The 5-minute mentor

Welcome to the latest installment of the “5 minute mentor”.As previously mentioned, my hope is if you spend 5 minutes reading these posts you will learn something useful that you can apply to your business.

This month I promised to talk about the sales funnel. Many businesses expect contacts to be marketed to once and to drop out of the other end of the sales funnel as a customer. Which when you think about it, this is a little ridiculous! Why would someone buy from you when they don’t know you?

To turn a ‘cold contact’ into a repeat customer you first have to build credibility with them. Then build trust. Then reach them when they have a need for your product or service. So do you understand the sales funnel for your business?

Building credibility
Firstly, your marketing needs to demonstrate to your target audience that you know what you are talking about. Usually this can be achieved by relating to the challenges your market faces and educating them as to some potential solutions. This is known as “education based marketing”.

Building trust
Now you have some credibility with your market place you need to position your business as a trusted advisor. Demonstrate that you have successfully worked with similar organisations to them using case studies and client quotes. Also discuss (without giving too much away) the processes you use to solve their challenge.

Be there when they need your product/service
Now you have credibility and trust you need to stay ‘front of mind’ with your target customer, so when they have a need, you are the company they turn to. This requires regular, pertinent and useful communications (newsletters, blogs etc.)

So if you want to better understand your sales funnel, you need to plot these stages and work out what communications (content and format) will work best for you and your customers. What will you need to do to convert them from contact to warm lead to prospect to hot prospect and finally customer (and then repeat customer)? And what can you do at each stage to ‘encourage’ them to move through this process? It will certainly be different messages at each stage; your communications will get more detailed and sophisticated the further they move through the funnel.

Finally once they are a customer, what is your strategy to turn them into repeat business?

If you want to read more about this you can download my whitepaper (http://www.dacostacoaching.co.uk/whitepaper-turning-contacts-repeat-customers/)

Next month I am going to talk about the hot topic of selling value rather than time.

Rob
(robert@dacostacoaching.co.uk)
www.dacostacoaching.co.uk

If you want to contribute to the Chamber blog, contact us on hannah@brightonchamber.co.uk