Instead of seeing the sales process as a funnel — and your reps’ role as working leads or forcing buyers through the funnel — John Jantsch, author of “Duct Tape Marketing,” suggests in his new book, “Duct Tape Selling: Think Like a Marketer — Sell Like a Superstar,” that you imagine guiding prospects on a journey through what he calls the Marketing Hourglass.
“Most organizations have gaping holes in their version of the journey. In order to think like a marketer, you must understand marketing as surely as you do sales in order to fill these gaps before, during and after the sale,” Jantsch states.
“The mentality that sales isn’t responsible for building and protecting the process must change. As a salesperson, you must understand how all the pieces go together — marketing, sales and service — and own every step of the process.
Here’s what the Hourglass steps look like:
Know – The act of creating awareness. While it sometimes starts with a referral or through an introduction made at a networking event, it’s often the act of putting something out there that gets the attention of your prospect.
Like – Move toward gaining permission to continuing a conversation. Many times the key is to fire up your email capture activities.
Trust – Subtly moving toward gaining the trust that comes from educating and demonstrating that you have something of value to bring to the table.
Try – An attempt to get the prospect to sample what it might be like to work with your firm. This can be accomplished with a low-cost version of the product, analysis, use case study or trial period.
Buy – The step every salesperson wants, but in the Hourglass approach it’s just another stepping stone to the ultimate goal — a thoroughly thrilled customer. In some organizations, this is the branching point. Customer service may step in to close a sale or marketing might reengage to follow up, or worse, nobody really owns the journey from this point on.
Repeat – For most businesses, and for that matter most sales quotas, long-term momentum only occurs when existing customers continue to purchase over and over again as new customers are added. This step must be intentional, and designed at the beginning as opposed to being left to chance.
Refer – The goal of this system is to get 100 percent referrals from your client base. While it won’t ever happen no matter how good you are, if you begin with this goal in mind, it’s more likely that a higher percentage of clients will refer.
