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by Michael S Melfi
If you ever watch an episode of Shark Tank you know the number one asked question is what are your revenues? So ask yourself ‘what are the revenues’ of your current business. If you don’t know, a good idea would be to start measuring the revenues. If you do know, are they at a level that you are comfortable with, or would you prefer them to be greater?
Generating revenue is the direct function and based on the ability to build a sales process utilizing a sales funnel. A sales funnel involves the steps necessary to identify a customer lead, engage with that lead, end the conversation and the communication required to convert that lead into a customer. A customer who purchases the product and becomes the ultimate consumer who uses the product and shares it with others.
Awareness
The first step in building a successful sales funnel is the ability to create awareness for your target audience, assuming you have identified your ultimate consumer – the person who uses your product and your ultimate customer – the person who buys the product. Once you understand this identity, you can focus on using marketing communication to get in front of them and create awareness. A key aspect to this first step is the ability to be disruptive, as the average customer is bombarded with marketing.
Consideration
Once you have your Target customer’s attention it will be critically important to provide them with the necessary information so that they may understand how your product or service solves their problem. The ability to educate them around why your product assist and what it does will assist in educating them, and hence allowing them to properly consider you a leading solution in your industry’s competitive set.
Engagement
People purchase from brands they know, like, and trust. By focusing on relationship-based selling in creating an engagement with your ultimate customer, you could focus on building rapport. Utilize your content and exponential marketing to position your brand and its communication as part of their regular activities. As you utilize marketing strategies, specifically digital marketing, the ability to increase open rates, click-throughs and social media shares are all great measurements to the success of your engagement.
Purchase
One of the key performance indicators (KPI) for any sales funnel is the conversion rate from prospecting to purchases. The ability to influence the customer into making a purchase and becoming committed to your brand in that transaction is a huge step in the sales process.t this point, you can begin to determine acquisition cost and resources for the consumer as you will know what it took to secure this purchase.
Loyalty
Once the purchase has been made the question becomes what is the lifetime value of that customer? How often will they use your product or service? If your product ultimately provides the solution they expected, which led to the purchase, then the chances of loyalty increases. Ultimately, the ability to provide value on an ongoing basis will be the key to establishing this loyalty.
Advocate
The ultimate testament of the product or service comes long after the purchase. The ability to have a customer become an ambassador of your brand is the most important key to new growth and success for your business. Word of Mouth marketing and peer-to-peer recommendations are crucial to the expansion of any brand. This personal influence from your customer base will have impact and should be behind any internal marketing efforts that could be created.
As you look to drive revenue for your organization it is critical you take time to dissect your sales funnel and understand each step of the process. Your ability to build a sales funnel and most importantly measure the results will be the key to your growth and success.
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