Sales funnel? Forget this traditional way!

This post is inspired by an amazing book ‘ Invisible sale ‘ written by Tom Martin. I need to share with you a great idea he wrote in this book.

Most of you who works in sales know pretty much what sales funnel is about. Most companies have pre-defined sales process (see the figure 1) , which they follow every single sales stage.  This looks as following: Your first stage is prospecting, where you allocate your potential clients, then you contact them. Third, you qualify if the potential lead is your prospect. Fourth, proposal stage is where you present what you have to sale and luckily at the end you have negotiations and contracting. People, this is already outdated!

Figure 1: Traditional Sales Funnel (Taken from the book Invisible Sale by Tom Martin)

The sales funnel defines you that you’re going to start big amount of people but those are unqualified prospects. It takes a while until you get smaller qualified group of people on your list and yet you do not have a guarantee you will close the lead.

Instead of sales funnel, let’s focus on something you can call a sales radar (see the figure 2). It is a new type of sales funnel but without a visible database,however, you can see it using digital technology. This sales radar helps you to sell because of today’s self-educating buyers. The knowledge and the content that is available online gives so many options to self-educate the potential buyers. Buyers no longer have to rely on sales people.

Figure 2: Sales Radar (Taken from the book Invisible Sale by Tom Martin)

So imagine you have lots of content available on your website or social media that helps your potential lead to get access to. Even better, a valuable content for free that helps this prospect  with something he is looking for. When this person clicks on your content, it could be already displayed on your sales radar. It doesn’t necessarily need to mean this guy will purchase your service/product but can consume much more of your content you provide in the future allowing him to move to another circle in your radar.

That’s why today is super important to have valuable content shareable with your prospects. Because this prospect may become your customer in any time, you do not have to chase people,most of them they don’t like it! Instead, create  your online presence!

Age of self-educating buyer

“Today we live in the age of self-educating buyer who is using digital channels to develop a short list of solutions to pain point”, the author of ‘The Invisible Sale’, Tom Martin, said. Nowadays people are way busier than before, they don’t have time to spend 20-30 minutes on the phone qualifying the leads. It’s important to understand that companies should let the prospects (potential leads) to self-qualify by simply monitoring what those prospects are reading,downloading and viewing online. This way you might be able to discover new invisible buyer leads.

The days when buyers of products or services were forced to rely on information provided from sales team,are gone. Technology,especially internet has shifted the power from seller to buyer. Those have lots of online tools and information available. Thus, it makes them less dependent on sellers or vendors.

With this, you should make sure you create social media and marketing strategy. There are some basic points you could touch to define it. For example, defining your social media audience, choosing the right social media platform for your company, how are you going to see the success of it,etc. More of it coming in my next posts..

Additionally to the content, it’s crucial to realize that in today’s internet-based world, the competition is much higher than ever before. You cannot make a mistake of creating the content that isn’t any helpful to your potential client. Any companies can provide white papers, blogs or any information that can be downloaded. The information you want to provide your qualified buyers must be very helpful. The content you put online must be appealing and must give a great impression to convince a potential buyer to make a purchasing decision.

It’s important to know that sales are becoming more invisible every day. Buyers are 57% of the way through the buying decision before they are even talking to a sales people. That’ s why your online content is your online salesperson. So make it the best you can to get some leads done the fastest way possible.

Is selling based on cold calls still effective?

Lots of companies still have their selling strategy based on cold calling. It still works but in a long term. But the overall process of identifying potential leads, qualifying and closing the deals is very lengthy. Why? The biggest weakness of the traditional selling process is inefficiency. Well,let me explain one annoying thing about cold calling. You call one hundreds of contacts that are part of your database and could be that 60% of them respond to your calls with statements of being too busy or entering the meetings or just not interested. You can try to call ten times more but these guys will have always the same answer for you. In my opinion,this is a huge waste of time for companies. Companies more and more dislike pushy cold calls.

Instead,companies should take a look into a new concept of selling, so called invisible sale, in which qualified leads find companies instead of them spending lots of time finding those leads. This is called The Propinquity Effect – this is created by 2 main trends: self-educating buyers and the proliferation of internet service.

But how do you achieve that? By building a rich and valuable digital content and information that you can share with others. This information helps to find the way to self-educate the buyers. With this, you can build your reputation online with the potential of getting many clients.

Giving out some piece of information for free to your audience is so much more valuable than wasting 30 minutes with traditional cold calls with unqualified leads. Creating content takes definitely longer than that but this enables to sell to hundreds of people not only today but also in the future.

So now knowing that you can engage with qualified leads much sooner than with traditional cold calling, are you ready to acquire a totally new marketing & sales process that would deliver you awesome sales in much quicker way? If yes, stay tuned with my next blog posts.