Golden Funnel Formula – Five Success Factors of Modern Marketing…
In the above video, I reveal the five success factors of modern marketing. To push a business through to the next level, you can’t risk ignoring these new realities of business.
If you are currently working on a business, or in the future, find yourself working on a business which has hit a ceiling, and growth has slowed down, or even gone backwards, DON’T PANIC!
An Upgrade to the 4 P’s of Marketing…
If you’ve studied marketing at all, then you’ll have heard about the 4 P’s, which is the marketing model we’ve been using since the 60’s. The 4 P’s are:
- Product: what are you selling?
- Pricing: How much to you charge?
- Promotion: Which includes all those things you do to attract and convert your prospects.
- Place: which is where or how you deliver what you are selling
The 4 P’s have been taught for decades and are still being taught today. The model is still valid, but in itself, the 4P model is inadequate to describe the process or workflow as to how we acquire new customers, clients or investors. It isn’t very good at shining light on what we need to do next. Of course we need a product, and yes we need pricing and promotion, but what do we do, specifically? What is the workflow that enables some businesses and careers to rise meteorically to the top?
The Golden Funnel Formula is a model which shines light on the path, making it easier to see exactly where you need to focus your attention. It adds value to the 4P model, as you’ll see in a minute.
The objective of the Formula is to help you develop marketing systems which produce results which are;
Predictable, Profitable, Repeatable and Scalable.
If your marketing has all of these characteristics, the business becomes almost unstoppable.
Five Core Success Factors of Business…
let’s take a look at the 5 Core Success Factors.
First we have Intake.
INTAKE
During Intake, you attract new prospects using various tactics, such as referrals and of course, advertising.
In any case, marketing is a numbers game. The quantity of customers, clients or investors who come out the bottom of your funnel will be in direct proportion to the number of prospects who go in through the top, so it is essential you optimize this intake stage of your sales funnel. If you don’t solve this, it’s game over.
You need several sources of Intake, which are on a dial, giving you the ability to scale. Referrals alone will not be enough.
I call this next phase the Handshake and it’s right here where the marketing process for many companies completely falls apart.
HANDSHAKE
The handshake is where a qualified prospect reaches out and identify themselves to you. It’s when a prospect ceases to be anonymous.
If you were at a live networking event, you would want to meet people you could potentially do business with. When you meet them you would shake their hand and hopefully exchange contact information. That’s why we call this phase the handshake.
The transfer of contact information, from them to you, is the goal of this phase of the funnel.
You can reach millions of people with your advertising, but if your prospects don’t reach out and take the next step, it was a complete waste of time.
But watch for this common mistake… We want their next step to be a purchase, or the very least, requesting a proposal. But in the vast majority of cases, the prospect is not ready for that. They are still in the information gathering process. Remember, we need to match our strategies and tactics to their journey, rather than trying to get them to match their behavior with our desire. If you expect to pull your prospects through their journey in way or at a pace which is uncomfortable for them, you’ll damage your ability to close the deal.
Given that most people are not immediately ready to move forward, you need to put systems in place to collect their contact information which enables you to nurture the relationship until they are ready to take the next step.
You need to finesse this part of your funnel because when your prospects are in the early stages of their research and exploration process, it is not natural for them to contact you and surrender their contact information.
There are six different tactics for collecting contact information, which you need to know, including the new digital tagging system (remarketing) which enables you to stay in front of your prospects after they leave your site and continue to navigate around the web. You’ve probably experienced this where you’ve been shopping for something on Amazon, then leave without buying. Later that day or the next day you are visiting a completely different site and you see an ad for the exact thing you were looking at on Amazon. What happened is that Amazon digitally tagged you when you were looking at that product. With digital tagging, you don’t identify the individual, you identify their phone or their computer, and tag it which enables you to repeatedly stay in front of these prospects and keep them moving in the right direction. No matter what industry or business you are working on, the handshake is a necessary part of the process.
If you have done some advertising in the past which has failed you, the truth is, it might have actually been working and chances are, it was the Handshake portion of the funnel that was broken. In other words, if you were reaching the right people with the right message at the right time, but those people didn’t reach back to you, that’s not broken advertising, that’s a broken handshake and I’m going to show you how to deal with that.
Once you have the contact information of your qualified prospects, you can then move on and cultivate those relationships, which is the next module of the program.
CULTIVATE
Your goal during the cultivation phase of the funnel is to create glue in the relationship.
You do this by using marketing automation to educate them, build trust and communicate your value proposition, that is, give them compelling reasons to do business with you, rather than the guy down the road.
This is the phase where you need to craft and deliver a message which is specifically designed to transform prospects into sales-ready leads who are ready to take the next step.
By making an effort to cultivate the relationship, you are creating a feeling of familiarity and trust. When you do this, a higher percentage of your prospects will give you their business. Why? Because people would rather do business with people they know. Having an intentional, well thought out cultivation process, here in the middle of the funnel, is not optional.
UPTAKE
Uptake is first sale or transaction you make with a prospect.
The atmosphere for obtaining more sales during uptake is created by coming up with a strategically-designed closing sequence. You should be thinking of ways to automate big portions of this, and ideally, you need to present your offer in such a way that they would be crazy to say “no”. And it turns out, presenting your offer in that way requires only a few extra lines to your offers, in a little package known as your Extra Value Proposition.
The extra value proposition transforms the perception of any product or service into something which is worth far more. This enables you to charge more money for the same thing and enjoy a higher closing ratio if they happen to be comparison shopping.
This uptake process needs to be intentionally designed. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard marketing managers and entrepreneurs say “If they are going to buy, they are going to buy”, as though there is nothing that can be done to change the odds. Of course that is ridiculous.
And once you’ve got that first transaction complete, that’s not the end of your sales funnel.As the great Dan Kennedy says, most people make the mistake of creating a relationship to get a customer. But the most successful marketers are those who create a customer to get a relationship. What Dan is saying is that the first sale is not the end, it’s the beginning.
ESCALATE
This final phase of the sales funnel is focused on escalating the value of your relationships.
We call this maximizing Lifetime Value (LTV), which is the monetary value of a relationship, over the lifetime of the relationship.
You do this in several ways. For example, you can do it by Increasing the Average transaction value.
You can also increase Lifetime Value by Improving the frequency of transactions. Rather than one transaction per month or per year, you could do more.
You can also increase lifetime value by Extending the lifetime of the relationship. Rather than doing business for an average of six months or a year, you could extend the life of the relationship to two years.
And of course you can indirectly increase lifetime value by Enhancing the number of Referrals you get.
Great businesses are built on the concept of Lifetime Value, not on making one solitary transaction and you need to be intentional about building and optimizing this component of your funnel.
Summary…
These five success factors enable you to more easily focus on the correct phase of your sales funnel because it is easier to see the best opportunities for improvement. It is this intentional focus that enables the resources to be proportioned out for maximum optimization. The 4 P model showed us the general components of a marketing mix, and now, the Golden Funnel Formula sheds light on what to do next to take our marketing to the next level.