Aaron Hoos

It’s the end of April. Time to fill out your Monthly Sales Funnel Check-up. (I’ll bet these are getting easier and faster to do!)

Wondering what the heck a Monthly Sales Funnel Check-up is? Read the first Monthly Sales Funnel Check-up blog post that kicked it all off!

This week, I challenged you to write about your target market in detail. How did you do?

Here’s my answer to this challenge:

My target market is made up of entrepreneurial small business owners who are just starting their businesses or trying to grow them. They are focused on the web (primarily) and looking to sell products and/or services via the web. They are often do-it-yourselfers on a limited budget. They have an interest in marketing, and especially in internet marketing, but they are also overwhelmed by the possibilities as well as the time and money expense to market successfully. They connect with other business owners locally and through the web and are always looking for an extra edge to grow their businesses. When they aren’t working on their businesses, they are spending time with family and friends and sometimes they are working at day-jobs that they desire to leave.

Knowing your target market in this way helps you to make decisions about what marketing channels you’ll use to connect with them and what you’ll say to them when you meet.

The web has dramatically reduced the barrier to entry that people once faced when they wanted to start a business. Today, someone with some talent, aspiration, and an email address can create their own empire.

But not everyone can.

There are a lot of talented, aggressive marketers out there who do start a business and make a fortune, but there are many talented, aggressive marketers out there who do not. This latter group has a sales funnel that is bursting at the seams with contacts but it’s not going anywhere. They aren’t making any money.

There are a lot of reasons this could be the case (maybe the product falls short of the promotion that was given earlier, maybe the Prospect isn’t motivated to buy) but in my experience, the top reason for sales funnel failure is because the entrepreneur didn’t ask for the sale.

I blame marketing

Marketing is fun, creative, and it can be easy to do. You write something, you put it out there on the web, and you get people who are interested. With some thought and experience, you start creating a lot of good, targeted content and the right people are attracted into your sales funnel. A lot of web-based marketing content keeps chugging along, long after you created it, bringing people into your sales funnel even while you sleep.

Marketing is a popular topic. It has a sex appeal to it. People like to talk about it. People like to “do marketing”. Marketing is all about building a relationship with a sales funnel contact around a specific topic (the benefits you offer).

But then there’s sales

Sales seems like hard work. It doesn’t seem creative or fun. Asking for the sale feels like an interruption in the relationship. Everyone wants to be a marketer but only a few people will admit they’re salespeople.

Marketing is fuzzy and difficult to measure. Sales is clear (you made a sale or you didn’t) and it’s easy to measure.
Marketing is quick to do (you write an ad or you publish a press release). Sales can take a long time (there are sales presentations and you have to overcome objections).
Marketing doesn’t require very much (just some creativity and a place to publish your content). Sales requires a willing listener and some persistence.

In spite of all this, sales is what makes a business successful. Sales converts Prospects to Customers, marketing doesn’t. Sales brings in the cash, marketing doesn’t.

It’s easy to spend a lot of time on marketing — and marketing IS important to do — but many businesses need to spend way more time on sales than they do. The most successful entrepreneurs I’ve met are good marketers and relentless sellers.

Sales isn’t as bad as it seems

Sales isn’t a break in the relationship with the contact. It’s moving the relationship forward to help add value to the contact. Good sales should feel like the next obvious step in your interaction with the contacts in your sales funnel. Earlier in your sales funnel you gave them some free, generalized value (i.e. maybe from some free advice on your blog). They benefited from it. Now your “sales pitch” is really just showing them how they could benefit even more from some specific, personalized value (i.e. from your consulting services).

Take a hard look at your sales funnel

Is it a sales funnel? Or is it really a marketing funnel without ever turning into a sales funnel? If you do a lot of marketing but never get around to the “Buy Now”, then it’s time to inject some sales into your sales funnel by asking for the order.

One last kick in the ass

In ANY business, there are going to be challenging tasks and easy tasks. It’s easy to do the easy tasks (obviously!). But it’s the challenging tasks that will make your business successful. Marketing is fun and easy, but it’s the challenging task of sales that will make your business successful.