Thu 03 / 07 / 14
5 minute mentor
Welcome to the July installment of the “5 minute mentor”. As previously mentioned, my hope is if you spend 5 minutes reading these posts you will learn something useful that you can apply to your business.
This month we are going to discuss how to turn contacts into customers and this ties into a forthcoming workshop I am running for the Chamber on August 6th.
We all understand that in order to grow our business we need to turn contacts (i.e. target customers who don’t know us today) into customers. It’s tempting to assume that one piece of marketing or one contact will be enough to convert these contacts but in truth, it’s much more complex than that.
Your customer personas
There are a number of stages we need to follow in order to truly understand our customers and therefore ‘speak their language’. Firstly, we need to understand who our target customer is. Sounds obvious right? You’d be surprised how few companies have identified their target customer groups (maybe 3-4 different types) and therefore can map their typical behaviours, challenges and needs of each group onto their product/service. If you do this as step one then you can start to produce sales and marketing messages that resonate with each group.
Take me for example, as a business coach and mentor, 2 of my (3) customer personas are HR managers of mid sized businesses and Owner/Managers of small businesses. Do you think they have the same needs when looking for a coach? No, they don’t. If I understand their specific and unique requirements then I can start to ‘talk their language’ when marketing to them.
Understand your customer’s journey
Now you understand your client types you can start to map the journey they will take as they look to buy your solution and move through your sales funnel.
What are the various stages they go through as the convert from contact to warm lead to prospect to hot prospect and finally customer (and then repeat customer)?
And what can you do at each stage to ‘encourage ‘ them to move through this process? It will certainly be different messages at each stage; your communications will get more detailed and sophisticated the further they move through the funnel.
Sound intriguing? Well fortunately you can learn a lot more about this and how to apply it to your business by attending the Bite-sized learning event taking place on August 6th.
I hope to see you there but if not next month we will look at a typical sales funnel for a small to mid sized business.
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If you want to contribute to the Chamber blog, contact us on hannah@brightonchamber.co.uk