Mastering Your Sales Cycle: From Awareness to Referrals
Step One: Building Awareness
The first and arguably most crucial step in the sales cycle is awareness. Amy highlights the frequent mistake many entrepreneurs make—relying solely on social media for visibility. Although social media is a valuable tool, it should not be your sole strategy. To stand out, it's crucial to think creatively and strategically.
Diversifying Your Approach
Instead of spreading yourself thin across every platform, identify where your ideal clients are most likely to hang out. Amy urges entrepreneurs to zig when others zag—meaning, differentiate yourself by going where others aren't. Be innovative in your approach:
Consider speaking engagements, collaborations, or guest blogging.
Attend industry-specific events to network face-to-face.
Utilize SEO to capture organic traffic to your website.
Remember, effective marketing isn't about being everywhere. It's about being where your audience is.
Step Two: Nurturing Your Leads
Once you've captured attention, nurturing your leads becomes crucial. Unlike the noisy world of social media, email serves as a quieter, more controlled environment to build rapport with potential clients.
The Power of Email
Amy stresses the importance of owning a list you can nurture:
Regular Updates:
Send informative and engaging emails to keep your audience aware of your presence.
Value-Driven Content:
Provide valuable information that addresses their challenges and offers solutions.
Email marketing helps you build the "know, like, and trust" factors essential for converting leads into clients. Even if recipients don’t open your emails, their subconscious awareness of your presence strengthens over time.
Step Three: Conversion
The conversion stage is where the magic happens—transforming nurtured leads into paying clients. Often, sales can feel icky or uncomfortable, but Amy simplifies it by framing sales as an invitation to solve a client's problem.
Simplifying Sales
Understanding your client's challenges deeply allows you to position your product or service as the best solution:
Emphasize Value Over Price:
Just as people pay a premium for luxury brands, they're willing to invest more in solutions that promise high value.
Clarify Your Positioning:
Make the benefits and unique selling points of your offering abundantly clear.
Amy advises not to get hung up on pricing; instead, focus on increasing perceived value and positioning yourself effectively in the market.
Step Four: Retention and Referrals
The final and often overlooked step in the sales cycle is retention and referrals. Once a client has completed a service, they shouldn't just drift away.
Creating a Referral Program
Leverage the power of word-of-mouth advertising:
Retention Strategies:
Implement a referral program to encourage satisfied clients to refer others.
Stay Engaged:
Follow up with past clients periodically to keep the relationship alive.
As Amy mentions, the pendulum is swinging back to word-of-mouth marketing. Trust is easier to establish through personal recommendations, especially in a skeptical market.
Conclusion
Mastering your sales cycle—from awareness to referrals—doesn't have to be complicated. By breaking it down into these four steps, you'll create a more efficient, effective, and ultimately profitable process.
Take the time to map out and refine your sales cycle:
Expand beyond social media for greater visibility.
Nurture leads through valuable email content.
Convert with confidence by emphasizing value.
Retain and grow through strategic referrals.
As Amy points out, someone is already searching for the solution you offer. Make sure your sales cycle is clear and optimized, so your sales process becomes a seamless and rewarding journey.
Episode Links
🙋♀️ Ask me anything! I know you have a burning business question you would love to ask. Submit your question here for a chance to have it answered on a future episode.
❌ Don't buy my Bestselling Book, The CEO Method: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Success because I want to give you a FREE copy. Click here!
Transcript for Episode 353. Demystifying the Sales Cycle
Amy [00:00:03]:
Do you have a crystal clear plan as to how followers or random strangers eventually become buyers in this world? This is something that I work through with clients all of the time. Because having a clear picture of your sales cycle allows us to identify opportunities, other opportunities, and ways to improve our sales process. Because what happens is when we have that awareness, we can start to collapse time. We can shrink the length of that sales cycle, therefore increasing our bottom line and shattering our sales plateau. So in today's episode, we're getting really tactical. So I want you to make sure you have a pen and a notebook ready so that we can together map that process out. So what is step one? Step one in the sales cycle is always awareness. How are people learning about you? All too often, I see entrepreneurs relying completely on social media to market their business.
Amy [00:01:20]:
That is just a piece the puzzle. I want you to get very curious and go, all right, this is what I do. This is who I serve. How am I getting in front of the people that need me? One of the common mistakes that I'm seeing is people are trying to be everywhere. You're trying to be everywhere. And when you're everywhere, you are diluting your energy. You're spreading yourself so thin because you're trying to do all the things on all the platforms while you're doing this, that and the other, and trying to run your business that you're not doing any of them well. And I know that can be a hard truth to hear, but it should also alleviate some of the stress and anxiety that you're feeling and the fact that you don't have to do it all.
Amy [00:02:10]:
You just need to position yourself in front of the person that you serve, that you are most apt to be able to help. So I don't want you going on every single platform. Get creative. Start to think outside of the box. Do what other people are not doing. You need to zig when other people are zagging. That's what's going to make you stand out. That's what's going to make you memorable.
Amy [00:02:41]:
And I did a whole episode on how to attract followers in other ways that don't rely on social media. You know, it's unfortunate how many of the major gurus are still trying to push the concept of going viral as being the solution to attract aligned clients. I cannot tell you how many fellow entrepreneurs I have spoken with that have gone viral. And you know what's happened? It's actually hurt their engagement because, yes, they have more followers, but are those followers their ideal client? Are those followers converting into sales. And oftentimes the answer is no, it's not. So stop stressing so much about the constant need for more. More. We want to be attracting the right people into our world by positioning ourselves in front of them.
Amy [00:03:39]:
Positioning ourselves as the solution to the problem that they have. And oftentimes this can be done via an opt in or a freebie. All right, how are we getting in front of these people? And then how are we sharing some value with them? Because what this is going to do is it boosts our credibility, it boosts our authority, so that then we can get them onto a list that we own. Because now, step two of the process, we need a way to nurture them. And think about it this way. Social media, it's loud. The world is loud. All these ads that are coming across our feed, all these ads that we hear even on podcasts, on the radio, all over the place, billboards, we are inundated with ads.
Amy [00:04:29]:
But email, email is a place that's quiet. Yes, there people are getting lots of emails every single day. But what's happening? So you're subconsciously triggering the awareness. You're subconsciously triggering that awareness. So even if they're not clicking on your email, even if they're not opening it up, it's that reminder that, hey, you still exist, you're still here. So once you've really nailed down how you're attracting clients where they are, what their big challenges, problems, desires are, once you have taken the time to do that, then how are we building that list so that we can nurture, so that we can build that know, like and trust? Because I will tell you what, especially if you are in the online space and selling a service, there are so many people out there that are more and more skeptical than ever because they've been burnt. They have been burnt in the online space. They were promised the ten k in ten minutes, which you and I both know is not realistic.
Amy [00:05:44]:
That just doesn't happen. And if you are making ten k in ten minutes, please dm me and tell me, like, how you're doing that, because I bet there's some context behind it. So step two, nurturing via a list that you own. Step three, conversions. So this is where the sale is actually happening. And if sales is one of those topics that makes you feel icky, slimy, sleazy, all of the things, please know that at the heart of it, sales is just presenting an invitation to the solution, to the solution to the problem that your ideal client has. That's it. That's all that sales is.
Amy [00:06:34]:
And I will tell you what makes this even easier. The more you understand exactly what your ideal client is going through, the more you deeply understand their challenges, their problems, where they're at right now that allows you to increase the value of your solution. All too often, we get really, really wrapped up in the numbers. Like, I don't know how to price my thing. Oh, my offer is not selling. Maybe I need to drop the price. I'm seeing this all the time. I have conversations all of the time with clients.
Amy [00:07:14]:
And the fact of the matter is, right now we are in the middle of an interesting shift in the market, in the online space, in the economy, the elections coming up. There's so many things right now in our world that have increased the length of the sales cycle. So now more than ever, it is so important for you to really focus on increasing the perceived value of your service. Because what is going on is that we are just inundated again with all of these messages, all of these people promising all of these things, and it's raising our skepticism. But what we're doing when we're really doing a good job with our nurturing through our email list, through the content that we are posting, what that does is that does the heavy lifting for us so that when we do go to launch something they've already bought in their minds. So of course it's going to be an easy yes. And it's never about the price. You know, we get so wrapped up in our minds about the price, we overthink it.
Amy [00:08:21]:
I mean, I am the world's biggest overthinker here. I am a recovering overthinker, and I am proud of it. But it's taught me a lot. It's taught me that I need to trust myself. It's never my price. It's how I am positioning my product. Just like purses and handbags, you can go into a Louis Vuitton store and drop a couple thousand dollars on a purse that has the exact same function as the $20 purse you can get on sale at Walmart. It's all about the perceived value.
Amy [00:08:54]:
It's all about how you're positioning yourself in the market. And when you can make that mindset shift to realize that it's not the price and no, just means next opportunity, you're presenting the invitation, you're just simply asking. And then following up too, which is a whole nother episode, you should totally check out. Because remember, if you don't ask, if you don't ask for the sale, the answer will always be no. So stop assuming and start asking. So step three is conversion, and then step four of your sales cycle is retention and referrals. So once they have completed our service, where do they go? Do they just go out into the oblivion like, okay, bye. See ya.
Amy [00:09:48]:
I did my thing. Never talk to you again? No. Do you have a referral program in place? Because the power of word of mouth advertising is enormous. My husband and I were just talking about this the other day. We're really starting to see the pendulum swing back to word of mouth advertising. It was funny because we got phone books in the, at the end of our driveway the other day. Did you know they still print the yellow pages? Literally? I got one of those uline catalogs with, like, all the office supplies that they, like, randomly send you even though you've never requested it. The Uline catalog was actually thicker than the phone book that was sitting at the end of my driveway.
Amy [00:10:34]:
I should have taken a picture of it, but it went right in the recycle. But isn't that crazy? Like, think about it. Nobody's really going to the yellow pages anymore. We used to, but now we would much rather go to someone that's been recommended again because so many of us have been burnt in the online space. So what do we do? We ask our friends, hey, I'm looking to hire a copywriter. Do you have any recommendations? Because I wrote a book. I have people come to me all the time, and they're like, hey, I don't know how to make this actually look like a book. I need a formatter.
Amy [00:11:10]:
Do you know someone? I'm referring out all of the time. And that's what you want your customers to do. You want your customers, your clients to turn into your leading referral source, because referrals will boost your revenue and collapse that sales cycle even further. And we did another episode about this a couple weeks back about the power of relationships, retentions, and referrals. And I will link up all of these episodes for you in the show notes because they are just full, full of juicy little nuggets as to how to set up your own referral program, how to promote yourself, how to get that client retention. That's all it is. This sales cycle doesn't have to be complicated, but when you break it down into those four steps, you attract, nurture, convert, retain, and refer. That's it.
Amy [00:12:19]:
It's as easy as that. But it takes the time, you putting in the time to set this up, to write this out physically write it down so that you can get curious, you can then identify, okay, this is working really well. This is where people are coming into my world from. And then you can double down on that. That gives you the opportunity to see the gaps, to find the holes in your marketing efforts so that you can turn all of your amazing goodness that you offer into sales. Because there is someone searching right now for you. They need the solution that you have. So when your sales cycle is clear, your sales become much easier.
Amy [00:13:16]:
I am here cheering for you. And until next time, cheers to making the money you want so you can create the impact you desire.
Comments