Your marketing team needs to look at things differently to help you succeed in a tough market. Think of ways that you can make your customers feel more like part of a team that is helping each other get through these times. If you do that, your bill may not end up on the bottom of the pile.

On the American Express Open Forum, I give 10 things that marketing can do to improve your cash flow. Go to the Open forum and take a look. Thanks!

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Service, Product, Retail, Construction, Professional services, Employee, and Volunteer … it doesn’t matter. A referral system should include 7 basic steps that helps you identify and succeed in ways you never imagined. It is the basic understanding on how to apply the Referral Flood program to Your Business or Organization .

Step #7 – To bring your referral system full circle you need to devise two follow-up steps:

1. 1. Continue to market to your referral leads that don’t immediately turn into clients.
   2. Systematically communicate the progress of a referral back to your referral sources to keep them motivated.

Since you inspect a shorter sales cycle you sometimes will give up on a referral more quickly. Well, you may find out since they entered the Hour Glass or Marketing Funnel at a different stage that maybe for this particular client you missed a step. Or, they may not have been that good of a referral and need to be educated more about your product. You should develop a system to re-qualify these people and send them back through your funnel. they may not have been viable candidates at all . However, by re-qualifying them you will have to make a decision of how to continue with them. Re-purpose some of the material in the top of the funnel and feed it back through to them. Keep the material fresh and try to automate this process as much as possible.

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Service, Product, Retail, Construction, Professional services, Employee, and Volunteer … it doesn’t matter. A referral system should include 7 basic steps that helps you identify and succeed in ways you never imagined. It is the basic understanding on how to apply the Referral Flood program to Your Business or Organization.

Step #6 – What good are referral leads if they don’t become referral clients? You must map out a specific set of steps that will allow you to convert your referral leads. What I would recommend is developing a hour glass for this process just like you do a regular sales channel. If you do this, your steps in developing a referral client will become very clear. After a while, you will begin to recognize where the referral is entering your sales cycle at. Why is this important? If the referral is strong enough the prospect may already know, like and trust you. They may be ready for a trial offer. You may only confuse them by trying to build more knowledge and sending them additional information  about your company. Understand the process and work it! A nice surprise would be that a significant portion of the sales cycle is skipped there by reducing your cost of sales.

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Derived from a Seth Godin post: The panhandler’s secret

Technorati Tags: Hour Glass,Markeitng Funnel,Sales Funnel,Lean Marketing,Seth Godin,Panhandler Secret,Duct Tape Marketing

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I see people fire one (marketing message)bullet after bullet and wondering why they are not sticking. They just keep bouncing off people. Take a look at this video. Can you emphasize with the bullets? Now, think about what the bullets cost you and what happens to them after the bounce. Do they stick anywhere? Your marketing message will not stick unless you have a receptive audience. Trying to sell to people before they know, like and trust you is just a waste of money. Don’t leave your marketing just fall to the ground. Use the sales funnel as an important tool in your marketing process and make sure everyone understands it throughout the organization. Your 1st step, should be a Marketing Assessment for yourself!

Technorati Tags: Sales Funnel ,Marketing Funnel ,Marketing Bullets ,Sales

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I always wondered, even before I started applying Lean Marketing Principles , why the marketing process rarely  considered what stages a customer went through to buy their product or service. Customer usually have a fairly regimented way they conduct business and a very structured purchasing pattern. Most will even tell you and the fact of the matter is, that your sales people already probably know it.

Now sit back and document that process, even create a a sales funnel or hour glass on this process. As you go through it step by step, pick critical points and review what you type of marketing materials you would like them to have in their hand as they reach those points. Maybe even think about reaching them just right before they reach a critical point. If you do this, it will create an entire different way of looking at your marketing. From the customers point of view!  Not that novel is it?

I will be doing a series of blog post this week on Mirroring Your Customers Marketing! This will be part 1 of 5.

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That says many times we just did not qualify them. Sound better! How ever, I think we should put another hole in our sales funnel. Just not at the bottom, maybe in every section. Accept the prospect, and than see if he fits through our funnel. If we struggle keeping him in the funnel have a pressure relief valve that leaves him exit gracefully.

Wonder why we get bad clients? We are successful at cramming them through the funnel instead of leaving gravity do its job. You can provide an easy path and even accelerate it but stop trying to overcome objections, just provide answers to them and leave good old gravity take its course.

P.S. There is another way of getting people out of your sales funnel, it could be overflowing.

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