“When you want to spend the rest of your life with someone, you want the rest of your life to start as quickly as possible.” – Billy Crystal at the end of When Harry Met Sally
When we think about our sales/marketing funnels or as the title of this blog states, The Engagement Funnel, do we view how the other person, our prospect, may go about making a decision based or how they think about the lifecycle of our product/service will affect them? Of course, we believe that everyone wants to “spend the rest of their life with us,” but do they? And if so, will they prolong the decision if they don’t? Or, even if they do, how will they go about making their decision?
Everyone has a different view of the engagement cycle. Someone will fall madly in love with a product/service and get married overnight. Others have prolonged engagements, and others are average length. The problem we have in sales and marketing is that we are not asked to facilitate or embrace that period or their process. Instead, we are asked to shorten, upset or sometimes completely disregard all the signals that we receive.
If you look at your past relationships, in the dating sense, you can think of all the complications that you have been part of and/or heard about and how often it is because of one part wanting to slow or speed up the process. Though certainly not a marriage counselor but as an individual and as a marketer this lack of understanding and/or trying to change someone (individual or organization) causes as many failures as the love/value we are trying to deliver.
In SaaS products, a good example is that when you only deliver free trials on a website for someone wanting to engage or learn more about your product/service. You create an atmosphere that we need to start dating before we even have a conversation.
In financial forecasting, I always created three different budgets. One was what I thought it would be; the others would be best and worst-case assumptions. This way I could spot trends or unbalances as the future unfolded. In these forecasts, I would keep rolling them forward instead of doing them annually with certain milestones correcting and reviewing. Not that this is a perfect way, but it allowed me to be looking at the future and correcting my own assumptions.
Should we build our engagement funnels with similar thinking? Should we be helping/facilitating our prospects and adjusting to their time, not ours?
Should our Engagement Funnel be based on an average length of time? So what is the average length of engagement? What is our ideal length? Our customer must determine the value of the problem, reach an agreement with others, select possible vendors and evaluate proposals.
As a supplier, we need to evaluate how we can facilitate the process, not with the idea or obsession of shortening the cycle but to have ready and even predict their needs. Be in-tune to when they are ready for more information and hopefully cumulating with a trial. Rushing this point is like asking for a prenuptial at the wrong time or in the wrong engagement, no matter the length.
Do we receive signals this will be a long engagement? Often from the sheer size of the prospect or from a monetary standpoint, the length of engagement will extend. What we might not understand is that other milestones need to be reached. There are other constraints within the organization that causes an engagement to extend.
We often think that we just need to create more of a burning desire for this to happen. Often it is just they are not as unsatisfied with their current solution or have paid for it, and so they are “trying” to be frugal. Others just want to get to know you better to secure the proper foundation.
The obvious solution for the frugal ones is to pay the cost of what they would be losing if they switched. A very common approach. Also, the lack of motivation may say that our offer is not as resounding as we might like to think. Either another party is making as much sense or more to them. It is a great time to learn more about the organization and become clearer in what we can offer them.
However, not so common, is this idea of other milestones/constraints. This is an ideal opportunity for most companies to learn about other companies and their capabilities. It gives us the opportunity to develop partnerships with other vendors that allow us to engage with prospects sooner in their decision process.
What happens if someone want to jump at our opportunity? People/Organizations often move quickly because the pain you are relieving, or the gain you are delivering is obvious, and it is easy to act. Before trying to move everyone into this category, I would ask to look at your success rates. Are most of these divorcing you later? Do they have shorter lifecycles than others? On the positive side though is that with shorter engagements there is a tendency for both parties to take a more active role. This enables people to work through issues and deal with problems first-hand.
Summary: The length of the time for the engagement process may have little to do with the lifetime value of a customer. The real test may not be the length of the engagement but the compatibility of people/organizations and of course processes. Understanding and improving the engagement process is critical to developing new customers. When you recognize their decision process and compare it to successful outcomes of other similar customer cycles it may greatly assist you in better understanding how, what which, where, why and to who delivery and timeliness of your marketing collateral.
This is not to say every customer is or mean to be a lifelong companion. Problems come and go changing over time. So your product/service may only be of use temporarily.