I learnt an AMAZINGLY important lesson last week. I don’t want more sales.
Isn’t that insane? That I would willingly tell people that I don’t want to make more sales?
Here’s the deal. What I learnt (from the ex-President of Emerging Markets at Motorola and an ex-NFL football player) is that if my media business, MeBox, got 1000 orders for membership funnels in tomorrow, I’d be fine.
If I had 1000 orders come in, all with their deposits paid, I could take a loan out against the final balance and hire a team FAST to deliver all that work.
But that’s not the problem. The problem is when I have 5 new customers come in.
If I had 5 new customers come in, could I cope? It’s not enough to hire a new team. But it’s also too much for our current team.
I need to make sure 3 things happen.
First, that every new customer is profitable. Sounds obvious, but most of the time when we sell a core product to a customer, we don’t make much profit on them because we’ve spent so much acquiring them.
Second, I need to space out all my sales so I have enough time to qualify, consult and work with each customer.
Third, that all customers have enough trust in me for them to follow what I tell them to do. They’re already desperate to work with us, not risking anything by handing over a deposit.
So how do we do this? How do we qualify customers, space them out and make sure they’re profitable?
Our sales funnel. We need to structure our sales funnel.
I want you to imagine going to a bar and asking the first person you see to marry them. They’re probably going to say no.
Well…at some of the bars I drink at, they’re more likely to say yes…but that’s another story.
If they did say yes, they’re probably not worth marrying anyway.
So what do you do? You ask for a number, you ask for a date. You get to know someone. That’s our sales funnel.
How we get to know someone and move them through the process to total trust?
Think about your sales funnel. Think about the options you have to help people. What’s free? What’s going to cost them a small price? What’s your core offer?
