Phone a Friend: Cheyenne Buttrey on Marketing Funnels

Listen in on my chat with Cheyenne Buttrey of Copy Girl Co. to break down one of the most misunderstood parts of growing a service business, marketing funnels. We talk about what a funnel actually is (spoiler, you probably already have one), why bigger isn't better, and the four core building blocks that make a funnel work. Cheyenne shares when you should bootstrap your funnel versus when to bring in an expert, how to avoid the tech rabbit hole, and why your data matters way more than your software. If you've been feeling overwhelmed by funnel advice on the internet, this one's for you.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Welcome to the Subwall Podcast. Today is another phone a friend episode, and it is with one of my all-time favorite people. Cheyenne Butchery is one of my best friends and founder of Copy Girl Co. We started our entrepreneurial journeys around the same time, and I'll never forget when she called me early on and said, I think you're gonna need a copywriter to help you get some of this off the ground. I asked her how much she wanted to charge, and she said, Don't worry about that. I'm just gonna help you get started and we'll figure the rest out later. That later turned into hundreds of clients, thousands of projects, tens of thousands of projects, and a partnership and friendship I'm really proud of. We've worked in and out of each other's businesses ever since. Cheyenne has spent the last six years behind the scenes for some of the biggest names in the creator economy, leading seven and eight-figure launches, ghostwriting for audiences in the millions, and generating over $20 million in revenue across 70 plus live launches and three New York Times and Wall Street Journal book launches. She's kind of a big deal, and I'm so excited for you to learn from her today. In this conversation, we get into her best practices around funnels. She actually takes you through what is a funnel and people not to listen to on the internet and how to decipher what is good advice and how you can actually build a strong funnel in your business. It's practical, it's actionable. Grab a notebook, get comfy. I think this is going to be one of the best conversations that you'll get to eavesdrop on this year if you were looking to grow revenue in your business. Hey Cheyenne, thanks so much for joining us. Hi, thank you for having me. I'm so excited to have you on. You are on my speed dial, if that's still a thing on iPhones. Um, and we talk all the time. So I'm excited to let people listen in on our business brainstorming and to ask you a couple of questions about funnels.

SPEAKER_00 1:43

Oh my gosh, right back at you. It's gonna be so much fun. And I feel like funnels and sales tie together so nicely that it'll be cool to kind of connect the stuff that you've been doing with funnels too.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

For sure. So to start out, I'd love to just get a little bit of your background and how you decided to go into funnels because I think that is such an interesting um twist in your career story as I've watched it unfold as a friend. Um, that you could have gone a lot of different directions from a copywriting standpoint or even pursuing being a fractional CMO or all of these different pieces, but you really have focused on funnels. What do you what made you choose that? Why do you think that's such a big gap in the market right now?

SPEAKER_00 2:23

Oh my gosh. Um, where could I even begin? I really got started in my marketing career when I was the marketing project manager at Story Brand and then went over to Boss Babe as a senior copywriter. And so, in both of those roles, I got to see how all the pieces of marketing really fit together. And at Boss Babe, we were running such a long live launch model, which it was really interesting because Storybrand for the most part was Evergreen when we were there. Boss Babe for the most part was live launch. And I was watching my team at Boss Babe get so burnt out launching over and over again. Every time you launch, you've got about a month of pre-launch, about two to three weeks promoting a webinar, about two weeks of sales, another two weeks of downsell. Like it's a pretty big process. And I was watching my team get so burnt out over time that off the side of my desk, I started running some evergreen experiences or sorry, some evergreen experiments in products that we weren't actively selling. And they did really well. And so when we got to January of, when we got to our January launch, which was for our membership, and we did it every single year. I remember sitting the founders down and saying, hey, I really want to try to run this on evergreen for this year instead of just doing a big launch in January, a big launch in May, a big launch of Black Friday. And what was interesting about that is they said no originally. And I remember going into it with like this huge pitch deck, and I was so excited and totally got shot down. And one of the founders called me afterwards and was like, hey, that was a pretty tough meeting. Like, how are you feeling about it? And I was like, I just want to try it. Like, if it fails, I will know that it failed because I failed, but I just want to give it a shot. And they ended up letting me run with it. And cut to today, Boss Babe primarily runs on Evergreen. And so I just started to see like there is a model out here that launches don't have to be so chaotic. You don't have to burn out your audience all the time. And as I did about a year in the fractional CMO space, the funnels were time and time again what I kept coming back to. Like there's a lot of fractional CMO work that is team and pulling the right contractors together and helping navigate launches. But Evergreen was what I loved. And I just came to a point where a lot of my CMO clients were wrapping up at the same time. And I was kind of like, do I want to continue going down this fractional CML route? Or do I want to do marketing funnels, which I've seen so much success in, and ended up landing on marketing funnels?

SPEAKER_01 4:55

I love that. And I mean, you do hold such an interesting role for your clients because they normally come in saying, I need a funnel, or I need a new website with copy and things like that. Um, and what ends up happening from my point of view, and somebody who has worked for you and in your business is you are able to sit in that strategic seat with a deliverable focus. And I think that's such a cool way that you run your work and that you work with clients one-on-one. So you don't sell them on this like, hey, I'm gonna be your fractional CMO. Here's a giant bucket of things we can do. You're like, we're gonna work on this one thing specifically, which I think is just a really cool model.

SPEAKER_00 5:35

Yeah, and it's really fun to get to be in it with my clients. I think the fractional CMO model can work really, really well, especially for these larger brands. But what I've found with the larger brands is just because they're making more money doesn't mean that they want to have this huge, bulky team. And a fractional CMO can lead to a bulky team pretty quickly. Like because the fractional CMO is typically holding strategy and not execution, they have to recommend here's your ads agency, here's your copywriter, here's your designer, here's your tech team. Like it starts to become a lot of people. And yeah, I was in a weird position where I was like, man, I don't actually just love strategy, but I also don't want somebody to tell me the strategy for the copy. So how do I get to hold the strategy and then also go execute it? And then there's not this game of telephone happening all the time between your marketing strategy and your marketing execution. Um, I'm able to really own all of it and I really like that model and keep the team really lean because you're not bringing in five people for every one fractional CMO higher.

SPEAKER_01 6:34

I love that. If somebody's listening to this and they're like, that sounds amazing, um, what is a funnel? There's so many things out there. Um, if you go on TikTok or Instagram for two seconds or the Cess pool that is LinkedIn, right? If you go in there for a few minutes, you're gonna see somebody who's like, you should follow my 47-step funnel, or you should, you know, follow all these different things. What how do you define a funnel when you start talking to somebody about that? Do you have a framework? Do you um do you have a specific process you take everybody through? Just kind of walk us through that.

SPEAKER_00 7:10

Okay, so you have used a metaphor recently that I really like that I'm gonna riff off of, where you say, just because someone doesn't like running might mean that you just don't like running in the way that I run, but you're probably running in other parts of your life. So you'll say, like, okay, I might like distance running, but somebody else might be running back and forth on the pickleball court and we're still running it just in different ways. I think that's pretty relevant for marketing funnels because everybody runs at some point in their life. And they might say that they hate it, but they might just mean they hate distance running. Marketing funnels are pretty similar to that, where it's like everybody has a marketing funnel. Even if you are sitting here being like, no, I don't, all that happens is people book a call with me. Like if we took your funnel, Susie, you have podcasts, people book a call with you, they can work with you as their coach. That is still a funnel because there are still steps in there. And so the way that I describe a funnel, instead of it being all of your tech and all these pages and all these emails and automations and social content and your no-like trust factor, like there's a lot of stuff that gets tossed around. But instead, I just say a marketing funnel is a next step. So, regardless of what the pages or the emails or the tech are, the only thing you really have to think about is once somebody takes an action with me, do they have a next step? And then from there, do they have a next step? And go every little piece of your funnel step by step until you get them to the sale. That is the funnel. And it might be a combination of pages, tech, emails, yes, but it's not this big, bulky thing. And it's certainly not one size fits all. So I get pretty scared when I see the ads that are like, copy paste my funnel into your business. And I'm like, that just is not possible. Um, so yeah, that's kind of how it works.

SPEAKER_01 8:50

I love that too, because I think um there's kind of a bigger is butter when it comes to funnels. And people think, well, if I have a webinar and it leads to a freebie and then it leads to another webinar, and the more emails we're sending people and the more things we're doing, um, you know, something you've told me when I've worked on my funnel and my funnel is very simple. You're like, you're actually creating more steps um that are keeping people from working with you. Would you rather just take the call with them? And I'm like, yeah, I would. You know, like to jump through all these hoops. So I think that you bring a lot of clarity and um really strong simplicity to your clients, which I think is really cool. Thanks. Jumping over to um thinking about, so let's say somebody's thinking, huh, I guess I do have a funnel. Because that's how you helped me recognize. Um, I guess I do have a funnel. What do you think makes a funnel work when you're thinking about these next steps? What makes it successful? What makes it a win? What metric should I be looking at?

SPEAKER_00 9:48

Yeah, more than anything in your funnel, it is, like I said, making sure that the next step is very clear. There is a line of thinking that in your marking funnel, some amount of friction is actually really healthy, like making sure that someone doesn't just have full access to your calendar at all times to book a call. Okay, cool. We take calls on certain days. Maybe you ask a couple of qualifying questions, maybe you allow people to, or maybe you allow yourself to cancel a call if it's not the right fit. There should be some friction, but you also want to approach your funnel from almost a customer experience perspective. So if you have a webinar that you're running, how hard is it for somebody to add that to their calendar so that they can show up live? If you have an offer that you want them to buy, how hard do you make it for them to get the link to check out after the sales call? So a marketing funnel is going to be most successful when you're making sure that you have those next steps mapped out and that the next step is as clear as possible. So a lot of the time people get weird about leveraging thank you pages and emails and stuff like that. And the reframe that I put on it is well, if this is the next step for them, can you make it as easy as possible for them to take the next step in the same way that you would engineer an onboarding experience for an app to be really clear and simple? You want to do the same for your funnel, but most of the time people have too many dead ends in their funnel that allow people to just slip through the cracks. And it's just because you didn't tell them the next thing you wanted them to do.

SPEAKER_01 11:16

I think that's so interesting. I mean, my favorite thing about that answer is that you didn't say, well, you have to use kit or you have to you never start with the tech. And you don't even start with like, well, make sure your copy starts with the problem or whatever. Um, I think just there's so many frameworks and so many ways to approach this. To your point, it isn't a one size fits all, but making sure that it is easy to take a next step, I think is um really clear. Even if that is, hey, to work with me, email me and making sure your email is available. Like just making it really clear. If you're going to spend time on social, is it easy for somebody to go to a link in your bio and book time with you or things like that? Totally. Um, when you think about somebody DIYing their funnel, obviously you're like way simplifying this down, but for somebody who does have freebies and steps and things like that, if they're DIYing this, what are some best practices to keep in mind? What are some things to pay attention to as they are bootstrapping this in the space of their business?

SPEAKER_00 12:15

If I was bootstrapping it, I would think about four core functions of your funnel and making sure that they work together. And again, this is going to be in building block terms, not in over-engineering terms. You have to have some sort of top of funnel or traffic source. That might be your Instagram, that might be a podcast that you have, LinkedIn. That could also be, I mean, I worked on a funnel audit this week where the traffic source that I recommended was, hey, go email people in your network and tell them that this exists. So there has to be some sort of traffic source that you're getting people in. There has to be some sort of moment where you build trust. Typically, this is a lead generator. It's some sort of free thing where they're consuming content and deciding that they like you and that they trust you enough to work with you. That can be a free download, that can be a free audit of something, that can be just some sort of tangible thing that they can see. Then there needs to be some sort of conversion event, which probably for a lot of people listening is a sales call. That might also be a webinar if you can sell on a webinar. A funnel that's working really well right now is doing some sort of live webinar or QA call or kind of like office hour session that you open up to people and then from there getting them on a sales call. So that might be a two-part conversion event. And then your sales period, which is just where you ask for the sale. So I would map your funnel in those four components and try to think about it in as simple terms as possible. I think one of the biggest mistakes that oddly beginners make is that they really try to over-engineer their funnel because they see these big names with these big complex funnels. And like they ran a challenge into a webinar, into a low-ticket offer, into a high-ticket offer. It doesn't have to be that. And if anything, that's typically confusing your customers. The reason why really huge creators sometimes do that is because they have so many different personas in their audience that they have to speak to all of them. But you probably don't. You probably have a very clear ideal client. And if you can take them through, okay, how am I getting traffic? How am I building trust through some sort of free thing? How am I converting them into a sale through a webinar, a QA call, a sales call, something like that? And then how am I ultimately closing that sale? Because a lot of the people think, well, I had a sales call with them. That's it. And you have to follow up, send them the link, send them follow-up emails, remind them of how many spots are left. There has to be an actual sale made as well. So think in those four pieces and then make sure that each of those pieces connect to each other. So if at any point somebody is going to be able to stop taking action, think through, okay, how does this page not just say, thank you so much for submitting the form, the freebies on its way to your inbox? How does that page redirect to something to get them onto the next step?

SPEAKER_01 14:54

I love that you outline it in these four categories. And one of the traps that I've fallen into is when it comes to funnels, I'll start listening to somebody and realize they're pitching me on a software. And I think a lot of us fall into that trap where I fall in love with a landing page builder or a new app or some kind of new tech that then I'm trying to reorient my business around this. And I think if you can sit down and map it out on paper before you start building it using these four kind of building blocks, you're gonna be in much better shape and typically have a lower subscription rate that you're paying in your business every month because you're actually building it with what you need, which is normally a lot simpler than I'm gonna try to use all of this tech that, you know, this influencer used that it seems like it worked for her. Um, because a lot of those people, what they're not telling you is, yeah, this funnel is awesome. And I have six people and a full-time developer working on it. And all of these wires are connected. Um, which there is a time and a place, um, which I think brings me to my next question. At what point should you stop bootstrapping your funnel and start bringing in somebody to help you from an expert lens to really boost your lead generation? Like when do you bring somebody in to say, it's game time, we want to boost this and really take this to the next level. I want to bring in a funnel expert.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

You should be bootstrapping when you are still in the beta launch phase. And you should be bootstrapping when you don't have any points on the board yet. And the only caveat to that is if you have had historical points on the board, like in a past offer, in a past business, in something that was great before, and now we're launching a new offer, a new membership, a new uh business model, branch of the business, then it's okay to bring in an expert because you at least have some sort of understanding of, hey, this worked for me to an extent in the past, or this didn't work for me in the past, I've tried some things and I have some movement, some proof of life in this funnel. At that point, so to say clearly, at that point, if you have either done something in the past that has worked, or you have a funnel that you have been working on for a while that you have data around, then bring in an expert because no amount of going back and forth with Claude is going to get you the insights that you need for a marketing funnel to convert. Now, if you are in, like I said, the beta launch phase, or this is like brand new business, which you should probably be in the beta launch phase, and you're still like reaching out to referrals, you're still kind of in that scrappy connecting people. Typically, I don't recommend people work with a funnel expert. Now, from time to time, somebody will be like, I hear you, but I really want to do my beta launch right from the very beginning. One of my students who's in the funnel method did a funnel audit for a brand new offer. We put together a strategy, she ran her beta launch and she sold out her beta offer because she was like, I want to do it right from the first time, and that's great. However, a lot of that was because she's super motivated and she followed the plan for it to a T. So I would recommend if you're in that earlier stages, if you're beta launching, get some points on the board, capture some data, figure out what's working. If you have done something in the past that either was working or isn't, and you have some data to bring to me, then working with an expert is really helpful because instead of just staring at the data trying to make sense of it or asking Quad why they think that live launch converted better than Evergreen, you're going to end up with like real insights. And a funny story about that too, I literally had somebody who kept saying to me, Live Launch converts so much better than Evergreen. I took her data, I myself ran it through Quad and Claude was like, yep, live launch converts better than Evergreen. And I looked at it and I was like, well, that's not true. She had more people during the live launch, so she made more money, but Evergreen actually converts way better. Like the amount of purchaser, the total revenue is lower, but her conversion rate is way higher. And I was like, why did you say it converted better? And Claude was like, Oh, yeah, you're right. So just be careful trying to figure out the data on your own. If you have a data, bring it to someone who can help you make sense of it. Because it takes a really specific skill set to understand how to make sense of marketing funnel data.

SPEAKER_01 19:08

To beat our running metaphor to death, um, because you and I both are marathon runners and we talk about running a lot. I think about this as somebody coming to a running coach having never run before and not knowing what their pace is, not knowing, hey, here's how fast I can run a mile, here's how fast I can run a 5K, and saying, hey, write me a training plan for a half marathon. And it's like, well, I can. I can definitely put together a loose plan of how often you should run and how fast, but I actually don't know what we're working towards. And I have no idea if we're like breaking uh PR here or if we're going to, you know, shatter records, or if we're just trying to walk run the best we can in our turkey costume. Like there's a lot of different ways to approach this. And I think if you don't have any data, if you don't have any kind of, hey, I've taken a sales call and it closed, I took five sales calls and they didn't close, or I have posted on social media and only my mom liked it. Like, give us any kind of starting point of I've gotten this, I have some kind of momentum or movement. Um, and there's going to be somebody who can come in and guide you in the right direction. But without that data, we can't start building your race plan.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

A hundred percent. And then the caveat to that is like, could somebody build a race plan for someone who plays professional basketball? Probably, because we at least have some sense of, okay, when you're moving back and forth down the court for a while, your hip starts to hurt. Like now we have some flags and some data to go off of. So we just need something. And the last thing I'll say on that is a lot of people will say, Well, I don't have any data at all yet, even though I've been running this for a while. You have data, I promise. If you have been running it for a while, if you have done a live launch, if you have a funnel that you have sent traffic into, if you've taken sales calls, there is data there. I'm not asking for UTM tracking to know if Instagram stories on a Thursday convert better than Instagram stories on a Sunday. Like we're not getting that granular. And a lot of the time that's gonna lead you to ask the wrong questions and fix the wrong things. I just want to know, hey, when you run a webinar, roughly how many people end up showing up and roughly how many people end up buying. Okay, cool. When you just send people straight to your sales page, are they buying from it? Or do you have to do 10 things before you do that? Do people show up to your sales calls or not? Like there's some bigger picture, again, think in building blocks, not in these minute details. And I think if you're trying, to your point about tech, if you're trying to ask all these very hyper-specific funnel questions, like should I use Active Campaign or Kit? Should I use Luma or Webinar Jam? Like if you're trying to really over-engineer your subject lines and all this specific stuff, to me, that tells me that you are way too far in a clawed rabbit hole. Is that a thing? And you need someone to help you make sense of the data rather than yourself just try to obsess over these minute details that aren't going to actually make a difference in the funnel.

SPEAKER_01 22:07

If someone's listening to this and they're like, I need that clarity, tell us how we work with you. How do we go and take a next step, bring you into our business?

SPEAKER_00 22:16

Yeah, the first step has very much become you have to do a marketing funnel audit. When I first started doing this two years ago, I thought, oh, people can just come to me and we'll just get started writing. And people get really eager and excited to want to do that. And the secret that I have found is if you just take that 90-minute call, I'm literally asking for just 90 minutes. It's not going to set you back three months. Like we need 90 minutes to look at everything and make a solid plan. We are going to move so much faster through the rest of the funnel. So everybody starts off with a 90-minute funnel audit. I've gone back and forth if I should call it an audit or a strategy, but I'm looking at your data, I'm looking at what you have so far and making a plan on what to do in your marketing funnel. And then from there, your entire 90-minute audit investment, if you decide to work with me one-to-one, applies forward. So again, you're not wasting any time. You're just getting a strategy so that we know what to build. I'd be really cautious of marketers and copywriters and designers who just give you a scope out of the gate because no marketing funnels are the same. It's not one size fits all. So start with an audit and then I work with people one-to-one to write and execute their marketing funnel.

SPEAKER_01 23:26

One of my favorite things you do in the audit is actually some revenue modeling. Yeah. Um, so if you are a fan of this podcast, you know that we like to look at cash flow. We like to talk about how much money you're going to make and setting goals around that. Um, that is something Cheyenne is an expert at is saying, hey, if you do X, we are able to predict this much revenue and helping you have realistic goals and kind of have a good, better best scenario. So I absolutely love that. Tell us where we can follow you and find you.

SPEAKER_00 23:57

Yeah, I'm at copygirl.co on pretty much every platform. By the time that this is live, YouTube should be live. So go check me out on YouTube if you want more long form content and Instagram if you want more short form content. And my funny story about that is I will never forget Susie E walking into the marketing office at Storybrand and closing the door behind you and saying, I have a great name for your business before I had a business at all. And you said it shouldn't coffee girl. And you said, I made you a logo, by the way. And um, just such a cool, such a cool moment, full circle to be here now.

SPEAKER_01 24:30

So fun. It's been so much fun. Um, and I'm so grateful that uh I do have you on Speed Dial. My business is definitely all of my businesses have been better because of it. Um, and I'm so grateful. I would highly encourage anybody who's sitting there struggling to go through the data to pause, have a conversation with somebody who is an expert in this. Um, if you are hearing this episode and you're like, oh my gosh, it's me. You're talking about my business. Um, I think you should definitely give Cheyenne a call. She is the best out there. Um, so thank you so much for listening. Cheyenne, thank you so much for sharing all of your wisdom. Until next time, sell well.