Episode 6 - Ideas from YouTube Videos and the person behind the video (Alaia Williams), and the advice on her own blog on her website (http://www.oneorganizedbusiness.com)
Long Term Relationship Marketing
We’re not prospecting or hunting or farming. We’re selling products and services within long-term relationships.
That realization helps not only your sales and your business – but it should extend into your marketing life, and the way that you conduct your business. You should be getting more from each sales prospect and at each point of contact between your business and every customer.
Very often, offline sellers will look exclusively at how online-only sellers are doing it.
This is a relatively grave mistake, because unbeknownst to lots of offline sellers, online-only sellers have learned the really important tricks of the trade from offline sellers – not the other way around. We’ll look more closely at human sales people below but first, take a look at what the stone age of Internet selling looked like. Bring your club.
“Ye olde sales funnel”
- Website site visit
- Inquiry email
- Follow up email
- Purchase
And maybe sometimes, they’d include something more after the sale.
Sales funnels can be a lot more elaborate, but ye olde sales funnel is entirely focused on a one-time sale. You miss out on all the good stuff including repeat sales and 99% of the people who wanted to buy but weren’t ready to do so quite yet.
One-time sales cost a fortune compared to second, third and repeat sales.
And even hesitant, or not-ready-to-buy now customers (99% of your contacts?) go right back to being cold-call, expensive-to-reach nobodies. That’s not a good sales and marketing plan.
The Sales Funnel in the Age of the Repeat Customer
It’s also the age of the repeat visitor, the acquaintance and the only passively interested customer. That’s where your sales are, not in the cold-call stratosphere of the Internet and the mass market.
Repeat customers (and all of the above) are the secret to offline selling that Internet seller had to learn. What those offline sellers had expertise in – and that online sellers have studied endlessly – is one thing: environment!
Marketing is always about establishing and maintaining an environment of trust. Even lots of experienced marketing people never learn this. Sales people may do it – but many of hardened sales pros don’t know that what they’re doing is “marketing.” But many sales people are the very best marketers in the world, far better than marketing teams and commissions and departments. Sales people live and breathe marketing, and that’s precisely why some industries continue to rely on a human sales team. No one does it better.
Sales people do marketing by talking, asking questions and listening.
The new re-conceptualization of the sales funnel is designed to listen better, communicate better and to draw customers into a pattern of repeated use, inquiry and value exchange. The more you learn about your customer the more you can contribute to that customer’s well-being. Maybe not surprisingly, bricks and mortar stores had – and have – a distinct advantage when it comes to establishing the environment where that can happen.
Think about it. Customers come in, they ask questions and they learn about solutions. Sales people ask questions and provide answers and strengthen human relationships, and the good ones know that their customers will come back.
Duplicating that kind of sales funnel online can mean a lot more simple interactivity.
It can mean more informative content – and it can quickly grow into programs or apps that help your site to make suggestions based on past purchases or inquiries. The more important goal though is to always keep prospects and past customers in a circulation, living and prospering, but stopping back in from time to time and always remembering your name and recommending your business.
Your personality, that is, your brand should be more attractive than an ant picking up aphids and herding them around. But filling out your brand – so that it lives and breathes like a personality – can take a lot more involvement. Such a strategy requires that involvement.
At the same though, this kind of sales and marketing plan doesn’t have to be extremely expensive. It doesn’t even need to be very technological. Some of the best and most cost-effective sales and marketing strategies involve a better mix of incentives to visit a physical location with incentives to return online – or to stay in touch. In most cases, it will involve a lot more communications, information and information exchange.
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I found videos on facebook, twitter, and other social media sites. In just an hour or so of researching online, I was able to learn so very much on my own. The internet is the new wild west frontier....or as on Star Trek, the new frontier.....I am amazed that the playing field has been leveled by the internet for small business owners, if one has the time to learn from all the FREE insights and advice of other people in similar positions or from the large corporations, such as Google....so very much is available to the disadvantaged and the advantaged at this time in history living in any country that provides technology options for the public....just go to a public library in Santa Fe and learn all one needs to learn about internet marketing for FREE!!!!
:)Adrienne
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