Your application form is probably a Typeform that asks some questions and hopes for the best. This video walks through what a smarter one looks like. It asks the applicant's goal early, then shows them a real client transformation tagged to that same goal, so they see their aspiration has already happened for somebody else. It qualifies on readiness and price, then routes people: qualified applicants redirect to a call booking, unqualified ones get a resource matched to their goal and go into a nurture route instead of disappearing. Every application, finished or abandoned, lands in an Airtable lead tracker with instant phone notifications for speed to lead. And underneath it all, every screen view, every answer and every drop-off point is recorded, so you can see exactly which question is leaking leads. The principle: an application form isn't a gate, it's a data source, and both the yeses and the noes should be captured and worked.
"We can basically show them that the reality they're aspiring for has happened for somebody else."
This is what's going on behind the scenes with the smart application funnel that we built for the coaches, and I'm going to walk you through every single part of it and show you why we're doing certain things inside there. The way it's currently set up: the person clicks on the link in the bio or the link on the Instagram story, whatever it is, and they go to the application form. Inside there it does the usual things of capturing all the information, but after it captures the information, we find out what their goal is.
Because we know what their goal is, we can ask in more detail. Right, if it's fat loss, how much body fat are we looking to go with? Then we can use some calculations and logic. We have all these great client testimonials and transformations that match all these different goals. We can tag them and say, well, if your goal is fat loss, it's actually very similar to this client here. Is this what you're looking for? We can basically show them that the reality they're aspiring for has happened for somebody else. And we're saying, is this exactly what you want to achieve? And they're like, yeah, absolutely, that's me, that's what I want. And you're like, cool, that's what we do.
From there, we're going to qualify them. We qualify them on readiness, and we also qualify them on price. Then after that they get to the submit. Now, depending on what they actually did inside the form, whether they were qualified or not qualified, we send them down different routes. If they were qualified, we redirect them to a call booking, so send them to a Calendly, and from there they get the confirmation once they've actually booked the call.
If they're not qualified, we bring them down the route of a resource. We still make sure we get all their details, but then we say, look, here's something for you to work on or have a look at for the moment. We're nurturing the people who either didn't have enough know, like and trust with us, or genuinely couldn't afford it. That's where we can give them some sort of a lead magnet and eventually put them into some sort of a downsell where we're not actually booking the call. It happens so that it's exactly towards the goal they picked in their application form. They receive a resource towards that, and if you want, you can give them the option to book a call, depending on whether it was a price qualification or a readiness qualification that you disqualified them for.
Every application that goes through goes into the lead tracker. After the submission, regardless of whether they were qualified or not, they go into the lead tracker. It sends the information to Airtable. Airtable then searches for them via email and full name, so it does a double search, and if the person is found, it moves them from lead opted in to application complete. Then if they book the call, call booked. And they get instant notifications to their phone, so the coach and the setter get notified and we have speed to lead. From there, if we don't already have the person, they get created inside the lead tracker, so the new lead profile is put in there as applied, or applied and call booked, depending on what's happening.
Now, we could have left it there and said, yeah, that's all good. But the most important thing is data and knowing what's actually going on, what's going through the person's mind as they're going through this, so we can optimise it to get the most conversions. We can't do that without data tracking. So this is what's going on on the back end of the back end. Every single screen the person views, everything they touch inside there, the time it takes them on all the questions, what they're actually viewing, all of that is tracked.
This goes into the funnel stats. We're able to see all the people who came through, how many completed, how many actually booked the call, who stopped on what question, who went down what route. All of this data is being tracked, so we're able to see a step-by-step drop-off of what's actually going on. We're actually able to see what the biggest issue is with the application form. The biggest leak is the accountability part.
We're able to see a follow-up list of all the people who are partial submits. This is super important too, because if you don't currently have partial submit points in your form, which you likely don't, there are probably a lot of lost leads inside there who changed their mind. You'll be able to see who they are, what their actual goal was, what their contact details are, where they actually left, and when they left. So you could phone them up, you could message them, you could basically re-engage with them and see why they didn't follow through from there.
Then we're able to see, of all the people who went through this, why did they not qualify? Was it readiness? Was it know, like and trust? Was it budget? What's going on with our messaging that's getting people into these applications when they're not actually ready to be applying? And from there you can make the changes to your application.
Then another really important change on this is the part about the submit and redirecting to a call if they're qualified. A lot of people will have it in their Typeform, and this caught me before, where you'll have the application and then inside your Typeform you'll have the Calendly integration. Someone will be qualified, they'll hit next, and they'll actually go on without booking the call, and then they'll say, oh, I never got a chance to book a call. An even worse one is they fill out the information, they get to the Calendly part, they can't find a time that suits them, they have no other options, they close the form, and you never even realise they applied.
What I suggest doing is making it a redirect instead of having it in the form. On submit, we either redirect to "right, we're looking at your application, by the way, check your email", or we redirect to "please go book a call". The reason we do this is that if somebody goes to book a call and cannot find a time, we've still already got all their details, and we got notified that they applied. This happened to me recently as well, where I was on a call and saw an application come through, and then didn't see a call come through. After I jumped off that call, I went in about to message that person, and they messaged me saying, hey, I tried to book a call but there were no times available, does anything suit at this time? And we were able to organise the actual call itself. If those were not two separate steps as a redirect, they would have just exited, they might not have even messaged me, and I wouldn't have even known they applied.
So that is the smart application system. It's a little bit different from your traditional Typeform, for very good reason, and you've seen all the different aspects of it. If you want me to have a look at the application funnel you use as the conversion mechanism for your coaching, drop me a message and we can have a chat. If you want to have a chat about building out all the systems in your coaching business, this is one system of ten. Let me know. Drop me a message with the word audit, I'll talk you through the entire process and then show you what it would actually be like to work together.
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