Xsellerate declares war on your sales funnel!
It’s war! Xsellerate declares war on the sales funnel. Perhaps that sounds silly: we think not. The sales funnel may have helped many businesses in the day, but now we need a new model for community marketing in the new millennium. Someone has to offer the challenge, stand up to convention, and say the emperor has no clothes. If that means war, then the gauntlet is thrown.
If you have a 20% close rate, then 80% of your sales leads do not flow through to the bottom of your sales funnel. Where did they go? Your funnel has holes, lot’s of them.
Through sales qualification, leads get evaluated according to their sales potential . Qualified leads move forward toward the throat of the funnel. Disqualified leads spill out of the funnel through the holes in your funnel.
According to research conducted by Forrester, Gartner, and the Sales Lead Management Association, up to 80% of disqualified leads never hear from the selling company again. Now consider that 80% of spilled leads make a buying decision in the 18 months following their disqualification. That means about 64% of the pipeline makes a buying decision without considering your solution.
Granted, the funnel as a metaphor doesn’t directly cause this. But, it reinforces a way of thinking that says we will sell to fewer than we start with. The funnel gets you thinking in terms of “in” and “out”. It discourages you from thinking about degrees of readiness.
Most people start shopping before they become ready to buy. If the sales and marketing model doesn’t accommodate this reality, you run the risk of forming the perception that most leads are “tire kickers,” “time wasters”, unqualified. As a result they get disqualified out of your marketing and sales process.
Instead of the sales funnel, we need a model that has no easy exit. In the new model, qualification should have one job: to properly position people according to the type of relationship they want with your business. We need a model in which people find it easy to move in and become reluctant to leave. This same model should simplify the process of planning and executing your marketing program, and doesn’t promote a feud between sales and marketing.
Enter the bull’s eye and community marketing. You will see the bull’s eye appearing everywhere on our site. It provides a straight forward way of managing the entire community across both the marketing and sales function. Outside the bull’s eye lives suspects, people you think might want to hear what you have to say. Inside the outer boundary of the bull’s eye resides people with whom you have a relationship.
Marketing converts suspects into relationships, and then grows those relationships until they become prospects. Sales works with prospects through the buying process until they become new clients. Rings inside the bull’s eye represent various stages of relationship development. You can learn more about these at:
http://www.xselleratesolutions.com/resources.php.
Each ring of the bull’s eye sits inside the prior indicating that the people inherit the characteristics and programs available to stages represented by the out rings of the bull’s eye.
In future articles we want to explore in greater detail the bull’s eye model. We will break down each ring of the bull’s eye; define the behaviors people in your community exhibit as members of each stage. We will show you a great way to qualify your leads according to their behaviors, and a way to manage leads that virtually eliminates spillage and lost future opportunity. You will leave less money on the table, boost your revenue, and grow.
Do you get all that from using a different drawing? No, all of that comes from thinking differently about the people who belong to the community around your business.
Yes, we think we have a better approach. And we do want to make it available to you. If someone wants to defend the sales funnel of yesteryear, by all means drop us a note.