is completed, and then it is integrated with tech.
Option B is similar to option A, but just organized a little bit differently. It works for me to break it down this way because it does tend to be kind of chronological anyway. I like to have it like this so I can easily see at a glance all of the tasks in each area and quickly determine which ones need to be delegated to each team member. If you have a team, such as a marketing team or tech team, it’s easy to see what tasks need to be assigned.
Related: How to Use Asana for Behind-the-Scenes Business Organization
4a. Choose Your Tasks
After organizing the tasks, it’s time to choose which things on the list you are going to do. When I’m delegating a large project, I like to start by first identifying which things in all of these tasks that I personally have to do myself no matter what. These are the tasks that totally depend on your expertise. The sales funnel creation could not function if you don’t do them.
For me, these tasks include strategy and content creation, like recording videos or creating a deliverable. For you, it might look different based on whatever your area of expertise is. Whatever you and only you can do on your team, those are the pieces that you’re going to want to delegate to yourself first. Identify those pieces and then assign them to yourself and schedule out your due date.
4b. Manage Your Control Freak Tendencies
Next, I like to pick and choose some additional things that I would like to do myself as well, but things that I don’t necessarily have to do. One of my struggles when delegating a project is that I’m a little bit of a control freak and you guys might feel the same way. It’s your business, after all! I also really enjoy the type of work that I do. If it was a perfect world, I would want to create the entire sales funnel myself from A to Z. But I just don’t have time to do that and neither do you.
I always want to do more than what is absolutely necessary. If I do see that I have some time left in my schedule before the launch date, I let myself add in a couple more things to my plate. At the same time, I do try to be realistic with this and don’t overload myself. I almost never have time to do everything (as a business owner, I’m sure you understand that there’s always more to do!). If you’re new at delegating, honestly I would recommend skipping this step or just being super careful about this. It’s really easy to take on too much until it’s too late to delegate out.
I completely understand the desire to do everything, and I would recommend being extremely careful with putting too much on your plate. Basically, put the lowest amount of stuff on your plate because you want to be realistic. You might not have time to do everything that you think you’re going to have time to do. It always works out like that. The more delegation experiences I’ve had, the better I get about doing this more realistically.
5. Delegate Remaining Tasks
The last step is delegating all the remaining tasks to a team member. Once you’ve picked which things you’re going to do, you have to go through and assign all of those other tasks that you’re not going to do to a relevant team member and give them due dates that line up with the timeline of the project. When you’re doing this, you’re going to want to be careful about overlapping tasks and dependencies. For example, if task A can’t be done until task B is completed, you’ll want to adjust the due dates appropriately.
You’ll also want to keep a close eye on the project as it’s being worked on because if just one small piece gets delayed, the whole project can run off the rails before you even know it. You’ll want to make sure to be consistently reviewing any late tasks and making sure that due dates of dependent tasks get moved if something does come up.
Related: How to Get Good at Delegating Tasks for Your Business
My last piece of advice: it’s always good practice to build at least an extra week or two into your project. When you set the due date, put in a buffer in case there’s a snag or a tech glitch. With big projects, something usually comes up that can cause a delay and creating that buffer gives you breathing room, allowing you to still launch on time.
Building a sales funnel or preparing for a launch is a lot of work. But there’s no reason you have to do it alone. If you have a team or hire help for a big project, these five steps will help you delegate the work and make sales funnel creation a lot easier. You got this!
