Welcome to Crush Your Funnel, a blog dedicated to improving sales and marketing operations.
Many firms, even in the high-tech space, have operated for a long time with a legacy set of beliefs about how leads should be generated, how projects should be sold, and how customer relationships should be managed. A lot of that thinking has been reasonably effective (if executed well) for decades, but it has failed to keep pace with modern technology, and it definitely lags behind delivering the kinds of experiences that consumers have begun to demand from brands.
The result has been that many companies have come to accept an enormous amount of waste and inefficiency – much of which they can’t even see – as entirely normal and expected.
I was having a nice meal with a marketing manager of a good-sized home services company, and he was telling me about some of his lead sources which are producing sales at about 3% of the total number of leads generated. Because the revenue from that 3% was right around a 15% marketing cost, the source met their expectations, and they planned to continue investing in it.
Let that sink in for a moment: They were happy to accept 97% waste.
Would you be happy with a car that wasted 97% of the gas you put in it, or a supermarket that sold you 97% spoiled food?
Even worse than that, most firms only start counting once a lead is generated, and they really have no idea how many leads they COULD have had if they changed some policies and gotten smarter. That’s waste too, and I hate waste.
Crush Your Funnel is all about helping companies take a holistic view of the entire customer relationship from the moment the customer realizes that they have a need, all the way to buying again or referring a friend. While many folks focus on one part of that journey or another, I will take you all the way down the funnel and back, over and over again, finding the right things to measure and crushing the inefficiencies in your system along the way.
Who Is This Blog For?
This blog is written primarily for business owners, as well as leaders in the sales and marketing functions. While posts may be relevant to managers in HR, fulfillment, etc., I approach most of this content through the lens of customer experience, so it will be most relevant to customer-facing staff.
While much of this content is intended for higher-level employees, anyone in sales and marketing operations at any level will benefit from our posts on sales and marketing alignment (“smarketing” as it is called), and everyone can benefit from taking the perspective of the customer a little bit more than they do now.
In short, this blog is written for you. It doesn’t matter if you own a hundred million dollar tech company, or you have just started a plumbing outfit with your brother. In the B2C world there are many, many commonalities between wildly different companies because, at the end of the day, all marketing is about the consumer, however he or she may be defined. You will find ideas and inspiration, both original and curated, in these pages that you won’t find anywhere else.
Want to see topics not addressed here? Contact me, and I’ll get it on the schedule.
If you like what you see, please share freely. The more companies there are using this free content, the better.
Above all, bring an open mind, and get ready to Crush Your Funnel.
