Aaron Hoos

This week, I challenged you to give some thought to follow-up sales to your Customers and Evangelists. They are often overlooked in sales funnels as a source of revenue, but they are far easier to sell to and that makes them more profitable.

So did you find something to sell to them?

I always try to do the challenge with my readers and this week is no different: I did think of some additional sales to make to Customers and Evangelists and I started working on it! It will take a few months to produce (since I’m heavily committed with client work right now) but be sure to watch for it!

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.

Customers and Evangelists are terribly overlooked in a sales funnel. After all, they’ve already bought something so most people don’t even think of them as being IN the sales funnel any more.

But I disagree. Customers have bought from you once. Evangelists are Customers who talk about you to their friends. But they are still in your sales funnel and they are the easiest to sell to (because you’ve already sold to them once).
So, how are you going to sell to them again?

In this week’s challenge, I want you to think of a product or service that your Customers and Evangelists might like. It doesn’t have to be something YOU sell… it might be something for which you have an affiliate account and you just recommend the product or service.

No, I’m not asking you to start selling something more to your Customers and Evangelists this week. However, I think you should take a moment and think about what you can sell to them.

Good luck!

When I was in high school, my friend’s family owned the very first computer store in town. I was always sort of impressed that they had a lock on that market. I imagined a business without competition to be the highest level of business achievement – a sort of entrepreneurial nirvana.

Then, to my surprise, I learned that they were helping someone else start a computer store in the same town. In other words, they were helping to create their own competition! I didn’t understand it at all. When I asked my friend’s dad about it, he said that competition is good for business. Although he didn’t go into detail, it was a lesson I never forgot (I even remember the exact moment when he told me – it was in the kitchen of their house – it was a watershed moment for me).

It took me years to learn why competition is a good thing, but I now realize that it is essential to a strong, prosperous business. Here are my top 6 reasons why I embrace competition:

REASON #1: COMPETITORS DEFINE YOUR BUSINESS

Competitors help you to figure out what you do. If you are starting a business and you examine how your competitors define themselves, you can identify a point of difference that they are not addressing.

It’s like being lost and using a couple of fixed objects to help you figure out where you are. Your competitors are those fixed objects and you can easily find your way in the marketplace when you compare yourself to your competition.

Creating a business that has too much identical competition (everyone sells exactly the same thing at exactly the same price – real estate agents are a good example) will eventually result in a price war with your competitors. But if you look at your competitors as a starting point and then you define yourself carefully, strategically, and in a different way from the rest of the pack, you’ll help to attract the right people to your business (people who might not be attracted to your competitor). You won’t have to compete on price because your competitors are different from you.

For more information about differentiation and competition, read my blog posts: Equal is not good enough and Mine is bigger than yours — competitiveness and marketing content.

REASON #2: COMPETITORS KEEP YOU HUNGRY

A couple of years ago, I met someone who owned a business that was in-demand and the only kind like it in the entire state. The guy charged insanely high prices and 100% interest on unpaid debts. He could make his own schedule and he didn’t need to provide good customer service. Sounds awesome, at first – you can do what you want and you basically have a licence to print money. But eventually, some other entrepreneur will spot the opportunity in that market and see that he or she could make a financial killing while charging less AND providing exemplary service… and suddenly the first guy’s business is in trouble.

When I was a freelance writer, I would sometimes get frustrated at the low-priced freelancer writers who would charge next-to-nothing, undercutting my prices. On more than one occasion, it caused me to look at my prices and sometimes consider lowering them. (Fortunately, I never did). I realize now that those low-priced competitors kept me hungry and I worked harder to out-work and out-earn those competitors. I’m glad for them now.

REASON #3: COMPETITORS COMPEL INNOVATION

In economics, inflation is kind of like a swarm of termites. You don’t see them but they eat away at the stuff you own. Inflation causes upward pressure on prices so that $1.00 tomorrow is worth less than $1.00 today. In other words, if you’re standing still in your finances, you’re actually going backwards.

It’s the same in business. If you want to create a product or service, build a sales funnel, automate it, and then go sip margaritas on a beach, think again. Your business is “standing still” (not innovating) and your competition will outpace you with newer, faster, shinier products and services. While you’re asking the lifeguard to put sunscreen on the places where you can’t reach, your competitors will be inventing a better mousetrap. Before you know it, your business will sputter and die because no one wants your clumsy old offering.

Your competitors are innovating, so you need to as well. Their very existence forces you to get creative, invest in your business, and reach for more. That’s great for your customers and for your business’ longevity. Read more about innovation at my blog post: My best advice on innovation. And this blog post provides an interesting take on innovation: Want a competitive advantage? Offer the same products as everyone else!

REASON #4: COMPETITORS BECOME CASE STUDIES

In your own business, every interaction in your sales funnel is a piece of data that you can analyze to make your business better. You watch for patterns, for sudden changes, and for opportunities. You put all of these pieces together, you compare it with your metrics, and you can make huge, positive changes in your business.

But if you raise your head out of your sales funnel for a moment and glance across the street at your competition, you’ll learn quite a bit, too. Yes, you won’t have all of the facts or metrics, but you can put together an awful lot just by looking in their windows, browsing their website, mystery shopping them, and listening to both happy and disaffected customers.

Watch for competitors’ marketing campaigns that have a huge impact. Analyze the types of people going through your competitors’ doors. Find patterns among the disaffected customers who decide to switch providers and buy from you instead. By simply watching your competitor, you can learn so much from them to benefit your own business. They become a living, breathing MBA case study to make you a smarter entrepreneur.

Want a place to start? Why not do some really simple competitive research to figure out how to price your products or services. Learn more about it at this blog post: How to easily discover the best price for your product or service.

REASON #5: COMPETITORS RAISE MARKET AWARENESS

Imagine a town in which there are only two companies providing window cleaning services. They both market their services aggressively and have their own point of difference. Simply by advertising the benefit of cleaner windows, they highlight the problem of dirty windows in the market’s mind and the market will search for a window cleaning company – even if it’s not the one whose advertising initially prompted their awareness.

It’s the principle of 1+1=3. Competitors’ marketing will attract new Leads (and sometimes YOUR Leads) to the competitor, but it will also alert the general marketplace to the general problem or need. People from the marketplace will look for a solution or fulfillment and may end up in your sales funnel as a result (all because they became aware of the problem or need from your competitor’s ad). Note: I’m not suggesting that you don’t leave all of the marketing to your competition. However, I think that competitors who advertise in the same market will have a greater cumulative effect than if they each advertised in their own market).

REASON #6: COMPETITORS CAN BECOME COOPERATORS

I love motorsports, especially NASCAR. One of the things that makes the sport great is when two competitors will work together to push ahead of everyone else. Overall, they are still ruthless competitors, but for a brief moment they can put aside their differences to eliminate the rest of the competition.

The same thing can happen in business, too. You can work together with a few carefully chosen competitors to win more customers and outpace other competitors. Now, please note: There are laws about collusion and I’m not suggesting you circumvent those laws – you’re not doing this to raise prices across the board or to destroy a few competitors. There are ways to legally cooperate with your competitors for mutual benefit. For example, you can share the costs of joint advertising to reach different markets through the same channels. Or, you can send each other potential customers who may be a better fit for the other than for you. When I was a freelance writer, I competed against other freelance writers, of course. But when a Prospect wanted to buy from me and I discovered that they were not a good fit (perhaps I didn’t have the bandwidth to help them, or maybe they were in an industry I knew nothing about), I had a few carefully chosen competitors who I felt comfortable recommending them to. And the relationship worked both ways – those competitors knew who I was interested in working with and they would send people to me.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU

First, welcome competition. If there are no competitors in your marketplace, be wary. Dare to invite competitors to your marketplace! Get to know your competition as individuals, but also get to know their businesses. Use competitive analysis to learn as much as you can about them. Find out how you can help them (and take the first step to do so) and you may see some reciprocation. And always keep an eye on your competition to motivate you to stay hungry and stay innovative!

Hey, this blog post gives another reason to love competitors: 4 ways to insert yourself into your competitor’s sales funnel and steal their customers.

As contacts move through your sales funnel, you nurture a relationship with them. The engagement that comes from that relationship elicits more and more information to help you know whether or not this contact is likely to buy from you.

As the relationship builds, the contact moves out of the Audience stage, where they were simply listening to general ideas about the problem or need they have, and they advance to the Lead stage, where they start taking action to pursue a solution.

But what exactly is a Lead? Is it a name? Is it an email address? Is it a telephone number? Is it an affirmation that they are interested in what you have to sell?

I believe that a Lead is a sales funnel contact who has realized just how acute their problem or need is and is starting to search out a solution. They’re willing to exchange a little bit of information about themselves in order to see if you could be one of the potential solution-providers to meet their needs. But what information you collect from them depends on your business.

I recently read an article that was published back in December 2009 (but the good stuff is always timeless!). In the article, Eric Rudolf proposes the difference between “a name”, “a lead”, and “an opportunity”. His article nicely bridges the gap that the marketing department and sales department often try to communicate over.

Summarizing what Rudolf says…

• A name is just a name with no context.
• A Lead is a name and contact information of someone within a target market who has expressed interest in learning more.
• An opportunity is a name and contact information of someone within a target market who has expressed interest in learning more, and has a budget, and is an decision-maker.

Those are pretty good definitions. And if I were to look at those and then compare them to how we understand sales funnels, I would suggest that a name is a contact from your Audience stage, a Lead is a contact from your Leads stage, and an opportunity is a contact from your Prospect stage. And this matches with what Rudolf is saying — an opportunity is the warmest and most likely to buy.

So what should you do? It doesn’t matter whether you work alone or have a big marketing department and sales department. You (and/or your team) need to get names in the Audience stage and then nurture the relationship into a Lead. Then, nurture the relationship into a Prospect. Once you’re there, the contact is ready to be sold.

Read Eric Rudolf’s article Is it a Lead or not? A marketer’s guide to communicating with sales.

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.

I’ve had a lot of new readers since I started doing these Weekly Sales Funnel Challenges, so I thought it was time to repeat one of the very first challenges: Draw your sales funnel.

List each stage (Audience, Leads, Prospects, Customers, Evangelists), and outline what your contacts do at each stage and how you communicate with them. It doesn’t have to be perfect. The goal is to write down what you do know and to see what you don’t know… and then build from there.

Even if you’ve already drawn your sales funnel in a previous challenge, I challenge you to do it again. If you’ve been one of the faithful Weekly Sales Funnel Challenge participants, it will be an interesting experiment to go back compare your current sales funnel drawing with your first one. How have you progressed in the months between those drawings?