Automating your business and building out sales funnels can seem overwhelming and intimidating, especially when you’re in the foundational stages of your entrepreneurial journey.

But the truth is, it’s one of those things that people tend to overcomplicate when, in fact, it’s pretty straightforward. All you need is the right set of tools to make automating your business possible for you.

Here are some of the tools that will help you to get your first sales funnel up and running in no time:

1. Landing Page Host

A landing page is essentially a standalone web page where a potential client or visitor is directed from various sources of traffic. It’s mainly created for marketing your products and services, and serves as an entry point into your world. The key difference between a website and a landing page is that a landing page has ONE objective, whereas a website is like an online home with lots of different things a potential customer could do. The goal of a landing page is to get a person to take an action, whether it’s opting in for something free, or making a purchase.

A common misconception among biz owners is that you need to have a website for you to create a landing page. That is not necessarily the case. While it is ideal to have your website set up, it can take a lot of time, effort, and resources to get a website up and running.

You don’t have to spend resources creating a site when you can very much set up just a landing page for starters. It’s much simpler and cheaper and you can utilise it to offer free master classes, webinars, strategy sessions, and discovery calls.

It’s an important tool for driving leads and sales straight into your business. And that’s why it’s crucial that you choose the right host for your landing page.

One of my favourite landing page hosts is Kajabi. It makes landing page building super easy, with a range of templates and pipelines already set up and ready to customise.

With Kajabi, you’re not only able to build landing pages, you can also host your courses, podcasts, email marketing, and even process payments on there.

To get a free extended 30-day trial of Kajabi, you can use my affiliate link here.

2. Email Service Provider

Whether you’re someone who’s only starting out or you’ve been in the business for quite some time, I cannot stress this enough: build an email list!

A successful lead generation strategy goes hand in hand with a great lead nurturing strategy using emails, which can only be accomplished when you have a reliable email service provider as a partner.

A good email service provider allows you to capture leads after being introduced to your landing pages. It also has features that let you automate the process of helping people build a relationship with you online without you having to manually send out emails to every new person.

My go-to suggestions for this: ActiveCampaign is one of the most popular email marketing platforms that is widely used (I use it in my business!). Mailchimp is another excellent option for beginners. And Kajabi has an email marketing feature as well if you want an all in one solution for lead generation and email marketing campaigns.

3. Calendar Booking System

As a coach, a course creator, or a service provider, there is nothing more painful than to set up a meeting with a potential client only to miss it because of a mix up in your schedules.

If you have any hopes of scaling up and going global with your business, you need a calendar booking system where people can see your availability and they have the freedom to book the time that works for them in their time zone.

This may seem like such a simple tool but trust me, it is such a game changer. It helps automate your sales process and gives you so much of your time back.

The leads coming into your business – people who want to talk to you about your services and want to book a free session or a discovery call – these are your warmest leads. These are people who want to find out more about how they can pay you.

If you don’t have a booking system in place, you are just making it so difficult for people to talk to you and find out more about your offers. So if you don’t have something like that set up, you are leaving money on the table.

Calendly is one of the best scheduling platforms I ever came across with. It integrates in so many tools that I am already using so it’s easy for me to set it up. It’s also very user-friendly and makes scheduling such a breeze, no matter which time zones are involved.

4. Video Conferencing Platform

No matter what business model you may have or which industry you may be a part of, video conferencing has become such an integral part of all business processes. And if you are automating your process as a coach, as a course creator, or as a service provider, this is gonna be a must-have for you.

Tools like Zoom and Google Meet have really exploded in the last couple of years. Zoom, in particular, is something I use in all my client meetings. It’s more professional and it gives you more control over the conferencing features compared to other tools out there.

5. Payment Processor

When you are automating your sales process, you need to make sure that there is something that you have to take the sale and process the payment. This is especially important when you are running a global business.

If you don’t have a convenient payment processor set up, collecting payments can be such a pain not only for you but for your clients.

You don’t go through the entire customer buying journey, nurturing your clients from the top of the funnel all the way down, only to spook them with a sketchy manual payment process in the end.

There are several tools you can use to automate this part of the sales process. Stripe is what I highly recommend. You can do payment links directly through the platform or you can have a checkout page through Stripe that makes things very easy.

So, Are You Ready To Automate Your Sales Process Now?

And there you have it – five helpful tools to automate your sales process. You see, putting your business into autopilot is quite a straightforward process. You only need the right set of tools to help you out. Investing in the right tools gives you the ability to grow your business AND get your time back, and what could be better than that?