Tag Archives: sales funnel

The 2 things that your prospects and customers are desperate to hear from you

By Aaron Hoos on May 8, 2013 in Business

I think businesses make the sales process too complicated. They present their offerings. They overcome objections. They ask for the sale. They deliver.

These same businesses see themselves as one choice out of many and they often sell into that mindset with marketing and sales communication that answers the question “why choose us”.

And although that sales process and the one-choice-out-of-many mindset does exist, I think prospects and customers are actually desperate for something else…

They’re desperate to hear two things:

  • Prospects and customers want to be told what to do
  • Prospects and customers want to the confidence to act

This point was driven home for me recently with an equity newsletter I was writing. I’m pretty clear in my newsletter that I do not give out stock advice. I can’t legally tell people what stocks to buy or sell and I’m very strict about avoiding that situation. But I frequently get emails from people asking, “which stock should I invest in?”.

This point was further driven home by a real estate investing client of mine. He trains other investors and his students frequently ask him questions like, “should I invest in Minneapolis or Ohio?” or “should I flip houses or wholesale houses?” And as he helps guide people to the answer, he encounters another problem: His students are afraid to move forward. They’re scared of different things that could go wrong and it halts them from taking action.

People are looking to be told what to do and they’re looking for the confidence to act. Let’s look at these ideas a little closer:

THEY WANT TO BE TOLD WHAT TO DO

Prospects and customers want to be told what to do. Here are some examples from my own work, writing for business, finance, and real estate audiences:

  • Entrepreneurs want to be told exactly how to start and grow their business.
  • Equity investors want to be told what equities to invest in.
  • Real estate investors want to be told how to invest in real estate.

Perhaps there are other things they want to be told, and maybe there are more specific things I could have mentioned, but these are the three that I see regularly.

A couple of caveats about what I’ve just written:

  • This has to be done legally (for example: Unless you have a license, you probably can’t tell your customer which equity to invest in).
  • This has to be done respectfully. Our customers want to be told what to do but they want to feel like they’ve done it themselves.

What are your prospects and customers desperate to hear? Chances are, the product or service they buy from you is only part of the solution. They want an answer. A way. A method. A key that unlocks what they were hoping to achieve.

THEY WANT THE CONFIDENCE TO ACT

Prospects and customers get a lot of ideas and advice and suggestions from experts (some of it is free, some of it is paid for) but they don’t always act. There might be a lot of stated reasons about why they don’t act but it really boils down to confidence that they won’t cause more harm by acting on what they know or have bought.

As business owners, we need to not only provide the right solutions to our customers but we also have to empower them to use those solutions — we need to give them the right instructions, motivate them with reminders (which also helps to eliminate buyer remorse), and show them how other buyers are using the product or service successfully.

Your customers buy from you but do they get everything they need? They’re looking to be told what to do and they’re looking for confidence to act. Don’t forget to give that to them!

Aaron Hoos’ weekly reading list: ‘YouTube killed the TV star’ edition

By Aaron Hoos on April 28, 2013 in Business, From the desk of Aaron Hoos

Aaron Hoos: Weekly reading list

I called my parents earlier this evening, like a good son should from time to time. During the conversation, my mother mentioned that she had been watching a couple of her favorite shows on YouTube. For my parents, who don’t watch a lot of TV, it’s a way to find programming that they enjoy — it not only fits their tastes but also their schedule.

And recently, I was thinking about a TV show I had always wanted to see but it premiered, ran a few seasons, and was cancelled before I had even heard of it. I looked it up on YouTube and — awesome! — every episode is there. It’s bookmarked and ready to watch.

I love internet TV. In my mind, it really represents one of the great things about the web: You can find the entertainment you want, when you want it, and you can watch it wherever you want it (on whichever device you choose).

What a change from yesteryear when you got the TV Guide, fought with a sibling over what you got to watch on the one TV in the house. Yeah, I’m that old. I think it makes me appreciate YouTube and other web-based TV a lot more. And I appreciate it, not just for entertainment…

There have been several times when I’ve been renovating my house and I needed to figure out how to do something and a YouTube video helped me figure it out. (Hey, I love books but it’s hard to beat actually seeing the whole thing from start to finish).

YouTube is huge (and it’s continuing to get bigger) and it’s changing how we consume television/video. Here’s some reading that I found insightful about where YouTube is now and where we can expect it to be in the near future.

  • Don’t touch that remote talks about the growth of online video (not just YouTube) and how Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, and even traditional television networks are turning to the web as a way to produce video. It’s hinted in this article and I think we’ll see even more of it in the future: Companies can produce pilots, push them to the web, measure response, and know which shows to produce. That is an exciting opportunity for the future of entertainment!
  • The future of content is niche channels. This article is kind of basic, and more than a year old, but I like how it nicely summarizes the trends in content consumption, particularly on YouTube. I’ve become fascinated by the channel concept on YouTube and particularly how businesses can maximize that for the benefit of the organization and their customers.
  • It’s getting harder to make money on YouTube. This article provided a good counterpoint to the frequent comment that YouTube (and web videos in general) are the wave of the future. I think we will see lots of video being created and consumed but this article makes me wonder whether YouTube might need to innovate new monetization models to motivate more quality programming, or businesses need to rethink why they are on YouTube and see it as an earlier part of their sales funnel rather than the place where they make money.
  • How to respect copywriting on YouTube. This is a great article and it clearly outlines what happens if people upload a copyrighted song on their video. The concept of copyright is changing on the web, and YouTube is definitely a battleground where that is happening. As someone who earns money from the content I create, I want to see lots of copyright protection. But as a realist who is totally in love with the anything-can-happen wild west of the web, I recognize that copyright concepts may need to change even more than they already have. I frequently see people writing “I don’t own this song. No copyright infringement intended” on their videos, as if that will erase their liability for using copyrighted material. I don’t think there’s a clear answer yet about how we use content that we didn’t create. It’s very complicated.

4 marketing strategies to use when your prospect’s PERCEIVED needs and REAL needs aren’t the same

By Aaron Hoos on April 16, 2013 in Business

Henry Ford famously said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses’.”

fasterhorse

Ford was thinking about meeting customer needs with a horseless carriage but if he had stopped to ask his customers what they needed, their best answer would have been a modification of something that already existed.

Henry Ford’s comment is funny but it illustrates a very serious problem that many businesses face: There is a difference between customers’ real needs and perceived needs. This is a problem for businesses because people buy things based on their needs. So if they are buying based on perceived needs, they might buy the wrong thing.

As a marketer, how do you address perceived needs versus real needs?

  • Sell to the perceived problem. Instead of trying to fight the current and bend the prospect to the marketer’s will, flow with the current by building marketing content around the problem your prospects and customers THINK they have. It will take some creativity to achieve and you need to make sure you can do this ethically but it can be done and it’s a way to position your product or service attractively.
  • Position both problems together. In your marketing, try to handle both problems together, linking them in your content to link them in your prospect’s mind. This is sort-of educational and it’s sort-of a branding effort. You want your prospect to think of their perceived problem and the real problem as being closely associated. This can be hard if the perceived problem and the real problem are quite far apart. However, the advantage to this method is that you’ll increase the sense of how dire the situation is and that increases the urgency to buy.
  • Position the real problem as being an even bigger threat. Show your prospects how the problem they think they are facing could potentially be eclipsed by an even more serious problem (the real one).
  • Educate buyers about the perceived versus real need. Show your prospects that the perceived need they have is not really the need that must be solved. Show them that the real need is the need to be addressed and then connect that real need to the product or service you sell. This option is very challenging for marketers to do because you could run the risk of insulting your prospects. That will annoy prospects and send them off to your competitor who will be all too willing to take their money. Avoid insulting your customers by taking a very neutral, educational tone. Bring in respected experts. Treat both as actual problems but simply highlight the one problem that most people address with your product or service.

(Image credit: Curufin)

How to create more effective calls to action

By Aaron Hoos on April 11, 2013 in Business

Any interaction you have with a lead, a prospect, or a customer will likely have some kind of call to action or desired outcome attached to it. Those calls to action or desired outcomes are key to how well your business runs today and how successful it will be in the future.

Here are some desired outcome examples: It might be about educating them about your amazing product or service so they them further down your sales funnel. As they get closer to buying something, your desired outcomes might be to take action and buy now. Once they are customers, you might interact with them and end with desired outcomes of deepening your understanding of them or perhaps asking them to refer you to someone else.

Calls to action help to propel your prospects and customers forward and, ultimately, they help to propel your business forward. So doesn’t it make sense to improve your ability to create better calls to action? In doing so, you’ll improve how your marketing and selling abilities, your networking, your copywriting, and more!

Creating an effective call to action is about understanding what your audience is looking for and showing them how the desired action you’re describing will help them find it. (This is really basic sales stuff and you probably know this part already).

But there’s another aspect to creating effective calls to action that I never really thought about before now: You also need to understand exactly what you are asking the person to do — what behaviors you are asking them to change. Are you asking them to take action once (“buy now!”)? Are you asking them to hire you for some service (“let’s work together!”)? Are you asking them to make a permanent change (“stop smoking!”)?

I stumbled across a really useful tool about this. The tool is called the “Behavior Grid” and it was created by BJ Fogg of Stanford University. The behavior grid is useful for many applications (and I first noticed it in an article about improving the user experience in web design). But I realized that this tool is really useful to help you create powerful calls to action in your marketing and sales efforts (including interactions and copywriting).

Click here to check out BJ Fogg’s Behavior Grid (opens in a new window).

Screenshot of Behavior Grid websiteThe Behavior Grid shows the 15 different types of behavior changes someone could make. Down the side of the grid are the three possible scopes of change — one-time, over a period of time, or permanent (from now, on). Across the top of the grid are the 5 possible types of change — do a new behavior, do a familiar behavior, increase behavior intensity, decrease behavior intensity, and stop existing behavior.

So when you are thinking about the call to action you want to ask your lead, prospect, or customer to do, you would figure out the scope of the change you are asking them to do and then you would figure out the type of change you are asking them to do. “Buy now”, for example, is a one-time new behavior if you are asking a prospect who has never bought from you before.

Once you’ve figured out the scope and type of behavior then click on the intersecting square in the grid to get more information about the change and tips about triggers and motivation to help you compel the action.

Click here to check out BJ Fogg’s Behavior Grid.

Sales Funnel Bible — Chapter 40

By Aaron Hoos on April 9, 2013 in Business, Portfolio

Sales funnels are the most important part of your business. Get an early glimpse into how they can help your business by reading this early draft excerpted from my Sales Funnel Bible book.

Early draft of Aaron Hoos' book Sales Funnel Bible

Chapter 40: Using your sales funnel for business expansion

Throughout this book, you’ve read about growing your business by using different strategies and tactics in your sales funnel. I’ve made the assumption that you have only had one sales funnel to work with, driving one target market to one set of products or services. I used this simplified approach because it’s helpful and less overwhelming to learn all at once.

If you are just starting out, you should start with just one sales funnel – serving one set of products or services to one target market. It’s simple to set-up and you can optimize your sales funnel to increase profit. There’s nothing wrong with having just one sales funnel and focusing your entire business on that, and then growing that sales funnel so that you end up eventually with one big, highly-optimized sales funnel.

But that’s not the only way to grow your business. You can also expand your business by creating more sales funnels. Many businesses have more than one sales funnel (and as your business grows, you might discover that new sales funnels tend to crop up). For example:

  • Your business might have multiple target markets, which each require their own sales funnel because each target market goes through its own mindset evolutions. An example would be my former freelance writing service. I provided writing services to a few different target markets and each of those target markets had their own problems or challenges that my writing solved.
  • Your business might have different products or services, which each require their own sales funnel because the mindset evolution for the target market is different for one set of products or services versus another. A great example would be a car dealership. A car dealership has several different profit centers – they might sell new cars, used cars, as well as mechanical services, and collision repair.

Another way to expand your business is to replicate your sales funnel through franchising. Franchising is essentially “renting” your sales funnel to someone else so that they don’t have to start their own from scratch. It might be just one sales funnel but the sales funnel is replicated over and over with each franchise.

McDonalds rents the right to use their sales funnel to a franchisee and that franchisee pays fees to operate the sales funnel. That sales funnel includes branding, marketing, and several systems to help deliver McDonalds’ product.
A less formal version of franchising is very common online where a highly successful mentor coaches his or her students to perform the same sales funnel activities that the mentor does. In the work I do with real estate investors, this is big business!

So you might be starting out your business with just one shiny sales funnel. What should you do?
My advice is to first focus on that one sales funnel. Master it. Optimize it. Scale it up carefully. Build a good, solid business around that one sales funnel.

In time, new opportunities will present themselves and you might end up either creating more sales funnels in your existing business (for new markets or new products) or you might end up franchising.

If you choose to build new businesses to reach new markets or to deliver new products then apply the same focus to your new sales funnel that you did to the first one – taking the time to master it, optimize, it, and scale it up carefully.

If you choose to franchise then you need to roll up your sleeves and put a lot of focus on making your one sales funnel insanely easy to use. Write out each step in your sales funnel in great detail. Make sure that the sales funnel can be easily implemented by others. Focus on making your sales funnel transferable.

When you grow your business, you are growing your sales funnel or you are creating new sales funnels or replicating your sales funnels.

 
 
This chapter is excerpted from an early draft of my book. Comments and constructive criticisms are welcome. Please be aware that the chapter content and chapter order may change by publication.
 
 

Sales Funnel Bible — Chapter 39

By Aaron Hoos on April 8, 2013 in Business, Portfolio

Sales funnels are the most important part of your business. Get an early glimpse into how they can help your business by reading this early draft excerpted from my Sales Funnel Bible book.

Early draft of Aaron Hoos' book Sales Funnel Bible

Chapter 39: Using the sales funnel for competitive analysis

It’s a jungle out there. Your target market is wandering in search of a solution to whatever problem or need they have. If you don’t get your target into your sales funnel and then move them through it to the point of sale quickly, your competitors will snatch them away.

Lost marketshare not only makes you weaker (by robbing you of revenue and profit), it makes your competitors stronger. And although a little competition is good for business and keeps you honest, competitors that are too strong can outpace you, innovate faster, and strip the target market bare of all potential customers, leaving your business as a distant memory.

How can you pay attention to your competitors and ensure that you keep up with them so you can have a fighting chance to survive?

Competitive analysis is what smart businesses use to make sure that they aren’t at risk of losing significant marketshare to their competitor.

When I say “competitive analysis” I don’t just mean finding out what your competitor is and charging the same amount. I’ve worked for companies that called the competition pretending to be potential buyers in order to find out what their rates were. In high school, I worked at a gas station and the owner would drive up and down the street to see what other gas stations were charging so he’d know what to charge. I think: If you’re just spying on your competition to see what they are charging, you’re only doing part of the job. It’s not only about price.

And when I say “competitive analysis” I don’t mean corporate espionage. I’m not advocating that you illegally gather proprietary information or go “Dumpster-diving” to find out who your competitor’s customers are.

Smart competitive analysis should try to discover why customers buy from your competitors instead of you. Remember: You’re selling into an environment where your target market is looking for a solution – any solution! – to their problem. And unless they have a very strong reason to buy from you, they are looking at you and at all of your competitors as potential solution-providers.

So competitive analysis should seek to understand the competition so that you can keep more people moving forward in your sales funnel.

The sales funnel is an effective tool to help you do competitive analysis.

If you want to truly understand your competitor and why some of your target market buys from them instead, build your competitors’ sales funnels. Take a piece of paper and create a sales funnel for each of your competitors in the same way you created a sales funnel for yourself earlier in this book.

Identify the target market at the top. Identify the products or services at the bottom. Then, run through your competitor’s sales funnel (as much as you are comfortable doing so – perhaps you don’t want to actually buy from them). Along the way, record what mindsets, messages, activities, and channels they are using. Reverse engineer as many steps as you can. (Chances are, you can build a pretty good sales funnel at least describing their marketing efforts, if not also a lot of their sales efforts).

You will need to do research for this project. I say that because the target market you serve and the mindsets you connect with at each step of your sales funnel will be different than your competitors’ target markets and mindsets. There may be some overlap (there may be a LOT of overlap) but there will definitely be some differences that you should try to dissect.

Once you have created an at-a-glance Sales Funnel Strategy Matrix for each of your main competitors, you will have a very deep understanding of how their businesses operate and how they are similar to you and different from you.
With that information, you can do the following:

  • Do a better job of identifying your own target market to potentially reduce the overlap and increase how well you connect with that smaller sub-set of your once larger target market.
  • Adjust the mindsets you are reaching to better connect with your refined target market. Specifically, you want to show your newly refined target market why your solution is the best one out there. (The combination of speaking to a smaller group of people with a clearer message can be a powerful way to draw more people into your sales funnel).
  • Adjust the messages and activities and channels you are using to better connect with your refined target market.
  • Adjust the marketing and sales messages you are using to do a better job of differentiating you from your competitors.
  • Adjust your products or services so that they seem very different from your competitors. This might be done with some branding changes or by packaging your products and services together or in how you describe them; it might mean developing new products and services to meet the needs of your newly refined target market.
  • You might even get in touch with your competitor and work out a deal to trade names back and forth if someone from their target market lands in your sales funnel. As long as each member of this arrangement plays nice, it works out well. (Note: In my experience, some industries are going to be much more open to this idea than others!)

Schedule time regularly to do competitive analysis on each of your competitors regularly. The first competitive analysis on each competitor will be a lot of work but future analyses will be much easier because they might only be small adjustments when you learn more about them.

 
 
This chapter is excerpted from an early draft of my book. Comments and constructive criticisms are welcome. Please be aware that the chapter content and chapter order may change by publication.
 
 

Sales Funnel Bible — Chapter 38

By Aaron Hoos on April 7, 2013 in Business, Portfolio

Sales funnels are the most important part of your business. Get an early glimpse into how they can help your business by reading this early draft excerpted from my Sales Funnel Bible book.

Early draft of Aaron Hoos' book Sales Funnel Bible

Chapter 38: Sales funnels need a place in business plans

Over the years, I’ve read a lot of business plans. I’ve never seen one that included a sales funnel. It’s disappointing, since I see the sales funnel as the most essential aspect of the business.

True, you could probably piece together parts of the sales funnel by reading a business plan but it wasn’t obvious. Want to piece together the sales funnel of a business based on the existing business plan structure? You’d have to look in the Opportunity section of the business plan to see what need is being met. You’d have to look in the marketing and sales section to see some of the high-level marketing and selling ideas. You’d have to look in the offering section to see what the business was going to sell.

And that’s only part of the story: You wouldn’t see how each one connected to the other; you wouldn’t see how smooth the process was; you wouldn’t see how the numbers aligned with the effort; you wouldn’t see where the pitfalls might be.

Why make your business plan audience do all of that work when a simple sales funnel image posted near the beginning of your business plan can do so much for you. The sales funnel is a fast and easy way to explain your business at glance to others. By putting it front and center, your business plan shows how all the key pieces are integrated together to run the most important money-making system in your business!

I propose the following change to business plan outlines in use today: After an introduction, the very next section should be the sales funnel (perhaps even a one-page Sales Funnel Strategy Matrix or some other simple at-a-glance depiction of the sales funnel). In one simple image, the business plan reader gets a quick, high-level view of who the business’s target market is, how the business intends to reach this audience, and what the business will sell.
That initial image, or a brief overview that describes it, then becomes a sort of table of contents outlining the rest of the business plan – the plan would go on to describe each element of the sales funnel from top to bottom:

  • The market need, opportunity, and target market, and projections
  • The marketing methods and then the sales methods, including the messages, activities, and channels used at each step – in order, and with projections
  • The product or service being sold, as well as monetization considerations (like paygates)
  • Any follow-up or additional notes (such as an explanation of the evangelist program)
  • Plans for future expansion

Of course there are other things to include in a business plan and those can come after. This is where you’d include your management team, competitive analysis, etc. The sales funnel can be shown again here, perhaps indicating the areas that each member of the management team is in charge of, and the competitive analysis can show a similar sales funnel picture but with competitor sales funnels depicted for comparison.

Then, in the financial section, the sales funnel could be shown again as a supplementary image in which key financials are added in to show the impact of income and expenses on the sales funnel.

And for venture capitalists and angel investors who read business plans: Insist on a sales funnel in the business plans submitted to you. And when you receive a business plan from a prospective investment, grill them about their sales funnel. Make sure they understand how all of the parts fit together – how their target market will be drawn into their funnel, what mindset evolutions will take place, and how those mindset evolutions will eventually turn into sales. Then ask about price – ensure that the price covers the cost of running the business now and the cost to investment in scaling up the sales funnel.

And when you see a business plan that includes only a sales funnel with a problem, use it as an opportunity to drill down. How many unviable businesses could have been passed over (instead of invested in) during the dot-com bubbles if a picture of a sales funnel at the beginning of the business plan prompted discussions about adequate monetization?
Use the sales funnel as a way to view the business, dissect it, analyze, and help you determine whether or not to invest.

 
 
This chapter is excerpted from an early draft of my book. Comments and constructive criticisms are welcome. Please be aware that the chapter content and chapter order may change by publication.
 
 

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