What’s the Difference Between a Marketing Funnel and Sales Funnel

INTRO: After generating over a million dollars in sales and selling one of her businesses with a single email, your host, Kathryn Thompson, takes an unconventional approach to marketing and sales. So if you're ready to tap into a more powerful way to be seen, heard, and a sought after entrepreneur in your industry, without having to spend endless hours marketing your business and chasing clients, you're in the right place.

Be The Sought After Entrepreneur Podcast is here to help you ditch the cookie cutter, one size fits all approach to marketing and use your unique energy to effortlessly attract the most aligned clients. When you do this, you can spend less time marketing your business and more time doing your soul work and enjoying the richness of your life.

Welcome to Be The Sought After Entrepreneur Podcast. And here's your host, Kathryn Thompson. 

Kathryn Thompson: Hey, hey, super stoked that you're tuning in this week's episode and I cannot wait to dive into today's [00:01:00] topic because I want to share with you what the difference is between marketing and sales. And you might be thinking, but don't I need both in my business?

And the short answer is yes, at some point, you definitely need both in your business if you want to create long term sustainable growth. However, if you're just starting out in your business, you don't have a validated offer, or maybe you have years of mastery in something and you're wanting to maybe.

bring your business online or you're wanting to package your offers differently than what you do in the offline world, then you don't actually want to spend a ton of time on the marketing element of your business just yet. And this is where most people go sideways because what is often being taught, especially in the online world, is actually digital marketing.

It's not sales. And so what ends up happening is, is that most people will then do all of the marketing. So creating all the content for social [00:02:00] media to build that know, like, and trust. They will create a masterclass, they have the opt in page, they record the masterclass, they build the slides. That takes effort and time to script it out, to do all of the things.

They... You know, write the email sequence to go after people opt in and they spend all this time and energy thinking about even what the masterclass should be about and what ends up happening is, is then they go to market it and we have people kind of going through it. But that's a marketing funnel and a marketing funnel is designed to build the know, like, and trust.

It's not necessarily designed to sell straight away. It is designed to sell, but the sales cycle on a webinar or masterclass or a launch. is usually between 60 to 70 days if people don't know who you are. You can shorten that time frame if you've got [00:03:00] an engaged audience, but if you're new to your business or you're putting out a new offer for the first time, you might not have an engaged audience or you might not have an audience yet that quite trusts this new offer that you're putting out there.

And so to build all of these assets just to test that idea is a difficult place to sit because It's going to take you 60 to 70 and maybe 80 days to start to see sales coming through. And the difficult part of that is, is that oftentimes when we put an offer out into the world, it isn't a home run offer straight away.

And so you've done all of this work and what ends up happening, I've seen this time and time again, is then we spend so much time trying to refine the thing, the masterclass, the emails. All of that, when in reality we haven't validated the offer. It's not something we even know people want, but we also haven't validated the messaging around how to really articulate what it is that we're doing and therefore a [00:04:00] few iterations into tweaking a masterclass.

A lot of people give up, if they even get through the first iteration, because oftentimes you'll be building out this masterclass where you're like, I don't even really know what my audience wants. And I don't really know what they're saying. And I'm kind of making this up because I actually haven't really talked to enough people.

And you might be feeling like that right now. You might've taken a program or a course or something that's walked you through. Whether setting up an evergreen funnel or setting up a launch style funnel, which are all marketing based with a sales element on the end. So you might be thinking, Kathryn, but when I see a launch, the sales cycle seems really short.

It's like four days because I'm being told if I don't buy this thing in four days, this thing's going away forever. This deal, this price, all the things. And the reality is what you don't see is, is all of the marketing that happened before that even happened. Right? So if we think of the big hitters in the world like Marie Folio, Amy Porterfield, James Wedmore, right?

They're spending three to [00:05:00] six months Marketing prior to launching. They're spending six months marketing to get people to build that know, like, and trust so that when people come into the actual launch of it, a live launch, and they spend two weeks launching because they've got live trainings and Q& As and all the things, bells and whistles, affiliate partnerships, you name it.

that people are like really warmed up and so when they go to open cart it doesn't take people that long to make the decision because they've already made the decision before cart even opened and that's what marketing does and it's there's a time and a place for it right when you have a validated offer and you've got something that you know can sell then putting some marketing behind it is the thing that's going to help you reach more people and impact more people and sell more because you're going to have more people coming into your world.

The problem with that is that model is being taught to everybody. It's [00:06:00] being taught to newbies. It's being taught to people that don't have a validated offer. And majority of people are therefore then not ever following through on the thing that they're creating, the masterclass, the launches, you name it, because there's so much effort that goes into building all of that before ever really seeing a result or experiencing a win of some sort.

And so When you're new or have a new offer or aren't selling that much, like I'm talking like you've sold something three to five times maybe, then to me you want to focus on building a sales funnel, not a marketing funnel. And a sales funnel is a direct sales funnel. It's I've got a thing, this is what it is.

Do you want to buy it? It's as simple as that. It's not, Hey, I've got this free training. That's going to educate you on what I do. That's going to start to build the know, like, and trust so that when I go to pitch the thing at the end, you're more likely to buy it because you [00:07:00] started to know, like, and trust me.

The thing with an evergreen funnel is, is that, like I said, that sales cycle can be 60 to 70 days on average. And most of us want to see a sale within, like, the first two or three weeks. I've recorded an episode about this a while ago of, like, it's around that two to three mark, week mark where people get itchy.

They're like, oh, it's not working. I need to tweak something. I need to change something. And in reality, we just haven't given people enough time to sort of warm up. And. This will look, especially if you are just putting something out for the first time, I always say you get that snowball effect because as you're building your audience, you're going to get some, they call them early adopters in a lot of ways, but you get people that'll buy in.

Those intuitive buyers are like, I know I want this. If the offer is articulated well, then they'll buy in. And then as you build up your audience of people who are your right fit people, it may take some people within your audience, three months, six months, a year to two years. And I've. I've said this a lot [00:08:00] as well, right?

And that's just the sales cycle because at any given time, there's about three to 10 percent of the people who are ready to buy and the rest are not ready to buy yet. And so your marketing is actually designed for the not ready to buy yet. And that's what it's focused on. It's focused on nurturing them.

It's focused on eventually getting them to want to buy your thing over time. And there's a lot of reasons why people don't buy or are not ready and it might have nothing to do with your offer. It could be a life situation, like maybe they have a surgery coming up or their kid's getting married in Bali and they're gonna go spend three months there and they just don't, aren't ready to commit yet to the thing because when they're all in, they're all in.

And so I'm sharing this with you because I want to support you in helping you navigate where to sort of focus your energy and what you kind of need to focus your energy on [00:09:00] and also to potentially highlight maybe some of the frustrations of why things feel hard because you're putting in a lot of effort and not kind of seeing a reward and bookjam only thinking about the money and only thinking about the sale.

Like it has nothing to do with that. But we as human beings want, when we're putting things out into the world, yes, not necessarily be validated by other people, but we, we want to know that what we're doing is of value, especially for those that are selling the invisible or like in the. you know, healing space or support space, life coach, right?

Like the reason you do the work you do is because you love to serve people and help them with their life or whatnot, right? It's to help and serve other people. And so when we're not able to do that, because we don't have people buying, because we're marketing, marketing, [00:10:00] marketing, marketing, then that becomes a depletion in our energy.

And that depletes our energy because we're not in client delivery. And that's why so many people come to me and they'll say to me, Kathryn, I just want to be in client delivery. I don't want to spend all my time marketing. And the reality is, is that we want to create a system that allows you one to market sort of on autopilot, as I often say, and then be able to sell in your way.

So whether that's through sales calls or in the DMs or maybe it's just straight off your website, however you want to set up that system, but we know that the people coming into your world are the right people, but we don't really want to spend our time on that straight away. We don't want to spend our time growing an audience on social and building an email list if we don't even know yet.

that the people that are coming into our world are going to buy the offer we put out there into the world, which is why we often want to start with a sales funnel first and a direct sales funnel. And we want to [00:11:00] validate that offer first before we start to put a ton of marketing budget behind it. And I always think of the corporate world, right?

And I always think about buying big, like, you know, spending a ton on ad spend. And we never, ever, ever invested a ton on ad spend on a whim. You know, we were marketing a proven. product, an idea. We were, we were marketing that proven thing because we had tested it. We had validated it. My years of working in the ad agency world where we would literally do focus group after focus group after focus group to validate the offer before we ever put any big dollars behind it.

And that to me is where I feel like Again, in the online space, we've gone like sideways, right? We're teaching people how to market before people are ready to really put the money behind marketing or time and effort behind it. So, you know, spending a ton of time on social media to create [00:12:00] content, whether you want to put a value to that or not, there is a value to your time.

And if, if you're spending 80 percent of your time, Posting social media posts that are building this know, like, and trust factor, and you're not seeing sales in your business, it's not going to take very long before you start to get either frustrated with the business, you contemplate going back to getting another job, or you're not able to leave the job that you have because You aren't making sales in the thing you really want to do.

And so I want you to kind of really think about that and how to really create that validation for the offer without all of the fluff of the marketing. And I don't want to say marketing is fluff cause it's not. I often will say if marketing is doing its job, sales is easy. And that is absolutely true, but it's true at a certain level of business, right?

It's when sales is [00:13:00] already happening in your business, sales will keep happening in your business, but it'll grow exponentially if your marketing's doing its job. And that's why you have marketing in place to grow and scale the business and to reach more people with it. But if you're not actually selling anything.

Then to put a bunch of marketing time budget or money budget behind it to me is a wasted effort in a lot of ways. And some people will counter me on that and say, I'd rather test quickly and get the results and all the things, but. My logic and thinking behind that is, is like, what are you actually testing though?

Because if you're testing a masterclass or a live launch, there's a lot of effort that goes into that. And so, how many times are you willing to test that? Because I've heard the notion of like, just keep testing, get back up and test, and I get it, get back up on the horse and do the thing. But, is it 5? Is it 10?

Is it 15? Is it 20? [00:14:00] Or do you just directly go to try and sell the thing and see if it actually sells? Because if it does, then you know that there's more people out there that are going to want to buy it. And if you can sell the thing and then deliver it and listen to like your clients or client or whatnot go through it, you're going to learn a ton about what they really want and they don't want.

Some of my best, best, best, I would say not even some, all of my best, you know, insight into who my people are and how I want to support them comes from my own lived experience and what I know to be true and talking to people. having conversations and having sales conversations, not just having a coffee chat where I'm like, you know, randomly just chatting with people and what not.

I'm talking sales conversations, people booking a sales call with me because I have a direct offer that I've positioned well, so they want to get on a call and talk about it and we have conversations and I get, you know, really great [00:15:00] insight from listening to them. And then the other piece of it is... It's having client delivery, like having humans sitting in front of me and me teaching and mentoring and coaching and realizing where I can improve and refine because I'm human and I need to, right?

And how I can do that better and be a better support for my people. That to me is the best lesson in learning you'll ever, ever, ever garner for your marketing. But you can't really do really great marketing until you know your people. And yet, a lot of the work we're being taught to do is to just, like, know the people in what?

In an exercise? In a worksheet? To me, it's lived experience. It's co creating with the people that you want to serve and support. And you can't do that unless they're sitting in front of you. And if you're speaking to the void, or you're feeling friend zoned, and you're churning out content over and over and over again, My guess [00:16:00] is, is that it's either not lending, speaking to the void, or people are loving it, but now they're like, but I don't see an offer and there is no direct sale or pitch or anything like that.

And, and I'm not saying from an icky place, right? You can have a sales conversation with someone in a very genuine, loving, compassionate way without it being icky. And you can talk about sales without it being icky. But you have to have something there for people to buy. And you have to have an offer that people want in a lot of ways.

And they have to be able to see that want when you communicate it, or they're never going to buy it, or you may get the trickle in effect of people who know you and know you well and know what you do and they'll buy, which is why I often hear from people that'll say it's really easy for me to sell.

word of mouth. And so I just want to sell word of mouth. And I was like, of course, it's easy to sell word of mouth because you don't really have to [00:17:00] sell because they already know what you do. And they know what you stand for because somebody referred them. That's that is easy. Word of mouth is the easiest way to sell.

Absolutely. Absolutely. But if you want to grow your business and expand beyond your current network, then you're eventually going to have to sell to people who don't really know you. And that's where marketing comes in. Because they have to get to know you and they have to get to know you in a quick period of time, which is why a masterclass or a live launch or things like that are beautiful for that.

But if you're not selling your offer and you're having a hard time selling it, or you don't even know what your offer is, creating a masterclass around it is just busy work in my opinion. I'm like, let's cut the steps out and let's build a sales funnel where we're directly selling the offer. Like, hey, if I could help you with x, y, and z, you know, Would you be up for it?

I'm looking for five case study people [00:18:00] to... Walk them through X, Y, and Z. Is that something you'd be up for? These are direct sell, selling approaches that are, they cut through the noise, they're direct, and they speak to a thing that you can support them with, right? If I could show you the meditation I teach my clients, or if I could show you the meditation that's helped me, Calm my nervous system and not snap at my children or my husband on a daily basis.

Would you want it? Or would you want me to show you how to do that? Yes, raise hand. Okay, there's interest there. Okay, we're onto something, right? It can be that simple. And I think we overthink it. And I think we overcomplicate it in a lot of ways. And I want to help you step off that overcomplication. And I want to help you really create results in your business, because Most of you and all of you who follow me, you know, do really amazing work and, and do really, really transformational work and are here to really change the way that we live on this planet.

And [00:19:00] I want to help you put your work into the hands of more people, but we have to start. with where you're at in your business in order to really be able to do that. And as a managing, I'm always looking at like, how do we cut the steps out? How do we make this more efficient? How do we make this more streamlined?

Like we've got to do it in some way, shape or form. And I'm all about not doing, you know, busy work or undo work that is really not going to help you move the needle right now in the stage of business that you're in. And that to me is key because building out all of these Marketing funnels for your business is to me, not the first step.

Do I believe you need a funnel of some sort? Yes. I've always said that. And lots of people will tell me, no, you don't need a funnel. I actually believe you need some type of funnel. And again, I think we, depending on how you interpret the word funnel can get all hung up about it, but like, it can be really simple.

It could be three emails that you send [00:20:00] out to your list. It could be. like three posts you put on social media that funnel people to something. Your DMs, a sales call, a sales page, right? That is a funnel. If you're asking people to take steps with you, that is a funnel. And so blasting social media content and hoping people will respond, again, is a surefire way that you're just going to eventually give up because after three, four, five months, it's like it's not working or 12 months, it's not working.

And That, for me, is heartbreaking to see because I talk to so many people that do, again, phenomenal, phenomenal work, and I know you're one of them, and so I wanted to get on here and really share what the difference is between marketing and sales because I think we get it twisted and, and there's a, and it's nobody's fault.

If you don't know marketing and it's a foreign language and sales is a foreign language, of course, of course, you're not going to know what the difference is and when you need it and why you need it. So, yeah. And there's so much noise out there and so [00:21:00] much distraction that it's easy to get lost in the sea of like, well, someone's saying to do this and someone's saying to do this.

But this, for me, is the thing that makes the most sense. Like when we opened our brick and mortar business, we were not putting thousands of dollars in radio ads, right? We were like, we opened the doors and if stuff starts to sell, we know we have a winner in, in, in product and in our services, right? And I think it wasn't until like the first year of business that we started to pay for some stuff.

Um, and then soon realized that we were at. a stage of business where we had so much word of mouth that we could thrive off of that and continue to grow year on year. At some point we would have hit a plateau and at that point we would have decided what we wanted to do but I was like I'm spending you know a thousand dollars a month let's just say on paid advertising and yet everybody that's coming through the door is more word of mouth people like why am I paying that I'm not really seeing the ROI yet but also I can [00:22:00] ride this beautiful wave of and eventually over time, like I said, that would have plateaued at some point.

It hadn't after four years, but it could have at five and six. And that's why, one, having conversations with the people that walk through your door, whether that's virtual or physical, is really important. So that you know where they came from, and how they came to you, and how they found you. Um, so that you can start to assess what's working in your business and what isn't working.

But also, so that you just know what. Who is in your world and, and what they want and what they sort of need. And that was like our decision making process with the brick and mortar, right? Is like, do I need ads in order to, to grow this? And at some point I probably would have, but I was a little premature in investing in that off the hop because.

We're inundated, uh, we were inundated with tons and tons of salespeople that wanted to market and advertise for us and all the things, um, and so it's easy to go, Oh, I think I need [00:23:00] to be on radio or I think I need to whatever, um, and get caught up in that. And I equally did as a marketer. Um, and then I got smarter after a while.

I was like, no, you're not pitching me this. thing that I'm gonna have you do for me. Um, like promote my stuff on the back of a receipt at Safeway. No, thank you. And so that was again that, you know, a live and learn sort of situation. And then with Creatively Owned, again, it was like a lot of what I did was organic to start, but it was really kind of direct sales in a lot of ways, but I also did follow the launch method and mode, which then showed me how backwards it can be because I have a ton of willpower and I'm somebody who doesn't really give up easily and yet.

I was coaching and mentoring people that were like, Kathryn, I've tried this and this and this and this. And it's so much work and effort. I'm really not seeing the results. And it wasn't until I had people sitting in front of me, where I was like, how can I make this simpler for [00:24:00] them so that they start to experience some wins in their business quickly so that they want to keep going because people aren't necessarily wired like me, who's willing to just go and go and go on my willpower until You know, forever.

Basically, I'm not somebody who gives up really honestly. It would take a lot for me to give up. Do I pivot and change directions? Absolutely. But so I had to look at it from that perspective, but then I had to really kind of go back and distill what made us really successful on that brick and mortar and how do I transfer that to the online space and really tune out and quiet out all the noise and that's sort of where Things landed for me.

I was like, wow, I don't need to have and create the masterclass and all of the things to get people to buy. And the two new offers that I just rolled out are a prime example of that. And I am as a bonus offering that whole reverse engineered system within both of those offers. It's going to be a bonus that I'm putting in there.

Because it's just a really beautiful thing to [00:25:00] witness, but it's also something I've been coaching my clients on who are filling beta programs by sending emails out, you know, and not building out a full funnel. And so yet not building out a full funnel yet. I want to be transparent that I do believe in having a marketing funnel.

I just believe that at certain stages it's, it's more beneficial than not. And. Then I did this whole rollout with these two new offers and sent one email and one social story post and literally had 37 sales come through in a 10 day period. Sales coming in every single day for 10 days and it's still coming like it's still happening.

And so I just want to share this with you because I think sales can be so easy and There was a point in my business two years ago now where I was like, there's gotta be an easier way. And if you've listened to the other episodes, you've, you've heard this, right? There's gotta be an easier way and, and always in the back of my mind was the brick and mortar and how easy sales felt with [00:26:00] that business.

And I was like, how do I transfer this over? I took what I learned there and really started to refine what I was doing in Creatively Owned, and I've created this beautiful sweet spot, and I'm helping my clients do the same, and it's just so beautiful to watch. And so those, for me, is why I felt like I needed to come on here and share the difference, because I know The big question I often get is like, where do I focus?

Like, I just feel so distracted in where I need to focus my energy. And it's as simple as this to me, that if you're not selling, you don't have a validated offer. You have to start to sell it. I would go direct to sale to see if people want it. I would not waste an ounce of my time marketing. I would directly try to sell it.

It's like us opening the wine door stores, right? Like I did no marketing prior to, I think I started a Facebook page. And I think I posted three times before we actually physically opened our doors because I was [00:27:00] like, we need to sell this. We need to get into the hands of people who will then talk about it.

And this is what we're going to do. And that worked really, really well. And then I stepped into the online space and fell into the launch model and rode that rollercoaster and then built out a whole evergreen system, which is beautiful and amazing. But I had a validated offer when I did that. And that for me was when the light bulb moment happened is that we're doing things backwards, but we're also marketing and selling programs and offers to people that may not quite be ready for the offer of the program at the time because they don't have that validated offer, but they also don't really even have an audience to sell to.

And so how do we do that and how do we validate it and how do we create those feedback loops so that we can get. Real time results and some wins in our business. I shared some templates a while back and I, it is so beautiful to watch because I had a woman reach out to me and she's like, Catherine, I did it and it [00:28:00] works.

I sent the email out to my list and I, and I had three people respond and I had a sale. That is how easy sales can be. Now, if you don't have an email list, you could. Use the same sort of template and framework and use that on social media and do that over a three post series and And and see what happens, right?

see what happens and what that response is. And so I really wanted to record this for you and, and to really help you distinguish so that you can kind of compartmentalize and really kind of focus your energy, but also know where you may be adding more complicated steps to your business right now that you don't need to do.

And that, It's far more beneficial to, to really start to see sales coming in than it is to market your business in my opinion. And then once you have sales coming in, you've got that validated offer and you know, people want it. Then the beautiful thing about that is that you can create a [00:29:00] system, a marketing and sales system, like the evergreen masterclasses or free trainings or launches or however you want to do it.

You can create a system like that, that will help you then grow and scale. Or you might be sitting in this beautiful pocket of people and a beautiful call with someone yesterday. And she's like, I have so many word of mouth that I'm, that I have a wait list. And I'm like, yeah, then, then live and love that wait list and, and have those clients coming in.

That's a beautiful thing. And at some point, if you want to scale, and reach new people. Like, I would love to support you, but it sounds like things are going so amazing with your business currently at the moment that I would, I would just love and soak that up at the moment. Similar to the brick and mortar business for us, right?

Like, why, why not be grateful for that? And if you're not seeing people come through, then it's like, okay, so how do I communicate what I do so that people reach out to me and want it? And that's about [00:30:00] just communicating the offer that you have and selling it. And it, again, does not have to be pushy. It's not about DM ing a hundred people or, you know.

emailing them multiple times. You can send one email and post one time and if you have a rock solid offer, that sales funnel is going to work for you because it's people are just going to reach out and then you can move them into the DMs or have a call with them however you want to do it or send them to a sales page or a checkout page, however you want to do it.

Um, and that to me is your, is your funnel. And then you can add the beautiful bells and whistles of a marketing funnel later on. Um, once you start to seal, see sales coming in and you've got that validated offer. So with that, I'm going to leave you. And I really hope that that episode has been beneficial to really help you distinguish between marketing and sales.

More specifically, what is a marketing funnel and what is a sales funnel and when and why you would want them in your business so that you're not, yeah, wasting time on things that aren't really, I say moving the needle in your business, [00:31:00] um, at the various stages that you're at. So with that, I'm going to leave you and I hope you enjoyed it.

Cheers! Thanks for listening. We'll see you right back here next time. You can also find us on social media at Creatively Owned and online at creativelyowned. com. Until next time, keep showing up as your authentic self.