Mixed or Matched Messages

Mixed or Matched Messages

Your customers are on a journey.

Do you know where they're at...
and is what you offer appropriate
to where they want to go?

For many businesses, sales and marketing is the key driver of growth - and therefore justifies time and effort perfecting it. In the next few articles we shall explore this in more detail. To start with an overview, let's look at the customer sales journey.

The Customer Sales Journey
The customer sales journey or sales funnel is a set of stages that your potential clients travel through during the process of making a purchase. They may travel through these stages quickly and become your client, this, of course, is the best possible outcome; some prospects will interact with your company for years before committing to a purchase, if at all.

Six Stages:

• They don't have or care about the problem you solve
• They realise that they have the problem you solve
• They become curious, or start to research, how to solve their problem
• They make a short list of options (including you) to solve their problem
• They make a decision how to solve it
• Hopefully, they choose you and become your customer

Good marketers realise they need to create messages that appeal to their market at each stage of the process.

These messages will be clearly different depending on the prospect's stage in the customer sales journey. It is essential to identify where your prospects are in their own journey and deliver relevant messages at the right time.

At each stage your customer's will be asking themselves different questions: 
In the early stages; 

        "Who are you?"  

        "Do I like and trust you?"  

In the latter stages; 

        "What is the risk if I use you?"
        "Am I ready to make a decision?"

At each stage we must reassure the prospect and encourage them to move forwards in the process.

Example 
In our industry when clients are close to starting a coaching programme we find two common reasons to delay.

Potential clients often feel they need to:

      • get other things organised or in place first, or

      • they have concerns justifying the cost of a programme.

The messages we need to convey are,
Regarding timing:
      • there is rarely a perfect time to start
      • coaching so often brings order to a business more quickly.

Regarding cost:
      • coaching is an investment that pays for itself often more than tenfold.
 

Your Messaging
How carefully have you thought through the journey taken by your own customers?
What are the questions they ask themselves along the way?
What do you need to provide them with to move them through each stage?

Which part of your sales pipeline needs attention first?

• If you need work now: start honing the stage that converts prospects into paying customers - as quickly as possible.
• If you need to secure future work: you may be better placed to concentrate on the awareness stage. This mean reaching as many of the right people as possible to start filling up your pipeline from the top

How intimately do you know your customer sales journey?
How well do you read their signs - to help them along their route?

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