Below is a transcript of this week’s video sales tip.
A key to any sales funnel success is movement – funnel sales opportunities moving closer to the ultimate objective – a close. Without movement of funnel opportunities your funnel is like a kitchen pantry full of old, stale food that’s no longer fit to eat.
Movement is when a sales opportunity changes stages, like moving from stage 2 to stage 3, or from stage 4 to stage 5. Adding a sales opportunity to your funnel is also movement.
Opportunities can move in the other direction, like from stage 4 to stage 2. Usually that’s not the kind of movement you want.
NOW HERE’S THE KEY TO MOVEMENT – it’s not what YOU do that defines movement, it’s what the customer does.
For example, if you deliver a proposal to a customer you might be tempted to say that the opportunity has moved to the ‘proposal delivered’ stage.
But your customer hasn’t done anything. They just received your proposal. Go ahead and test this. Have you ever delivered a proposal and the customer didn’t get back to you right away with any kind of answer? Or if they did answer was it 6 months later and they said they changed their minds?
It’s the same thing with a sample or a product trial or even a demo. You’re the one doing all the work. No movement.
The key to driving sales opportunities through your funnel – getting movement – is getting your customers to commit to doing things.
When customers commit they have skin in the game. When they commit they invest time, they invest political capital, and sometimes even money.
Even getting little commitments is important. Little commitments often lead to bigger commitments and to the biggest customer commitment of all – they purchase.
So, when you define your 30 day sales funnel plan each month, you really want to define what customer commitments you’re going to seek with each opportunity on your funnel.
At my company we call these Goals. It’s just a term that can mean different things, but for clients that use The Funnel Principle they know that a Goal is the customer commitment the salesperson is seeking with each opportunity on his or her funnel.
Let’s wrap up by going back to the proposal example. What would a Goal look like? How about this: Only deliver your proposal if the customer commits to reviewing it with you. Or, if a customer wants to trial your product agree to, but ask the customer to commit to discussing with you after the trial how the trial went and maybe even communicating the results with other key stakeholders.
If you found this tip helpful and you’d like more information I encourage you to contact me through the link below.
I wish you the best success, good selling!
Mark
614.571.8267
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