If you’ve been in the marketing space for any amount of time, you’ve undoubtedly heard about sales funnels.
Sales funnels are strategic models that represent the buying journey, from the moment a person becomes aware of your brand until they become a customer or client.
Traditional sales funnel steps include:
- Awareness – Seeking educational resources to solve a problem
- Consideration – Weighing all the options and sizing you up with your competitors
- Purchase – Ready to make an investment
With a sales funnel, the end goal is a conversion or purchase. When you look at a graphic representation of a funnel, it almost always has lots of people going in at the top, and dollar signs coming out at the bottom.
It seems like a pretty solid strategy, right?
The truth is, this concept is flawed.
The Downside of Sales Funnels
While sales funnels can help you achieve your various conversion and sales goals, they also come with their downsides.
To start, sales funnels treat people like commodities instead of actual human beings. The thought process is that if you get enough people into your funnels, some are bound to make it through the different steps of the process and ultimately, end up in that conversion space.
In many cases, the focus is on quantity – getting as many people into your funnel as possible – generating leads and growing lists of email addresses. The idea is that if you make enough offers, someone is bound to buy.
Another downside is that in the online space, it’s common for “worth” to be measured based on the size of your list. Let’s take a look at a few examples of this:
- I’m someone who frequently speaks at events (online and offline). There is a trend among some event organizers to place email list size requirements as a means of vetting potential speakers. You must have 5,000 (or 10,000, etc.) people on your email list.
- In my previous life, I did influencer work. The brands I was collaborating with wanted to see similar high email list (or follower) numbers.
The message this sends is that you need to have a large list to be successful and unlock these premium opportunities. It sets emerging entrepreneurs up for failure, implying that they should be concerned with quantity over quality.
We have to unlearn this.
We need to change the way we’re teaching others to market themselves and their businesses.
Shifting Our Mindset
It’s time to change the way we think about our business and talk about our marketing.
I know the general concept of mindset can seem fluffy, especially when you’re here for marketing insights. Something I’ve learned over the years, however, is that how we think directly impacts the way we market our business (and the way we do everything).
Instead of picturing a traditional sales funnel, we need to think about a customer’s journey, illustrating the path of interactions an individual has with your brand, product, or services.
We need to reject the idea that our ultimate goal is to get a person to spend money with us (as a traditional sales funnel would have us believe).
Yes, that’s part of the goal – but it should not be the end goal. EVER.
So what should your goal be, if not to make sales?
The goal is to impact.
The goal is to solve problems.
The goal is to transform.
A New Map For a New Goal
The customer journey map continues beyond where the funnel ends.
The first three “steps” of a customer journey are the same as a traditional funnel, however, the customer journey continues with an additional two more “steps.”
Here is what the updated customer journey map looks like:
- Awareness – Seeking educational resources to solve a problem
- Consideration – Weighing all the options, sizing you up with your competitors.
- Purchase – Ready to make an investment
- Retention (Customer Service) – Providing an exceptional customer experience through engaging, educating, and offering ongoing support for new/existing clients. This stage is the most important and takes the most time and energy. In reality, it’s not a single step, but a series of steps. People may make additional purchases as they make progress and face new problems or seek new transformations. This is where you have the opportunity to provide an experience so exceptional that the customer becomes a raving fan and enters the advocacy step.
- Advocacy – If/when clients share your business with others (also known as word-of-mouth advertising).
The Customer Journey As the Game of Life
Now, I like to think in pictures.
I’m definitely a visual learner, so I prefer to picture the customer journey as a map. Not a straight line map, but a twisty, winding map – the customer journey will rarely be linear.
Have you ever played the classic board game Life? It’s one of my kids’ favorites right now.
(Side note: the new version is very progressive and includes multi-colored people and updated language. I love it!)
I tend to picture my customer journey map much like the one used in Life. There isn’t just one way to go from start to finish. At various points throughout the game, you can choose which direction you want to go. Ultimately, both options go in the same direction, but each brings different experiences.
In your customer journey map, those different directions/experiences can provide different levels of support based on the needs of your clients. Not everyone will take the same path, and that’s okay.
Also, in Life, paydays and purchase opportunities are spread throughout the board. On your customer journey map, those are the different products and services you offer your clients. As I mentioned before, not everyone will take the same path and that’s okay.
As a marketer, I obviously think marketing is important. It’s necessary to increase awareness and attract leads. That being said, however, it’s essential to remember that your ultimate goal is to provide such a stellar customer experience that the client is singing your praises.
This way, your customer is not only likely to become a return customer, but they’ve become a raving fan who is sending more people and more traffic your way.
That’s the ultimate measure of success.
How Exactly Do You Go About Mapping Your Customer Journey?
You’ll discover that there are many touch points that you have with prospective clients. These may include things like in-person interactions, your website, social media, and more. We can also get increasingly granular with how we track the customer journey by tracking specific in-person events, specific blog posts, websites, social media platforms, post types, etc.
My all-in-one marketing platform, FG Funnels, allows me to keep track of the different referral traffic, websites, offers, and emails that each person in my ecosystem receives.
When someone makes a purchase, I can easily go back and see what other pieces of content they consumed before making the purchase. This allows me to then begin mapping out the process to get a better idea of what content should be optimized or created to enhance the customer experience.
If you’re not using FG Funnels, it may very well be that the CRM you’re using allows you to measure some of the same information, or you can leverage Google Analytics for similar insights.
No matter how you’re tracking this information, or mapping out your customer’s journey, I highly suggest that you continue to keep detailed notes about the experiences and ongoing needs of your clients. This will help you improve your offers and the overall customer experience.
Your work isn’t done when you close a sale. It’s just beginning.
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