Aaron Hoos

As a business owner, one of your tasks should be to get your Customers to buy from you again. Repeat business is more profitable because your buyers have already been through your sales funnel once! Therefore, it takes less work to sell to them, which means less of the money is “spent” on the sale and more of it is profit.

But if you sell services, this isn’t easy to do: Customers who need your service for a brief season may not need it after they have achieved the goal they hired you for.

So how can you extend your contract? Here are 3 ways to keep your service clients:

1. Know more than anyone else in the organization about the topic.
Your Customer has a lot on their mind and they rely on you to be the specialist in your particular area. Take this a step further by becoming a specialist on your area in your client’s business. Become an expert in your client’s business! Know more than your client does about one particular aspect of their business and they will keep coming back to you for more. (Oh, and as a bonus, you’ll also lock yourself in over and above the competition).

2. Be the easiest person in the world to work with.
Your Customer just wants their business to run. They don’t need drama, they don’t want divas, and they definitely don’t want to hold your hand. Instead, they want to hand off one aspect of their business to you and trust you to deliver on time, in full, as you had promised. Deliver your service, be clear and a pleasure to work with, and be helpful. These will go a long way.

3. Proactively search for other projects and make recommendations.
Don’t wait for your Customer to come to you with project ideas. Search out opportunities in your Customer’s business and make recommendations. Create a proposal with one or two ideas (don’t overwhelm them with ideas; just give a couple) and ask if they’d like to extend your contract.

For this week’s sales funnel challenge, I had you choosing a competitor and writing out THEIR sales funnel. It’s challenging work to try and dissect someone else’s sales funnel, but it gives you a distinct competitive advantage if you take the time to do it.

Here’s why: There’s a good chance that your competitor hasn’t dissect his or her own sales funnel. Therefore, you know their business better than they know it themselves! You can figure out who their target market is, where they are losing contacts, and how you can do it better.

Start a binder or a file on your computer labeled “Competitive Analysis” and add this to it. You’ll use this file (and any additional competitors’ sales funnel dissections you decide to do) in future challenges.

A sales funnel is a roadmap of the relationship you have with your contacts, and the journey the two of you take from Audience to Evangelist. But a sales funnel isn’t JUST a roadmap. It’s also a crystal ball that can predict the success or failure of your business.

As your contacts move through each stage of your sales funnel, some will drop off because they don’t feel that your product or service can help them. But many will continue on through your sales funnel and ultimately buy from you.

As those contacts move from one stage to the next in your sales funnel, what they do and how long it takes them will act as a fortune teller for your business:

Start by figuring out your sales funnel ratios. How many contacts are in each stage?

Then, figure out how long an average contact takes to get from your Audience stage to become a customer.

With these two numbers, you have a very useful way to predict how your business will do in the short-term future.

HOW RATIOS HELP TO PREDICT YOUR BUSINESS SUCCESS
We’ll use some really simple numbers to illustrate how your ratios will help predict your business.

Let’s say you have 10,000 Audience members.
Of those Audience members, 1,000 become Leads.
Of those Leads, 100 become Prospects.
Of those Prospects, 10 become a customer.
Of those Customers, 1 becomes an Evangelist.
So, your ratio is 10000:1000:100:10:1.

Using this number, you can predict what would happen in your business if the only thing you did was double the number of Audience members. Assuming all else remains equal, your numbers would increase overall to 20000:2000:200:20:2. Double Audience means double everything!

By keeping tabs on this number, you can observe how slight changes in your business impact your sales: Let’s say that you had a ratio of 10000:1000:100:10:1 and then you made some changes in your Leads stage marketing and in your Prospect stage. Then you look at your numbers again and they look like this: 10000:600:120:12:1. This tells you that whatever you did in your Leads stage is hurting your sales funnel (driving the number of Leads down from 1000 to 600) but whatever you did in your Prospect stage is actually very good (because your Prospects should have dropped to 60, since the Leads dropped to 600, but they actually increased slightly).

So, you end whatever you are doing in the Leads stage and you increase whatever you are doing in the Prospect stage!

These ratios help you to know how changes to specific stages impact your business. This helps you to know how changes earlier in your sales funnel will impact the number of customers you have.

HOW DURATION HELPS TO PREDICT YOUR BUSINESS SUCCESS
Duration is the amount of time that a contact takes to go from Audience member to Evangelist.

Here’s an example from my own business. As a business writer, I not only write about sales funnels but I also write marketing and sales content for businesses. And I discovered early in my career that it took an average of 2 weeks for a Lead to become a Customer. I knew that active Lead generation would result in Customers almost exactly 2 weeks down the road.

So, in order to know how much Lead generation I needed to do today, I just looked at my calendar 2 weeks from today and figured out how much time I had to give to clients. Then I performed various Lead generation and Prospecting activities, and sure enough, I had the right amount of clients at the right time.

The reverse was true, too: If I didn’t do any Lead generation, I would have a lot of spare time on my hands 2 weeks down the road. So, knowing the duration of your sales funnel helps you to know how much business you’ll have in the future based on your Audience members today.

WHY BUSINESS PREDICTIONS ARE SO VALUABLE
Running a business is like juggling — there are so many things to keep moving. Having the ability to predict your success based on how many people are at each stage in your sales funnel, and based on how long they take to get through your sales funnel, gives you a serious advantage over your competition. Here are a few highlights:

• A predictable business lets you invest wisely to build capacity so you can handle more and more customers.
• An entrepreneur that knows what business is going to be like down the road can spend less time worrying and more time serving Customers.
• An entrepreneur that can accurate predict the amount of business coming down the pipe can optimize the entire business for greater profitability.
• A business that is that predictable can be set to autopilot faster and easier than a business that is unpredictable.

I’ve only listed a few of the many benefits that accurate sales funnel predictions offer.

Get to know your sales funnel ratio and sales funnel duration!

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.

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!

Building a sales funnel can be a lot of work: You need marketing and sales collateral, you need to get out there and aggressively fill your sales funnel with contacts, and you need to continuously move those prospects along while you keep your sales funnel full. It can be exhausting!

But one effective way to strengthen your competitive position is to steal prospects from your competition. In other words, get your competitors to put in the sales-funnel-filling effort and you can reap the rewards. It’s neither unethical nor immoral; it’s all about saying and doing the right things at the right time!

Here are four ways you can do that:

STAND CLOSE TO YOUR COMPETITORS
If you have a business that operates out of a physical location, you’ll want to make sure that prospects can see your sign at the same time they see your competitors’ signs. This is one reason why you tend to see fast food stores grouped together. On a smaller scale, you see this in grocery stores, where an entire aisle will be devoted to a particular type of product.

This concept also applies online, too. If your competitors use a specific mix of keywords, and you want to steal their customers, you need to identify what keywords they’re using and surpass your competitors on how you are optimized for those keywords. Ideally, you want to accelerate past them on search engines. (And, if you end up on the same results page as your competitor, improve the text that appears as a blurb/summary in the search engine results to make it more compelling).

The challenge in choosing this method is to make sure that your brand shines the brightest when you are side-by-side with your competitor.

INVITE PROSPECTS TO COMPARISON SHOP
This is related to the tactic above, but it’s effectively used when there isn’t an obvious side-by-side comparison, or if there is a lot of loyalty to the competitor.

In the 1980′s, Lee Iaccoca inserted Chrysler into GM’s and Ford’s sales funnel by challenging his audience with the line: If you find a better car, buy it. In a way, it reminded contacts that there is a choice. Today, we see Ford commercials where Ford contacts people selling their used Hondas and Toyotas (and are likely going to buy another Honda or Toyota) to get them to test-drive a Ford.

As a freelance writer, I used to use this tactic effectively to keep my sales funnel full: I often told prospects that there would be a lot of freelancers vying for their attention and offering ridiculous prices to win their business. I wasn’t about to lower my prices, but I empowered my prospects with some helpful decision-making tools so they could easily determine which freelancer worked for them. (Sometimes it was me, and sometimes it wasn’t).

Progressive.com provides real-time quotes from several competing insurance companies on their websites. Sometimes Progressive’s quote is higher, sometimes it’s lower, but it gives a sense of authenticity to a very competitive industry, and it encourages a lot of people to click there first to find out.

When I was in sales, the company I worked for had a lot of people calling in to get a quote, and if we couldn’t close the deal on the phone, we were instructed to tell prospects to call us back and we would beat our competitor’s lowest price. This was an effective way to ensure that prospects called us back (although, in general, I don’t think that being a low-priced provider is a smart long-term strategy for many businesses).

And waaaaaaay back when I was in high school and working at a fast food place, we were instructed to take any competitor’s coupon. I worked at a sub place, and if a prospect brought in a buy-one-pizza-get-one-free, we were to give an equivalent offer. This was an effective way to get customers to clip all kinds of coupons but still to come to our restaurant.

SHOW UP ON THEIR WEBSITE
It is possible to show up on your competitor’s website! If your competitor posts ads from an automated ad network (i.e. AdSense), chances are good that those ads are for a related product or service. If you sell that product or service and use the right keywords, paying for an ad in that ad network could get you listed on your competitor’s website.

Another way to appear on your competitor’s website is to contact your competitor and work out a referral agreement for customers that don’t exactly match the kind that you serve. For example if your competitor is a low priced provider and you provide a longer-lasting product, then most of your customers will remain your own but any low-priced customers who come to you can be sent to your competitor and any customers looking for longer-lasting products can be sent from your competitor to you. This can be a difficult strategy to pitch, though, so expect a lot of resistance and skepticism. But I’ve used it myself when I was a sales manager.

APPEAR AT EXACTLY THE RIGHT TIME, WHEN THE PROSPECT IS READY TO BUY
Timing is everything. Showing up at exactly the right moment (when your competitor’s lead or prospect is about to advance a stage in the competitor’s sales funnel) can win that contact over to you.

But doing that effectively isn’t easy. Real estate agents and financial advisors try to do it with marketing collateral (magnets, calendars, etc.) that keep the professional’s name in front of the prospect.

But there are better ways to do it: If you know approximately how long people take to use a product or service that they’ve purchased from your competitor, you can time your marketing to reach out to them when they are nearing the point where they have to buy again and incentivize them to buy from you.

A very simple example of this is placing a coupon on the bottom of a tissue box and then blitzing the marketplace to get a box of tissues into people’s homes (perhaps through a cross-product promotion or a loss-leader-style giveaway). The coupon on the bottom of the tissue box is there for them to use for the next time… essentially inserting you into your competitor’s sales funnel.

Another example is the bank of dedicated phone lines at airports. You’ve seen them (and probably used them): Your plane lands, you pick up your luggage, and then you go to the bank of phones. If you want a rental car, you pick up one of the phones with the rental car logo on it and it connects you immediately to that rental car place. If you want a hotel, you pick up one of the phones with the hotel logo on it and it connects you immediately to that hotel.

Lots of businesses can use this. When I first started my business, I was contacted by a marketing firm that wanted to sell their services to me. They found my information from the list of new companies published by the government licensing agency every month. Although I didn’t hire them, they showed up in my life at a time when I was looking for the kinds of services they provide.