Making It Easier For Customers to Get Through Your Sales Hourglass

If you’ll remember from my previous message I talked about viewing your marketing as an hourglass shape instead of a funnel as many marketing ‘experts’ teach.

You can reread the previous message here:

http://lawncaremarketingmagic.com/wordpress/124/is-your-sales-funnel-complete/

Now, it’s not that viewing your sales cycle as a funnel is entirely bad, it’s just that it’s incredibly short-sited.  When you view sales as a funnel, you’re working to get as many people as possible into the very top of the funnel.  Then as you move down the funnel, prospects drop out for numerous reasons (find another provider, price too high, don’t like your offerings, etc.) until finally, the only ones passing through the bottom are your new customers.

At this point, many businesses stop focusing on those that have made it all the way through your funnel.  As a result, these businesses end up losing TONS of additional revenue that’s available to them if they would only change the way they look at marketing.

You see, once you’ve managed to coax your customers all the way through your funnel and they reach the very bottom, you should immediately start working to increase the value of this new relationship. Doing this is what gives your marketing more of an hourglass shape instead of just a funnel.

So, how do you go about increasing the value of your customer relationships? 

Well, it really starts at the bottom of your funnel, or at the skinny part of the hourglass where your prospects move from being a prospect to being a customer.

Many times, a business will try to sell their most expensive package of services to a prospect that doesn’t really know much about them.  While they may have some success and will sell some of their services, it’s not nearly as much as they could if they first tried to sell an introductory package that isn’t too expensive and allows them to ‘try you out’ on a low risk basis.

Getting your prospects to move through the narrow part of your hourglass is the most difficult part of the sales cycle, but if you can create an offer to help make the transition easier, your conversion rate will be much higher. 

And once your customers reach the bottom half of the hourglass, you’ll have a much easier time moving your customers deeper and deeper into the bottom of the hourglass as a result of establishing the trust early on.

Next time, I’ll be back to share with you some ideas for moving your customers deeper and deeper into the hourglass, which translates to more sales, bigger and better projects, and ultimately, more revenue.

Bookmark Me!