The sales funnel is a useful concept for helping us visualize the journey that a prospect makes toward becoming a customer. But the idea of the “funnel” makes the process seem more predictable than most of us find in practice! Just because someone is in your funnel doesn’t mean that they will buy, or even…
When it comes to your sales pipeline, there’s just one thing you are in complete control over. You can’t control when people buy or who will buy, but you have complete control over the top of your funnel. And unless you’ve got something seriously wrong, the more qualified leads you put into the top of…
When the quarantine first started, one of the things I saw was businesses that had primarily sold through networking, and F2F interaction had their top of funnel activity cut off. In quarantine we have; No networking No conferences No meetups No leads! No business can survive for long without regularly putting leads into the top…
When I started selling professional services the process was simple. Find where your ideal customers gathered. Go to that place and meet them. Follow up after the meeting to meet 1-2-1 for “coffee” Determine if they had a need and if there was a “fit” Schedule a diagnostic meeting (e.g. actual sales call) Close. That…
I work with several businesses that rely on conferences for their business success. A new conference cancelation is coming out every day, and the forecast is bleak for at least a few months. How should we respond? The primary value of an in-person conference is networking. You get to meet a lot of folks in a…
Just like children, businesses grow through predictable phases. We start life as baby startups, then progress to raging growth companies, before settling into a more stable “adult” phase. But as we cross each of those growth stages things change — and if we don’t change with them our growth can get stuck. Here’s my version…
Finding your core service that is valuable to your ideal client and focusing on that means that you are going to do a lot of similar assignments. For creative people, this sounds like a kind of death. “You want me to do this thing over, and over, and over, and…ARUAGHHHH!” Well, yes, and no… First,…
We’ve talked previously about how important it is to find more significant, scarier problems. My father used to say it this way; ”No one gets hired to tell a client to take his vitamins. You hire an outside firm when you have an artery spouting blood and they need a tourniquet!” Dad had a way…
After our last email where I offered Nedra Rezinas my best advice for kick-starting her business development engine I got one reply that really surprised me. In my answer to Nedra I said, “…the only thing you can control in the sales process is the top of the funnel…” and talked about how to get…
Nedra Rezinas from Veritas Web Design wrote in this week with this question (and she agreed to let me share it with you): Hi Brad, What do you think is the #1 thing that helps you the most with your marketing? I’m working on putting together some marketing habits and wanted to reach out to people…