Welcome to another episode of Less Is the Strategy, the only podcast that tells you that the cult of hustle and complexity is something you can escape, and find simplicity, the answer to growing and scaling your business.
My name is Ant Hodges. I'm the author of Simplify the Funnel, the book that is out there telling everybody that we ignore the complexity that everybody teaches, and we can just set up a minimum viable funnel to be able to generate leads and sales for our business.
In this episode today, I want to talk about the minimum viable funnel, and I want to talk about how it's different from what you might hear from every other guru and pro marketer on the planet. I'm gonna unpack some of the thinking behind why this works from a psychological perspective, why it works from a consumer perspective, and some of the stats and data that's out there. But more so, why this works from the experience I've had of 20 years of doing marketing and funnel building, and building out on platforms like Kajabi. And I can see what works and what doesn't work, and in all of that time, complexity is the one thing that kills conversions.
So thanks for joining me here. It's a very special episode, because this is actually the first episode that's also video, and video is obviously something that works from a podcast perspective as well as listening to audio. So wherever you're listening, or if you're watching on my YouTube channel, thanks for being here. Do make sure that you're subscribed wherever you're listening or watching, and I'll try my best to make sense of things.
If you're listening, I'll be vulnerable, and it's like... I started my audio podcast for the simple reason that it was just much easier for me to be able to just sit in front of a mic, record some audio, and I didn't have to, you know, a lot of people call it kind of like Zoom prep time. I didn't have to worry about what I was wearing, whether my hair was actually combed in the right way, whether the lighting would be good. I could literally kind of record from wherever I am, and I have recorded from places like hotel bedrooms. I've recorded one of my other podcasts, CMO Field Notes, walking down the street, audio wise, because video wasn't important then.
But I said to myself, once I'd hit over 1,000 downloads on this podcast, I would probably switch it into video. And so I've hit that milestone, which is amazing. Thank you for listening, thank you for subscribing wherever you're listening. And now we're gonna dive into YouTube as well. So I'm gonna simply record these episodes kind of unedited, unfiltered, straight talking to camera, for 20 minutes or so about a particular subject, and it's gonna get published onto YouTube too.
So today I promised that I would talk about the minimum viable funnel. Now this is part of what I write about in my book. If you haven't got a copy of my book, you can head over to simplifythefunnel.com and grab your copy. You can also find it over on Amazon, physical and Kindle versions as well.
Simplify the Funnel was really born out of me having spent 20 years building other people's funnels, seeing what works and what doesn't work. And I've just come back from an event up in Newcastle in the United Kingdom called Atomicon. Great event. I wanna give a shout out to Pete and Andrew for laying on such a great event. It was my first time there. They've been running for a few years, and I've heard lots of good things about the event. It's like a marketing event with some amazing speakers, really accessible, catering for the neurodivergent. And you know, it was fantastic. Being fully ADHD myself, it was kind of like great to be around others. And really, for an event to kind of look after you and care for you in that sense, so it was a fantastic event. I've already booked in for next year, then moving from Newcastle to Manchester. But make sure that, if you wanna just Google Atomicon, maybe I'll see you there in July next year.
But I came back, and going to physical events like this, you get to talk to 3D people, not people 2D on a screen, like we pretty much do 90% of the time through Zooms or through group online stuff. But real physical in-person meetings. Now I've been a networker locally in my local area for some time, and I've kind of done less of that recently, because what I've chosen to do instead is to get into rooms and go to events where people kind of speak the same language as me. You know, this online world is kind of alien to a lot of local businesses. Now don't get me wrong, that's because their businesses rely on local traffic, local people buying their services, local people walking into their physical shops and businesses. But obviously in this online world, we have this marketplace that is global, and we can reach a huge number of people. So we spend all of our time pretty much online.
I am locked away 90% of the time here in the studio. I do my live Q and As in my Simplify community, I do my coaching calls, my fractional CMO work is pretty much done virtually through Zoom and stuff like that. But physical people, you know, you get to have conversations between sessions. And I was able to unpack some of my thinking around the minimum viable funnel, some of my thinking around SEED marketing, which is also in my book. I was also able to talk a little bit about the whole essence and balance of human versus AI as well.
And as part of the minimum viable funnel, I'm a big advocate of bringing the human back into the funnel. And you'll see, in one part of the funnel as I unpack it here, that when we bring the human back into the funnel, conversions skyrocket. The minimum viable funnel effectively strips away all of the reliance on automations and bots for conversion. That's the simplest thing that it does really.
You know, we can build and we can set up systems, and we can spend months agonizing over hundreds of different email sequences and automations and triggers, and what offers should we have, how many upsells, how many downsells, what if people don't take anything, what do we do after that. And we can agonize over all of this before we even get out to market.
And I've seen it time and time and time again. People will buy into the products or the services of the pro marketers or the gurus, and they'll have some kind of blueprint that they wanna follow. And when they unpack that blueprint, they are looking at it and they need to build a course, then they need to build a mini course, then they need to create bonuses just to create an offer. And then what they need to do is they need to write a webinar, and they need to set up times where they're gonna do that webinar live, or set it as evergreen. Then they're gonna set up email sequences from a free PDF lead magnet that they might need to give away, or a quiz that they might need to run. And so what they're effectively doing is, from the quiz or the lead magnet, I then need another email sequence that's gonna lead them to the next thing. And then I need another email sequence if they buy. And if they don't buy, then I need another email sequence. If they buy or don't buy that offer, but if they didn't buy the first offer, I need to have another email sequence that invites them maybe to a call, or offers them something else. And if they don't book a call, then I need another email sequence if they do. And if they don't, and they don't buy the down sale that I'm offering, then maybe I need another email. And the list goes on.
And you end up with this tree diagram of a funnel that looks like the roots of a mighty oak tree. It's just a complete mess. And you might think, well, I'm building really good roots for my business and solid foundations. And this is the thinking behind a lot of people who buy these products and buy these systems: that what they're doing is they're creating this business engine, they're creating really strong foundations that go deep, that will give them security for the long term. Because that's the promise. That's the promise that is sold by all of these guys. But the reality is, that can take an absolute age to be able to build.
And Simplify the Funnel was written on the basis of looking at all of the clients that we'd worked with over the years, the clients that had succeeded and the clients that had failed. You know, we did our job around building online courses and building funnels for some people, who then decided they wanted to handle the marketing themselves because they spent all their budget on building things out. And in reality, when I look back, the decisions to be able to do those kind of things, and, you know, say yes, we will take that blueprint that you've just bought, and we will spend the next six months implementing it for you... I kind of wish I could turn back the clock and say no to every single one of them.
And the reason I would say no to every single one of them is because the clients that came to us that didn't buy into, or hadn't bought, some kind of high ticket program or funnel building blueprint or something like that from other people, asked me what they should do. And my drive was, okay, well I wanna get them a result as quickly as possible. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna say, look, we're gonna handle all the marketing, we're gonna build out the minimum thing that you need, we're not gonna spend months building stuff out. I'm gonna need some video content from you, I'm gonna need to get on a call with you, we're gonna need to work out what things look like. But I'm gonna spin up an offer, we're gonna create a minimum viable funnel, we're gonna start getting you visible in the marketplace so that you can start having conversations and you can start making sales, literally within 30 days.
And the minimum viable funnel for me is something that can be set up literally within a couple of days. It's not something that you're gonna have to agonize over, like I did, like I explained before, of months of sequences and offers and all of this kind of stuff.
So let me break down what the minimum viable funnel actually is. The first part of the minimum viable funnel is really all about your audience magnets. How are you showing up and being visible in the marketplace? Part 1 of my book talks about SEED marketing, which is a framework to help you to demonstrate that you're an expert, really convey the belief systems and values that you have in your life, in your business, about what you do, generate some kind of conversation, and actually deliver some kind of actionable content. And it's a four part framework that helps people to create content that actually drives engagement, drives interest, and even conversion. And so that sits right at the top end of the funnel as part 1.
Once you then become visible in the marketplace, and your content is building trust, and you're seen as an expert, what do you do next? Well, the second step of the minimum viable funnel is to send people to a low cost but high value product or service. A lot of people will say to me, but Ant, why am I wanting to send people from public content... I'm putting all this public content out there and I wanna send them to my website to buy something, when everybody is telling me the most important thing that I need to do is build my email list? And to build my email list, shouldn't I be giving something away for free rather than asking for somebody to buy something? And the answer is, well, you can do that if you want as well. But the reality is, the audience magnets and the way that you're publishing content builds the audience today, and in my opinion that is your lead magnet. A lead magnet magnetizes potential leads to your business. That's what it does.
Now there's a sense that when someone watches a video, subscribes to a podcast, whatever it might be, you don't get their contact details. But what you do get is their attention, when they subscribe or they follow and they set notifications to be able to be notified when episodes of your podcast come out, or videos on your YouTube channel, or even following you on social media. And they see you posting content on a regular basis, that is continually building trust. And it's the spending time with your content, and having multiple touch points with your content, to really demonstrate that they align with you and your values, they like you. Because at the end of the day, it's human to human. We're buying from people at the end of the day. So people need to understand what we're about, and how they like us. If they don't like us, then they'll just vote with their feet, and they'll just kind of stop following us, or, you know, unsubscribe from our channels and our podcasts. And that is fine. Because what we wanna be doing is, we wanna be attracting the ideal leads to our business.
The old school way of sending people to a squeeze page or a landing page on your website, for them to opt in using their name and email address, was what really was born from the internet marketing days. Because they did not have access to things like social media and YouTube like we have access to it today. And so they were sending paid ad traffic to squeeze pages to get opt ins, so that they can then send a shed load of emails to them on a very frequent basis. We're talking like multiple emails a day back in the internet marketing days. I remember it all too well. And there were some prolific internet marketers who were like sending like five emails a day after opting in. But the reality is that has changed today, because of the very nature of being able to publish content in the public domain.
And what was previously reserved for those PDFs and ebooks that were behind the opt in form is now the content that we put out in the public domain. What I'm talking about here on this episode could very well have been an ebook back in the day. But today, if I'd put this together as an ebook, as a PDF on my website, hardly anybody would actually download it, let alone read it. It would fill up the spaces of their hard drive and gather kind of digital dust and cobwebs, because they would never open it, they would never read it. And no matter how many times I tried to bombard them with emails, the battle for the inbox is real. And I'm not gonna get as much attention as I would have hoped, because everybody else is crying out for their attention in their inbox, because they're doing the same thing.
So if we can take what was previously reserved as the free content that we might put into PDFs and checklists and things like that, and we can put that into content in the public domain, we're gonna start to do the same thing that a traditional lead magnet would have done, and that is to build the trust in you and to demonstrate that you are an expert. So public content is massively important.
And one of the things that somebody said from stage at Atomicon... it was actually Ryan Deiss, he was talking about this, how faceless brands, you know, are dropping off a cliff in terms of engagement, and there needs to be this internal influencer within your business that is a human being demonstrating expertise, talking, relating, sharing wisdom and value in the public domain. So we need to show up with our faces, we need to be visible, we need our voices to be out there, so that people can really truly engage at a human level with us.
The job of the lead magnet is still being used by a lot of businesses, and to be honest I have a couple in my business still. I have some reports, so for instance, on LinkedIn, where I'm talking to CEOs and founders about fractional CMO services. There's a different way that a fractional CMO can operate within a business today compared to yesterday's fractional CMO, who might just walk in and wanna do a whole 90 day plan on rebranding, redoing the websites, new logo, all of this kind of stuff. The new CMO is about connecting marketing activity directly to revenue as fast as possible. And so the new CMO is far more focused on strategy and numbers than the pink and fluffy stuff, as I say. And so I have this kind of guide and framework to help educate.
But I also have a secondary podcast called CMO Field Notes. If you wanna dive into that, you can go to cmofieldnotes.com. And it's three times a week, just bite size chunks, my experience of being a fractional CMO. And that in and of itself is another way to get my content out there and to demonstrate my expertise. And that's doing the same job as the PDF. But different people will want to engage in different ways.
My big thing about your minimum viable funnel for your business is that you should test your public content direct to a small paid offer. A lot of people are hesitant about doing this, because they're entrenched in this idea that they need to build their email list, and they need to get people on the email list, so they need to give something away for free. But what if you could start building a list of buyers rather than a list of freebie hunters? That's the fundamental shift that we're making here.
What we're ending up with, if we put a small low cost but high value offer out there for people to engage with us and engage with our content, and actually get a real level of transformation in their life or their business or their marriage or their finances or their health, whatever niche you're in... the likelihood of them buying again from you when you position another offer is significantly higher, because they've already crossed the threshold of trust to buy something from you.
And that's the kind of nuance. And in some niches, I am saying, they have free stuff and they have these low cost paid offers that they're driving from their public content, and both do a job, they really do. I've got one client that I'm working with right now, they're generating around 3,000 leads a month from their free training. It's like a five part free training. And they are generating multiple five figures a month in sales from the people who go through that free training. And it really acts as an introduction to their business and what they do, demonstrates their expertise over five days. But we were actually looking at some of the stats, and actually the conversion from opt in to purchase is typically, on average, within the first 24 to 36 hours. And that's because the job of the public content that's out there in the marketplace already has done the job of demonstrating that they're an expert. And so yes, while they have this kind of five day challenge type thing, and it is nurturing people through the five days, a huge proportion of people are actually purchasing within 24 to 36 hours. Because the job of your content and your social media should be to demonstrate your expertise, to echo your values, to deliver some really engaging and actionable content, to have conversation with people, which is SEED marketing, and it's doing its job for them.
Now for your business, what I want you to think about is your main core offer. And if you wanna create this low cost, almost kind of like introduction offer... some people might call it like a trip wire, I call it a no brainer offer... that you can direct people to from your content, and you want it to be a chargeable thing. Look at the engagement that you're getting in your community, or with your customers right now, around the main pain point. If there's a pain point, or there's a module that's watched more than any other, or there's a section of your training that you get the most questions on, this will give you a hint at what you should create as this low cost no brainer offer. And all you've got to do is just recreate that content, that part of the content, in a different medium, in a different format maybe, trim it down a little bit so you don't give everything from the module away. Or even literally just splinter it out and give it away completely. It's entirely your decision. But the key thing here is, you're using the information you've got and the data that you've got from your community and from your existing customers to work out what's the hotspot, what's the thing that they wanna fix the most. Because that will become your no brainer offer, that will outstrip anything else that you can do in terms of lead magnets or anything. Because if your public content points them towards it, they will buy.
And then, once they've bought, that's the second step. So the first step is the visibility piece, the second step is the no brainer offer. And then the third step I call a conversion event. You need to engage with them at a human level in some way to be able to sell your main core offer. So step 3 of the minimum viable funnel means bringing the human back into the funnel. Abdicating nurture sequencing, abdicating that relationship building and that human connection to a nurture sequence, a bot, a level of automations that just keeps communicating with people... you are going to miss the mark.
Gartner recently released some statistics around consumers and the use of AI and AI content in marketing. Over 50% of people who are engaging with brands today, whether it's their content, or they're engaging with chat online, or through phones and things like that, over 50% can tell that they're engaging with either AI content or an AI bot of some kind. Over 75% of those consumers then choose not to engage with that brand ever again. That's a huge proportion of people who are basically saying, well, half of consumers can tell whether it's AI or not, but then three quarters of those people are saying that they'll never engage again. And that for me is staggering. There effectively is way over 37% of any given market that are choosing to not engage with a brand because they're creating AI content and they can tell. That's a statistic that we should all have a think about.
And that's the premise for me, in terms of what I'm really talking about in terms of the message for Built to Be Human. We are built to be human, to have human relationship at the end of the day. And the AI has its responsibilities in the back office. I believe that's where AI can absolutely, you know, come up trumps, help us to systematize, efficiencies, all of this kind of stuff. But reserve human contact for the front end.
And this is important. With part 3 of the minimum viable funnel, the engagement that they have with you needs to be as human as possible. Now some people would say, I don't wanna get on hundreds of calls. And I'm like, great, that's just one thing that you can do. I'm not saying that every single person needs to be on a call. But there are other ways in which you can engage people. You can create video content, like I publish on my YouTube, like I do with all of my training. And that is face to camera. I'm talking directly to the camera, I'm looking at the lens of the camera to create eye contact. And even though it's pre recorded, or even when I'm maybe doing it live... and live has another element that is important... but even if they're not meeting me physically, or even speaking to me live, if I'm making eye contact through the lens, it's a psychological trigger that a relationship is starting to be built. And it works. It's something that we should all do.
So things such as webinars, when you're doing a webinar, do it with camera and slides. Have a mix, but make sure that they're seeing you, they're engaging with you as a human. If you, for instance, have a chatbot on your website that currently is there, whether it's getting inquiries or not is another matter, but it's there... and what will happen is, when people start to chat with it, the AI will respond. Now what if you change that to maybe a WhatsApp button? And maybe you could automate the first message that says, hey, thanks, message received, tell us how can we help, and a member of the team or myself will see this and I'll come back to you in a human way, or I'll just come back to you as soon as I can. That's what I have on my website. If someone messages me using that WhatsApp button, I get a notification on my phone, and literally I'll pretty much send a video message most of the time back. I literally just hold my phone and film a very quick crude selfie message back to that person. I may have certainly looked at their website, looked at the inquiry that they made, maybe a message that they've left. It would be personalized. I've even had people say to me... one person said, that is the best AI Avatar I've ever seen. And so my instant reply back was, laptop open, hold on, I'm not an AI, look at this. So, open Google, date and time, there we go, that was it.
And I think for me, that human connection is the thing that sets you apart from anyone else. Everybody else that's doing the automations, everybody else that's relying on AI to have that kind of conversation, even triaging those leads, in a way they are missing the mark. Humans wanna connect with humans at the end of the day, and we should.
In that human connection, this conversion event, you've got to really tell the story, you've got to explain that you understand the pain, that you understand the challenges that they're going through, that you understand their goals, that you have a framework or a model and a path that they could follow. You tell them what they're gonna get out of that, and what the net result is once they go through that journey with you. You then unpack the kind of feature set and what they get inside it. You introduce yourself as the expert, you have a whole load of social proof, and then you ask for the sale. That's how to build, for instance, a sales page.
And if you want access to a sales page framework, then you can head over to anthodges.com/salespage. And I've got a framework that helps you to identify the 19 parts of an ideal sales page that would be great for you to be able to build out in your business. So that's anthodges.com/salespage, and just get access to that framework.
The thing that knocks me more than anything is how this conversion event, part 3 of a minimum viable funnel, is abdicated to AI rather than human. Bring the human back into the funnel. We're built to be human, we're built to have conversation and relationship. And I tell you, you will convert more.
And then part 4 of the minimum viable funnel is then actually delivering the result. How are you then engaging? How are you delivering the content? How are you actually setting your stall out? And how are you continuing to build that relationship with people? And my big thing here is, build community into everything that you do. People wanna feel like they're connected to people, people wanna feel like they associate with a group of people.
Like when I went to a Comic Con, I walked into a room of people that I really didn't know. I knew a few people, but there were a huge number of people I didn't know. But I was able to have conversations with people that fundamentally were great conversations. Felt accepted, I felt like I was part of a community, even though I didn't know anyone. And that's because they were there for a common goal, a common cause. There was something that brought us together. And that's what community should be. If someone, you know, buys from you, they've got a challenge that everybody else who's bought from you has got, so they've got something in common. And so they're then wanting to be part of that community ongoing. So make sure that you include them.
That's the minimum viable funnel. It's the visibility piece, step one. It's the no brainer offer, step two. It's the conversion event, step three. And it's the human follow up, the human connection and the delivery of real results, which is step 4. And that can literally be built out in a heartbeat. All you need are two offers and maybe a sales page, and you're driving traffic from one offer to the next. Then you're inviting people to the next stage of the journey through either a webinar or a call with you, and you're gonna send them a link to a sales page or another offer. You could have a minimum viable funnel set up literally within probably 48 hours, if you follow the roadmap and the principles set out in my book, Simplify the Funnel.
Head over to simplifythefunnel.com to grab your copy. And like I said, if you want that sales page framework to give you a head start, go to anthodges.com/salespage. I'll send the guide, and yes, I will also invite you to take the next step of that journey with me and join my community, where there is a training inside my community which covers all 19 parts of that sales page. And I break it down, I give you examples, and I help you to write that sales page in the best possible way. I have an AI copywriting assistant that helps you to brainstorm some of those ideas, asks you the right questions, and a template that you can load into your website if you want to as well.
That's the minimum viable funnel. That's part of what I'm about. It's about simplifying. And whilst we've been talking here for about half an hour, I hope it's been half an hour well spent, to understand that you do not need these noodles, amounts of email automations. You should want to have more conversations with your customers at a human level, and don't abdicate everything to an AI agent or bot. And really start to move the needle fast in your business with simplified implementation that you can get done quickly, and start generating leads and sales fast.
I've been Ant Hodges, this is Less Is the Strategy, the podcast that helps you to escape the cult of hustle and complexity and really start to build a business that's gonna work for you. I am excited that we've made this move now, so that wherever you're listening... if you're listening to the podcast on Spotify, on Apple, wherever you're listening, please do make sure that you're subscribing. The podcast is now out on Amazon Music as well, and it's also out on Podbean, another podcasting platform. You can pretty much find it on any audio podcasting platform. But now, the beauty of video and the studio setup that I've got, and that milestone of 1,000 downloads, means that this podcast is also now available over on my YouTube channel.
So wherever you're listening, or if you're watching, please make sure that you're subscribed. Share this episode with somebody who needs to hear this, who might have been having this conversation with you. And if things have resonated with you, then why don't we explore working together a little bit more? Just head over to anthodges.com, and there's links to different things, my community, my book, and everything that I've mentioned.
Let's simplify. Let's simplify your business and let's scale up, because less really is the strategy for growth. I've been Ant Hodges, I look forward to chatting with you again next time. Take care.