Understanding Your Sales Funnel
For many of our clients, choosing the best marketing channels seems like a very daunting task. How do you choose between direct mail, YouTube video ads, remarketing, Google search engine marketing, or an ad in the local paper? And these are just a few of the multitude of options readily available to businesses both small and large.
Attempting to choose in a vacuum without any understanding of what your specific goal is will inevitably lead to wasted marketing investment, underperforming ROI and disappointing results your company cannot afford.
Determine Your Best Opportunities for Growth
We like to start with understanding our clients’ sales process, from first introduction of their business to a potential customer to how customers engage with them, how they find them, how they learn what the business has to offer, and ultimately, what makes them the better choice. If you understand your sales process, then you have a foundation to understand what parts of the process need energy and which parts do not (or, at least, not as much). Sales Process Example: If you are a real estate agent, you may come to us and ask that we create a custom listing presentation to increase the number of listings in your portfolio. In this case, we would want to know what percentage of listing appointments you convert to new listings. Oddly enough, we have had this conversation many times and the majority of our clients have 75% plus closing ratios. So why do they believe they need a listing presentation to help sales performance, when they already have a remarkable closing ratio? The truth is, they just need more listing appointments, the underperformance in their sale funnel wasn’t how well they close, it was how many closing appointments they are currently working with. Now being a successful real estate agent takes much more than a two-stage sales pipeline, but the illustration is points out that spending your marketing investment on the wrong part of your sales pipeline is probably not going to help you very much.
When you are trying to decide what marketing channels you want utilize, try thinking about how customers enter and migrate through your sales process. If you need more brand awareness, then choosing marketing channels to accomplish that purpose becomes much easier and more valuable to your business. If you need existing customers to know more about the additional services you offer, choose channels for this purpose.
So, think through where the customer journey begins with your business, break it up stage by stage, then use that knowledge to choose the right marketing channels to turn your marketing spend into a marketing machine.
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