Archive | January, 2011

Weekly Sales Funnel Challenge: Review your competitor’s sales funnel

By Aaron Hoos on January 31, 2011 in Business

The Weekly Sales Funnel Challenge is a week-long challenge for business owners to focus on a specific aspect of their sales funnel for one week. It’s a fun way to keep you focused on one of the most important parts of your business. A new Weekly Sales Funnel Challenge is published every Monday and a wrap-up post is published every Friday.
Weekly Sales Funnel Challenge

Okay, last week’s Weekly Sales Funnel Challenge was a real challenge! It was a lot of work for you to squeeze into your already busy days.

So I’m going to go easier on you this week. For this week’s challenge, we’re going to choose a competitor and we’re going to write down THEIR sales funnel. Knowing your competitors’ sales funnels will help you keep tabs on what your competitors are up to so they can’t blindside you, and you’ll find ways to differentiate your business.

Writing down one of your competitors’ sales funnels doesn’t have to be complicated:

First choose one competitor. Be specific about who it is. (Don’t generalize by saying “most of my competitors are similar).

Second, list “Audience”, “Leads”, “Prospects”, “Customers”, and “Evangelists” down one side of a paper.

Third, write down all of the elements in each stage of your competitor’s sales funnel that you’re aware of. Maybe do a bit of digging to discover any additional channels or products or tactics that you aren’t aware of.

Email me to let me know how it’s going! I’d love to hear if you find this week’s challenge enlightening.

Have fun!

Monthly Sales Funnel Check-up

By Aaron Hoos on January 31, 2011 in Business

When I was just starting out in sales management, I was completely blindsided by something that really hurt the financial health of my branch. My manager gave me a useful piece of advice that I have tried to adopt ever since, no matter what business I’ve been in. He said: “Know your business well enough that there will never be any surprises.”

As a business owner, this comes naturally for me and it probably comes naturally for you, too: If you’re a sole proprietor, you likely know exactly what is happening in your business.

The same should apply for your sales funnel, your most important and strategic business asset. If you know your sales funnel inside and out, and are aware of its general health and operation, you’ll be in great shape to keep it “well-oiled”. Nothing will surprise you and you’ll be more likely to grow your leads, prospects, and customers.

So, I’m introducing a tool to help you: It’s the Monthly Sales Funnel Check-up, and I’ll post it at or near the end of each month so you can work through it.

Download the Monthly Sales Funnel Check-up PDF here.

It’s a simple chart that outlines your sales funnel and prompts you to fill in what you’re doing to reach contacts at each stage in your sales funnel. For example: What marketing and sales channels are you using for each stage? What key messages are you using in each channel? And, how many contacts did you have. Plus there is a place to include your own observations and ideas to make next month even more effective!

It’s very simple so it shouldn’t take long (maybe a little longer the first time you do it, but it will get faster as you gain experience) and the value it provides will be noticeable the very next month!

Download the Monthly Sales Funnel Check-up PDF here.

FAQ: I want to build a sales funnel. Where do I start?

By Aaron Hoos on January 30, 2011 in Business

Building a sales funnel is fun and easy. Yes, there’s some work involved but most entrepreneurs like working in their business (and working on your sales funnel isn’t as tedious as some of the other things you could be doing!).

So the very first step depends on whether your business has sold something before or whether it hasn’t. Below, I’ve written answers for both:

IF YOUR BUSINESS HAS SOLD SOMETHING BEFORE
If your business has sold something before, and you are just wanting to articulate and improve your existing sales funnel, then your very first step should be to look at your customer(s) and trace them backwards as far as you can:

  • What was the final action that made them become Customers? (A “buy now” button? A phone call? etc.)
  • What were they thinking about and asking you about before they bought? (How did you interact with them? Where did you interact with them?)
  • What did they do to reach the point where you could present to them? (Did they click to a sales page? Did they telephone you? Did you meet them at their office?)
  • How did they find you in the first place?
  • What are your customers like, demographically? (What was similar about them?)

If you have sold something to other people before, your goal here is to figure out who those people were, why thy bought from you, and how they progressed through your sales funnel. That doesn’t mean you can’t create a new sales funnel; rather, it means that you have a sales funnel starting point… but a sales funnel starting point you have not articulated before.

IF YOUR BUSINESS HAS NOT SOLD SOMETHING BEFORE
If you haven’t sold something (in this business) before, then your very first step should be to list your potential sales funnel (Audience, Leads, Prospects, Customers, Evangelists), and decide on at least one form of media to go in each stage. For example, your Audience might be collected through Twitter; your Leads might read your blog; your Prospects might read your newsletter; etc.).

The goal here is to create a starting point. You will build off it and improve it as time goes on, but you need a foundation and this is a fast way to build a sales funnel and focus your sales funnel strategy.

Testimonial

By Aaron Hoos on January 30, 2011 in Portfolio

“Exactly what I asked for and quicker than I needed it. Worth more than I paid for. Thanks again Aaron.”

-J. Taylor

A customer loyalty lesson learned from my friend’s emergency trip to the hospital

By Aaron Hoos on January 29, 2011 in Business

A friend of mine works at a Starbucks not too far from my house. I’ve known him for several years and he became a barista at Starbucks maybe a year or two ago.

Well, earlier this week he was rushed to the hospital because his lung collapsed. He’s been at the hospital ever since, sometimes returning home but frequently staying at the hospital overnight for observation. He seems to be doing okay, although we’re not yet sure why his lung collapsed.

Now here’s what shocked me: I just found out today that some of his Starbucks customers came to visit him in the hospital.

That’s impressive customer loyalty! In fact, that goes beyond customer loyalty to a true relationship!

Loyal customers are profitable customers. They buy again and again with very little prompting, and they talk up the business to others.

HOW CUSTOMER LOYALTY IS CREATED
I’ve found that creating customer loyalty is rarely something that happens at the business level. It happens at the employee level. Customers may become loyal to businesses (and a lot of Starbucks customers are loyal to Starbucks!), but customers more frequently and more easily become loyal to the people in those businesses.

So, are you helping your employees create customer loyalty?

  • Give your employees the freedom to stop and chat with customers. By comparison, a lot of retail-based companies take the approach “if you have time to lean, you have time to clean”, and their staff rush around cleaning instead of pausing for a moment to strike up a conversation with a customer. The downside is that your employees might not get that counter as clean as you’d like it. The upside is higher profitability from customers who feel that they have a relationship with the person behind the counter.
  • Give your employees the tools to strike up a meaningful conversation and build a relationship. Not everyone is socially savvy, so a few conversation starters is a good way to help your employees.
  • Give your employees the freedom to go the extra mile for customers. They do anyway (everyone learns how to game the system to give a little extra to those extra-special customers) so why not help them by giving them lots of ideas.
  • Give your employees the authority to fix mistakes. Nothing takes away from loyalty-building like an employee who says, “I have to call my manager to fix that for you.” Help them know what challenges they will likely face and what an adequate response those challenges might be, then give them the authority to fix it.
  • Give your employees a reason to be proud of the company they work for. Do good things; make a good product; strive for high quality; smile a little and try to brighten your employees’ days.

When you have employees who love where they work and are empowered to fix things and have the freedom to build relationships, they will create massive amounts of customer loyalty.

THERE ARE RISKS TO CREATING CUSTOMER LOYALTY
There’s are risks that comes with this employee-specific customer loyalty, and I think that employers are so afraid of the risks that they skip the loyalty-creating ideas I’ve listed above.

The risks include:

  • Employees who create customer loyalty and are empowered to do so become more marketable and therefore potentially less loyal to an employer.
  • Customers who are loyal to employees may move with an employee if that employee quits and moves to a new business. We see this happening in industries like beautician/hairdressing, where someone moves to a different salon and advertises that old customers are welcome at the new salon.
  • Employees could abuse the additional freedom (intended for relationship-building) or authority (intended to fix problems).

These are risks, but the downside created by these risks can be mitigated with fair pay, empowering management, and an enjoyable work environment. Sometimes you will get employees leaving, customers following them, and employees abusing the system. But more often than not, you’ll get customers who become fiercely loyal to the employees who serve them.

How loyal are your customers? Are they so loyal that they would visit one of your employees in the hospital?

Weekly Sales Funnel Challenge: Wrap-up

By Aaron Hoos on January 28, 2011 in Business

This week’s Weekly Sales Funnel Challenge was to use the big list of objections you created in the Sales Funnel Challenge from a week earlier and counter/refute/destroy them in at least 2 different ways. Then, you were figure out where they go in your sales funnel so you can pre-emptively eliminate those objections BEFORE they’re even asked!

Now, I realize this challenge was time consuming, but for those of you that followed through, you will easily make up that time very quickly because you’ll deal with objections far less, and you’ll close more sales faster because your answers to the top objections were embedded preemptively in your sales funnel!

Here are three examples for you to “check your work”. I posted this one last week…

Product too expensive

  • Higher priced but it lasts longer than any other similar product: To reach the Lead and Prospect stages, change our product tagline to add the words “longest-lasting”
  • Actually costs less than 75% of other providers: To reach the Lead and Prospect stage, make sure that we highlight this in at least one blog post every two weeks
  • Also comes with a free thingamajig and a lifetime warranty: To reach the Prospect stage, make sure this item is highlighted at least twice during every face-to-face sales presentation and at least three times during every telephone sales presentation.

And here are two more…

No money in the budget

  • Higher priced but we deliver a higher ROI than competitors: To reach the Lead and stage, make sure every benefits list includes “higher ROI”.
  • People who buy lower-priced products from competitors usually have to budget higher maintenance and servicing expenses. Therefore, if you spend a little more with us, you’ll spend less on the servicing side of the deal: To reach the Prospect stage, record 2-3 case studies with this message as the main point.
  • Because our product is higher value, your customers will buy more; therefore, you’ll generate more revenue: To reach the Lead stage, include this as one of the teaser points when capturing emails.

I’m not sure that you have experience in my very specific niche

  • We have a variety of industry experience in this industry and other, similar industries: To reach the Lead stage, list the industries we have worked in.
  • We have the experience to help your industry: To reach the Prospect satge, identify similarities between industries and highlight those aspects of our experience.
  • We learn new industries quickly: Create a whitepaper that outlines our process for quickly becoming experts in an particular industry.

(And don’t forget: Feel free to send your own Weekly Sales Funnel Challenge results to me and I’ll upload them here. Scan it or design it in your favorite word processing program and email it to me. Or, if it’s just a simple text-based answer, comment in the wrap-up. If you ever send something to me to post for a challenge wrap-up, I would kindly ask you to remove your competitive differentiators!)

4 deadly sales funnel sins that could completely ruin your business

By Aaron Hoos on January 28, 2011 in Business

A sales funnel is the most important part of your business because it’s the way you generate revenue; everything else in your company grows out of your sales funnel successes. Unfortunately, there are 4 deadly sales funnel sins that businesses commit, which dooms the business to almost certain failure.

Are you committing any of these?

DEADLY SALES FUNNEL SIN #1: LOSING LEADS
Building an Audience is not that hard, especially in today’s highly connected social-networking-crazy world. Unfortunately, businesses commit the first deadly sin by not strategically pushing Audience members to become Leads. For example, maybe there is no plan to take all of those Twitter followers and Facebook fans and get them clicking from Twitter or Facebook to your website. Or, maybe there isn’t an attainable SEO strategy that will generate enough traffic to your site.

In my experience, it’s rarely an intentional mistake. Rather, I’ve met many entrepreneurs who confidently believe that people will somehow find the business website simply because it’s online. Or, they confidently believe that fans or followers will click the website just because they can. But that’s rarely the case. Like contacts in any other stage of the sales funnel, people in the Audience stage need a reason to move the forward. Are you giving them that reason? Are you tempting them to take the next step in the relationship? Are you asking them for a small commitment to move forward?

How deadly is this sin? Figure out the amount of time that it takes for someone to go from Audience stage to the Customer stage. That’s how long your business will live if you don’t prompt more of your Audience to become Leads.

DEADLY SALES FUNNEL SIN #2: SKIPPING OUT ON SALES
Marketing is fun, easy, and creative. You can do lots of it yourself, very quickly, and pretty affordably. The web gives a lot of options to market. Unfortunately, Prospects don’t become Customers through marketing alone. There needs to be some sales effort, and that is where a lot of entrepreneurs fall short. Selling can be hard work, time consuming, and it can feel negative because it’s filled with rejection.

Entrepreneurs who spend all of their effort marketing but zero effort on sales, will run out of money very quickly. Sales will dry up (or will simply not occur if there were there at all). If you’re running a business that is heavy on marketing and light on sales effort, you may not be generating the revenue you were hoping for because contacts in the Prospect stage are not converting to the Customer stage.

How deadly is this sin? Add up all of your expenses in a month. How long can your business survive by borrowing that amount of money every month from lenders, friends, and investors? Since there are no Customers, there won’t be any revenue.

DEADLY SALES FUNNEL SIN #3: IGNORING PREVIOUS CUSTOMERS
Once a Prospect becomes a Customer, you’ve done the hard work of convincing them that you can help them. They’ve handed over their money and you have provided your product or service. For many businesses, this is the end of the story and they move on to spend their time and effort to convert another Lead into a Prospect then into a Customer. Many businesses ignore the already-sold Customer as a “past customer”. Instead they should be thinking of those Customers as “repeat buyers”.

Very few businesses have an effective method to sell to their previous buyers. Small businesses often only have a couple of products or services and if they sell those to a Customer and solve the need, end of relationship. But there is much more that businesses can do to turn one-time Customers into repeat-purchase Customers. The advantage of this is that it’s usually cheaper and faster to sell to these “already-sold” Customers than it is to sell a Prospect.

How deadly is this sin? Add up the per-Customer expense of bringing a contact along the sales funnel from the Audience stage to the Customer stage. Now figure out how big you want your business to grow and multiply your sales funnel expense by the percentage of growth. That’s expensive! Now, you will still spend some of that, but you can fuel profitable business growth at a lower cost by selling more to your existing Customers.

DEADLY SALES FUNNEL SIN #4: FORGETTING ABOUT YOUR SALES FUNNEL
The deadliest of the deadly sales funnel sins! Every year, thousands of small businesses start and fail. Businesses start because of a good idea by an innovative, energetic entrepreneur who wants to build a business. Businesses (often) fail because there isn’t enough revenue to pay the bills, to manufacture the goods, to pay for marketing and sales, and to keep the lights on.

While it’s true that there are several reasons for business failure, many business failures are tied to a sales funnel that did not produce the flood of eager Customers the businesses needed to thrive. Maybe the sales funnel was intentionally engineered but the demand wasn’t there. Maybe the product was too expensive and the sales funnel marketing collateral did an insufficient job at positioning the product at that price point. There are lots of reasons. But frequently, businesses skip out on designing and building their sales funnel. They know their market, they have some marketing and sales ideas, and they have a compelling product… shouldn’t that be enough?

It’s not. A sales funnel is an essential, strategic business asset that can help increase the likelihood of business success.

How deadly is this sin? We’ll never know. But there are a lot of struggling businesses out there. A sales funnel may not be the panacea to eliminate all of their woes, but it can help to highlight where many of those challenges are so they can be mitigated.

If you are committing any of these sales funnel sins, it’s time to stop where you are and start designing your sales funnel from the ground up.

Start by downloading the free Sales Funnel Quick Reference Guide to get an at-a-glimpse overview of sales funnels.

Then subscribe to my blog to learn more about sales funnels. I’ll show you how to design and engineer a sales funnel to help achieve business success. And very shortly, I’ll be publishing some exciting, useful tools to help you.

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