Aaron Hoos

The goal of your business is not to make a sale. Rather, the goal of your business is to earn profit from sales.

If the goal of your business was to make a sale, then you risk turning your business into a hamster wheel — where you sell one thing to one buyer and then start over trying to sell one thing to another potential buyer. You work hard but get nowhere because of the amount of effort you expend to make a single sale .

The goal of your business is to earn a profit and that is done through increasing your sales and decreasing the amount of effort you expend to make those sales.

One of the ways to do that is to sell to a Customer then turn that Customer into an Evangelist — someone who markets your business for you. A little extra effort is required and the result is more sales at less cost to you.

Many businesses sell and then jump on the hamster wheel to sell to someone else. But the most profitable businesses turn their Customers into a huge sales force of Evangelists.

In this article on Harvard Business Review, writer Matthew Rhoden describes 3 ways that businesses can turn Customers into Evangelists (or as he calls them, “Superfans”).

Create Brand Superfans – Matthew Rhoden – The Conversation – Harvard Business Review.

After you’ve read the article, think about your current Customer-to-Evangelist practices. How effective are they? Consider ways to step up this transformation process to turn your buyers into superfans. Even by tweaking a couple of your processes, and adding just one or two Evangelists, your business will be that much more profitable.

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.

A paygate is where you place the transaction part of your sale. A paygate might fall before you deliver your product or service, after you deliver your product or service, or while you deliver your product or service (or some combination of those three).

Right now, you have at least one paygate style that has worked for you. But do you know why you chose that particular paygate? Why do you require money before handing over your products? Why do you deliver service before asking for money? What risks does each one create?

For this week’s challenge, I’d like you to experiment with a different paygate. Maybe ask for money after you deliver the product. Or ask for money before you deliver the service. You don’t have to do it for every customer, but try it for a couple of customers and see what happens.

Good luck!

Word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective and most profitable kind of marketing there is. It’s most the effective because it’s peer-to-peer marketing (a friend tells another friend) and therefore is more trusted than if you as a business owner were to say exactly the same thing to your audience. It’s the most profitable because it costs you almost nothing to achieve (compared to other marketing efforts that demand a lot of your time and effort).

If you want the benefits of more word-of-mouth marketing in your business, apply these three tips to your sales funnel:

Word-of-mouth sales funnel tip #1: Don’t wait until your Customer has already bought from you before you push to get word-of-mouth marketing. Get your Audience members, Leads, and Prospects promoting your business before they ever buy from you. Retweets are a good place to start. Or write something on your blog that gets people talking. But don’t stop there. Get creative. Groupon IS this business! It’s word-of-mouth marketing before a purchase is ever made.

Word-of-mouth sales funnel tip #2: Frame a word-of-mouth opportunity for your customer. Don’t just wait for them to find someone who needs your services. Tell them about a specific situation they’ll face and explain what they should do. For example, a real estate agent might tell a Customer who just bought a house: “When you have guests come over for a barbecue and they ooh and ahh about your wonderful new house — would you give them my name? I have a few more houses that are just like it that I think they might be interested in seeing.” When your Customer finds themselves in that exact situation, it will be more likely to trigger their memory and compel a recommendation than if you just left it open to them to recommend you whenever they wanted. (Hint: Make sure it’s a specific but common situation that they will likely be in).

Word-of-mouth sales funnel tip #3: Ask your buyers how they heard of you. When they tell you that someone told them about you, find out what was said. If you can find out without sounding like you’re interrogating them, inquire about the situation where the recommendation was made. Where were they? Who was recommender? What was the situation in which they gave your name? The more information you glean, the better you can make changes to your sales funnel to encourage more of the same word-of-mouth recommendations in the future.

Word-of-mouth marketing is SO good. The more recommendations you get, the less time you need to spend on marketing and the more profitable your business will be. That’s an equation that every business owner wants!