At it’s simplest, the funnel is the distribution curve for “time to purchase” stood on it’s end. If you survey a large lead base and ask them what their timeframe to purchase a solution is, you’ll see the vast majority choose a long timeframe and a tiny minority choose a short timeframe. Beyond those people willing to express a time to purchase are a much larger population that have some interest, and finally a huge population that might benefit from your solution who are not yet aware that they have a problem you can solve.
However you stuff people into the funnel, there needs to be a process to move them along. Most people who are in your funnel are paying attention to your competition as well. You need to be the dominant voice if you are going to get more than your share of those sales.
Remember that mathematically you have to convert much more than your market share worth of prospects in the funnel in order to maintain your historic market share. There will inevitably be deals that you never get a chance at. The most effective way to move people through the funnel is with a disciplined maturation process.
Maturation (nurturing)
I think I invented lead nurturing–at least the web version of it. I certainly don’t remember anyone else talking about it back in the early 80’s, though probably plenty of people were. I called it lead maturation, but most consultants seem to have settled on Nurturing as the proper term. Email and other forms of web delivery made lead maturation much more effective, but it was feasible to do it with paper mail (we did!) and even telemarketing as long as you had some idea where a prospect stood in the sales cycle. But email and the web turned maturation into a highly successful and highly measurable strategy.
Maturation is simply staying in touch with a prospect, providing them with information they will find relevant to their progress through the sales cycle (so surely my belief that I invented it is pure hubris). Short surveys are a very useful maturation tool, both because surveys can be used to deliver a subtle marketing message, and because they provide an indication of progress through the sales cycle. In fact any touch of the prospect that can be recorded in the database which does not do damage I would call maturation.
Salespeople sometimes do a loose version of maturation, and CRM systems encourage it, but sales calls are not optimal for maturation. Neither are calls from a call center even if it’s a gentle followup. Calls are an interruption. You don’t like getting them, and neither do your prospects. They might move some people along the cycle, but they alienate more prospects than they progress. They used to make sense when our choices were limited, but now they don’t. We don’t need to interrupt prospects until they are ready to buy.
That last paragraph may be counter to your experience–if it is, you need to look deeper. It’s one of those very tricky spots where a little success masks a lot of failure. It’s hard to measure the negative effects unless you undertake a serious satisfaction survey effort, but here’s the mechanism. You generate 1000 leads–people who went to a web landing page and answered qualifying questions. You give them to a very dutiful sales force and they call all of them. Probably two percent are in the negotiating stage of the cycle and your sales force can close them–twenty sales. Ten percent are in the consideration stage, and the sales force will recognize them as leads–so that’s 100 leads and 20 sales. The remainder–880 prospects–are not ready to talk to your company. All of them–every blessed one–are irritated that some sales person called them when they were just browsing around. Probably half of them are irritated enough to remember the experience the next time you try to touch them. They will no longer respond to your marketing efforts–you have lost your permission to talk to them.
So for the sake of 20 sales and 100 leads that you could have had anyway if you used a reasonable qualification process, you have alienated 440 prospects and pushed them towards your competition.
Stores do this all the time. An active sales clerk approaches you while you browse and asks if they can “help you” which translates to “can I sell you something”. But it’s a human contact, and you are in their turf. If they are nice about it you have no real complaint. And yet you probably remember that people in that store are pretty aggressive about selling. We humans don’t really like to be sold, even if the experience is a good one.
Stores have no mechanism other than anecdotal information to inform them that they are driving customers away, all they see is that their aggressive salespeople close business once the customer enters the store, and that the average sale amount for real bully salespeople is higher than for the nicer folks. They can’t count how many people are avoiding walking through their door. Based on the results they encourage the sales force to be ever more aggressive, and they spiral downwards. How many people think Nordstrom’s is a fine store but will walk 200 feet out of their way to avoid the cosmetic section? Or no longer go there at all.
The outside edge of that experience is a used car lot, where white shoe, white belt piranhas circle and pounce. You drive the clunker you hate another 20,000 miles to avoid the experience. You can only be driven to that waterhole by extreme need, and when you do, you gird your loins and keep a firm grip on your keys. Any wonder that the internet eviscerated the car biz? Most dealerships now have a few meek and mild salespeople who fill out the paperwork after people transact for the car they want on the web. And yet we STILL hate to go to a car dealership.
Can timeshares shed their reputation for sleaze? Can mobile phone companies suddenly convince us their customer service is great? Once you have established a reputation for bad behavior you are constantly battling against it. You CAN overcome the results, as every mobile phone company demonstrates, but it is expensive and your customers are generally not willing ones. Given an effective alternative they depart, flipping you the bird as they leave.
Reputation is an instant thing on the web. Turn your white shoe sales force or some call center loose on a thousand un-matured prospects and they’ll be talking about it in forums and blogs in minutes. The multiplier is at least ten to one, and bad news travels much further and faster than good. And while it disseminates instantly it’s persistence is astounding. It’s NOT word of mouth, it’s written word, and it lasts for an amazingly long time–in fact it pretty much lasts forever. The web is archived.
This is a B&J self-promotion campaign website: www.iroi.com from 1999 that I opened using the wayback machine–the web archive project. If you just type that iROI URL into your browser you’ll get a page not found error. B&J still owns the URL, but hasn’t done much with it lately. But you can see every iteration of the site with the wayback machine. A lot of it still functions.
As you can see, we’ve been into this methodology for a long time.
We’ve also understood the very special relationship that Sales has to Marketing for a long time.
Here’s our website from 1997. In internet terms, the very dawn of time. I know, that’s only twelve years ago. It might be hard to believe, but the commercialization of the World Wide Web started in 1996. The first graphical browser–Mosaic–was completed in 1993. When we carved our first website out of hand-coded html there were only a handful of advertising agencies even considering the web as an interesting platform. We could have had almost any URL we wanted–even two letter ones. Consider all that when you’re thinking about how quickly technology changes the world.
The graphics didn’t survive but the text is still there–permanently. If you want to see just how geeky an agency can be, jump in the wayback machine and click on that DataDriver link.
I’ve digressed a bit, but the point is that the manner in which people’s perception of your company has been amplified on the web is absolutely frightening. You can’t afford to anger your prospects. And it’s simply stupid to go gather up a large array of the best prospects you can find, get them to give you permission to have a conversation with them, and then make half of them hate your company and avoid future conversations with you.