Many of us in sales and marketing came up learning the traditional sales funnel. This was how we were supposed to think about and treat other humans - as they moved, or were converted, from “hot leads” and prospects to customers.
That was before social media shifted more information into the hands of our market and a negative review could spread around the world in a matter of hours.
The traditional funnel focused on sales and conversions. Once customers moved through the funnel, they were off the radar.
Today, *almost 60% of all B2B purchase decisions are made before customers enter your funnel. Consumers come to you prepared and educated, with trusted referrals in hand before they ever hear your sales pitch. Today, we can’t have funnel vision - we need to look past the funnel and into what I call the Sales Cloud. With 74% of consumers relying on social networks to guide purchase decisions, it’s just too big to ignore. Or is it 67% like another study quoted. It almost gets to the point of ridiculousness to try to convince someone in this day and age that buying decisions involve something before a sales person contacts them.
Here we see the Sales Cloud. It’s made up of all the ways customers hear about your brand - blogs, online reviews, trusted referrals, social media sites, your website…These are where your market may or may not be hearing about you - for better or for worse. This is where most of the purchasing decisions are made. In fact, once someone is in your traditionally viewed funnel, the goal is more about not messing it up, because they’ve come to you with information.
Here we see why these experiences are so important. We aren’t alone as businesses, we are in competition with many other products, services and content. In the sales cloud people have access to a ton of information. This is why creating amazing experiences people want to share is so important - because if you aren’t, someone else is. And when what’s being shared about your company is negative, there is always another brand ready to make a good impression.
Your customers don’t stop being important once they’ve bought from you. Once they move through your sales funnel - if you’ve been able to get them in, and keep them happy during the process - they now re-enter the Sales Cloud and join the other voices. Was their experience as a customer good enough to share? Did they leave unhappy? Making the sale isn’t enough, we need to be creating sharable experiences for our customers through great products and service.
Once through the funnel, customers return to the cloud - this is almost always ignored. Current customers are treated as an entirely different pool than prospective ones. We bend over backwards for new prospects, while leaving current customers to fend for themselves. How many times have you seen special offers made to new customers of the brands you use, only to be left without the great rate, or free ipad, or any other special treatment they’ve been offered? Focusing outside the funnel is what UnSelling is all about.
One of the arguments against valuing social media referrals is that there isn’t always an easily measurable line between referral and purchase. But has there ever been? In the past, when I walked into a store to make a purchase, the sales person never wondered whether it was my sister’s recommendation, a billboard, or random chance that brought me in. Now that we can measure where a click comes from - we think that this line should be direct.
According to data from *Forrester Research, “forty-eight percent of consumers reported that social media posts are a great way to discover new products, brands, trends, or retailers, but less than 1% of transactions could be traced back to trackable social links...These factoids come from consumer surveys, as well as the tracing of 77,000 online purchases made by American consumers over a two-week span in April. What researchers found is that consumers almost never buy something right after seeing it mentioned in a post by a friend or retailer on Facebook or other social media outlets.
The key term here for me is that they don’t buy it “right after” - we have so much information before us now, that we may check 20 resources before making a click thru to purchase decision. That doesn't mean that these influences aren't important, or that they don’t lead to decisions and purchases. It may have taken three ads, two sightings on a friend’s blog and a lot of nagging from my mom to get be to buy a new pair of jeans - but each one lead to the sale with equal importance.
In today’s world, we need to drop our funnel vision ways and focus on UnSelling if we’re going to remain top of mind for our market. Buy or goodbye is ineffective in a world where purchase decisions are made long before you even get a chance pitch.
*Link to “buyers are about 57% of the way through their buying journey” via Challenger Inc.
*Link to “forty-eight percent of consumers reported that social media…” via Forrester Research