Designing a buyer oriented funnel is one of the major and essential steps of developing the product. Let us consider a perfect world where a product is being shown with its rich description, relevant features and the product price. This idea may not work for everyone because the buyer may have some concerns and questions about the product. We need to find a better solution for this process.
Understanding the buyer’s attitude
Break the process into several steps. Result of these steps can be stored in a funnel. The major concern about the funnels is Vendor Oriented Funnel. We need to find a superior way to approach the funnel design and this is done using a Buyer Oriented Funnel. The buyer’s journey include awareness about the product, its consideration and finally purchasing the product. The second step is to identify buyer’s personae. Identify what are the key business goals, decision criteria, other characteristics that are relevant to the purchase. Now map buyer’s process to your steps, find an optimal solution and convey all the decision criteria.
Website Grader
Take an example of a blockage point where you need to drive traffic to your website. Highlights from website grader include free tools that make a viral spread & high value is delivered. Thus, website grader is a great example where marketing issues are looked up by product teams. Another relevant example is for e Commerce website. As e Commerce shoppers, the things that attracts us mostly are product features, videos, rich description and reviews. They redesigned the trial steps like offered a chance to start with sample data, guided navigation & human help was a major help for customers. The final redesigned process included higher conversion rates.
Outbound Cold Calling
The major issue in cold calling is that no customer wants a cold call from a salesperson. There is a need to redesign it. For redesigning it, we need to start building a healthy relationship & gradually build trust. But there are different customers whose idea of wow are different. Suppose for a Head of Recruiting, application tracking can lead to wow; for a CEO, performance management can be a wow.
Identifying buyer’s key concerns
Now buyer’s key concerns are data quality and data coverage. For experiencing the product quality they get free trail. But the issue in free trail is that they need to go through IT. The solution to this problem is chrome extension. The browser will help connecting to website using chrome extension. They can see the enriched data in website, judge the data quality & finally a report that will show the data coverage percentage. Clear bit chrome extension eliminates the need to have dependencies on other people.
Flip the Funnel
Joseph Jaffe, Chief Interrupter says that “Flip the Funnel” means spending lesser amount of resources on gaining new customers & spending more on acknowledging and holding on to the existing customers Jaffe wants the company to apply this concept not only for a single department but to the whole organisation for businesses & customer benefits.
Below mentioned are the five typical ways.
Identify insights from data
We need to find out what percentage of sales is driven by the existing customers versus the new ones. As most companies are not tracking it, they don’t have an average cost of acquiring a new customer. Jaffe says that the calculation is important for monitoring.
Adapting new customer rules for service
Companies should commit to organizing customer service call centre for weekends, answer to emails promptly, and maintain a system for monitoring social media on frequent basis for any complaints of customers. It will feed to retention based focus.
Identify and reward excellent customers
Identify the customers who are doing outstanding performance & reward them with status badges on materials of company or customer of the month reward or free upgrades.
Recognize influencers
Identifying the influential customers is significant. Recognize them & treat them nicely. In order to recognize we can ask simple questions like how many friends they have on Facebook. On the basis of customer information, we can create data models.
Persuade Management
The toughest part about flipping the funnel is modifying the organisation & its culture. To make it easier there are some ways. First is Benchmark & Metrics, we can provide team numbers & some potential opportunities like cost of acquisition vs retention. Second is outside validation, to provide reference of experts outside the company who have a customer-centric approach. Last way is to manage expectations, it requires a long term investment.
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Drishti Patel
Semester 6, BDA ,Institute of Computer Technology, GUNI
