In This Episode:

* Why Coach Pony founder Christie Mims uses 2 “competing” sales funnels to accommodate for different ways of buying* How she melds both sales automation and a human approach to produce 7+ figure sales* The nuts & bolts of what both sales funnels entail and how they actually work together* Plus, why Christie’s approach is inspiring but, ultimately, might not be the best approach for you

How reliable are your sales?

How steadily do new customers buy? How loyal are your retainer clients or repeat customers?

Every business owners wants to feel confident when it comes to sales. Not just how to close a sale, but really how the chance to make a sale presents itself, how the process evolves, and how that final decision gets made.

Can you engineer a more reliable sales system?

Yes, you sure can. But it’s not the “if this, then that” kind of process that many reductive sales courses try to sell you on.

It would be awesome if I knew that every time I did a particular task, I could count on a sale. It would be awesome if I knew that stringing together a series of specific actions would supercharge my sales.

But so many things impact the way people buy… that it’s impossible to reduce sales to a single process or procedure.

That said, we can still dance with our sales systems!

So let’s return to Donella Meadows’s article on dancing with systems. Meadows encourages us to “celebrate complexity.”

Now, you might be thinking…

“But Tara, what about building simple business models? What about creating simple marketing procedures?”

I’m glad you asked! The reason we actively build simple structures, models, and procedures for our businesses is because the world is a complex place. When we focus on simplicity in how we design our businesses, we really can celebrate complexity in the world and our customers’ lives.

Meadows writes:

There’s something within the human mind that is attracted to straight lines and not curves, to whole numbers and not fractions, to uniformity and not diversity, and to certainties and not mystery. But there is something else within us that has the opposite set of tendencies, since we ourselves evolved out of and are shaped by and structured as complex feedback systems.

When it comes to sales, I believe our goal is to create the simplest system that celebrates the reality of complexity in the environment.

So what makes the environment we’re selling in so complex? Timing, trends, current events, seasons, budgets, competition, competing messages, personal histories, family needs…

The list could go on and on.

Every customers brings their own complex set of influences to the table when they interact with your business—especially in the sales process.

This is one of the reasons that “sales funnels” so often fail. A sales funnel is usually built from the business’s perspective—a perfect scenario of “if this, then that” actions that assume a lot about the people who are going through that funnel.

But no matter how niche your target customer or client is,