”Make new friends, but keep the old, One is silver and the other gold.”
You’ve probably heard this rhyme.
You may think that’s an old, tired, worn-out cliche, but it contains real nuggets of wisdom and it's as valid now as it has ever been.
As marketing has evolved, the sales strategy has remained pretty much the same.
Today I'm going to riff on a dreaded sales funnel.
The one you have seen in your sales presentation in the beginning of this year.
You know, the one which follows AIDA model. (More on AIDA here)
Stage one: Flirting aka Awareness
Stage two: Dating aka Interest
Stage three: Ready to commit aka Decision
Stage four: Marriage aka Action (Usually, this is the moment all marketing disappears)
In those four stages, prospects are supposed to become paying customers and rave about your product.
What really happens though is, they quickly fall out of love with you and never come back to your brand again.
You see, the key issue I have with the traditional sales funnel is that it neglects the value of your old friends, your current clients.
Many marketers suffer from funnel-vision.
I've seen funnels of all shapes, colours and stages.
I've seen pipelines.
I've even seen flywheels.
Same shit, different package.
The gist is always the same.
Selling is viewed by many organizations almost as a manufacturing process, a numbers game based upon simple math.
The sales funnel model causes otherwise smart people to do bad things.
Now, I’d like to go further.
The idea of a sales funnel is not just unhelpful, it is a distorted and misleading mental model.
Yes, you can buy attention.
But you can't buy trust.
More importantly, you can’t change a mind without winning a heart.
Your message will fall on deaf ears and closed hearts unless you find a way to make a connection with its intended audience.
As author J.K. Rowling said, ‘No story lives unless someone wants to listen.’
The goal is not to identify prospects and process them like corn flakes.
The goal is to tell a story.
Not your story.
The story of your customer and how you are playing the role of a guide in their story.
You need to talk about things you have that your customers want.
You need to offer them something that will help them survive and thrive.
It’s all about understanding their story.
Ali Mese, a founder of Growth Supply, writes here:
On my way to the co-working space, I grabbed my mobile to read the same Slack message yet another time.
“Ali, that’s good, but we should look at what converts.”
It never failed.
It was either a client or a colleague on the same marketing team.
There was always someone who never missed the perfect opportunity to remind me of the importance of a conversion funnel:
Get a bunch of website visitors,
then do something to turn some of them into leads — aka people who have shown interest in your business,
and then do something else to turn those leads into customers.
That ‘do something’ part was exactly what stressed me out the most every time I was reminded to stop wasting time on things that don’t sell and to get my focus back on what converts.
Later, Ali asks: "But weren’t we supposed to build products people love instead of wasting our lives optimising the colour of damn buttons to increase signups by 0.0123456789 percent?"
It’s agreat point.
Tracking every single action people take on our website sounds great.
Optimising funnels is perfect.
But wouldn’t it be better if you spent the same effort in delighting your customers, given that as a company you have only limited resources?
Consider this.
Ben Chestnut launched MailChimp to help users to "send better emails" in 2001.
Last year, 340 billion emails were sent using Mailchimp.
That is 340 followed by nine zeros.
That is a lot.
"It's kinda funny how I've founded an email marketing service with over 3 million users around the world, but I've never felt comfy calling myself an "email marketer," let alone a member of the email marketing community. That's partly because I nearly failed Marketing 101 in college (don't tell anybody). But mostly, it's because I hate funnels." - An opening paragraph of Ben Chestnut’s post from 2013 titled “Why I hate funnels
I’ll never forget reading Ben's piece for the first time back in 2013.
It’s made a dramatic impact on my business because this philosophy gave me the courage to stand up to people who were saying things that weren’t true.
This philosophy gave me the courage to change direction.
It gave me the courage to share my opinion.
Because of this philosophy, I know that if I try to please everybody all the time, nothing good will come from it.
So what did Ben do?
He flipped the funnel over, wide side at the bottom.
As Ben put it himself, “Doesn’t it look a lot more stable that way?”
What I love about this approach is that it’s all about loving the customers you have, rather than chasing down people you don’t even know yet.
Again, Ben writes here:
I just take that funnel, and turn it upside down… This approach works especially well for early-stage businesses. When you start a business, you don’t have a budget for marketing. You probably don’t have the time or talent for it, either. The only thing you’ve got is your passion. That damned, trouble-making passion that suckered you into starting your business in the first place. Take that passion and point it at your customers. Deliver awesome customer service. Delight them. Empower them. When I say “empower them” I mean empower them for free, with “no strings attached.” Because when companies make people sign up and register to download their content, we all know they’re about to feed us into the automation meat grinder.
“Empowering your customers for free, with no strings attached” is a pretty interesting concept, isn't it.
It challenges the popular marketing advice that tells you to give enough value to your audience so that you can ask for a sale later.
I admit it’s a pretty weird approach to marketing compared to 'the norm'.
But the results seem to be working out well.
The more I look around, the more I think this is the most normal, most human, most sustainable way to run your business.
Research shows that 70 percent of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels she is being treated.
So it's no surprise that loving customers has a significant impact on whether they choose to do business with you again.
If visitors to your site have the potential to become customers, love them right from the beginning.
They don’t want a product, they want to connect.
Make it easy for them to learn what they want to learn and do what they want to do.
Make your terms clear and obvious.
Make your communications about things that are relevant to them, instead of pestering them to do something they clearly don’t want to do.
To be a marketer, you have to understand humans.
Start with a simple question: "Who do you want your customers to become? (Check my riff on ‘the power of transformation' here)
Don't make a mistake by focusing on what is easy to measure as opposed to focusing on what is important.
Think more about their experience than about the way they’ll boost your stats.
Forget the funnel.
The funnel is about you, the marketer.
There are many different sales funnels.
I have spent 15 years encouraging people to look at an overlooked one, the one based on trust, attention, generosity and care.
The funnel based on being the one who is worth paying extra for.
Being the one we would be missed if you were gone.
What I saw many years ago and what I see over and over again is that this approach will continue to grow.
It's the person who is connected and trusted, who is going to have the leverage to bring something to people who need it.
Love your customers.
And then watch how the funnel stats improve.
Anyway, that’s my rant.
I hope it resonates.
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