by Noah Fleming
• How many times did the phone ring before someone picked up on the other end?
• Did someone pick up at all?
• How quickly can they expect to be called back?
• Did they get a voicemail recording?
• Was the mailbox full?
• Did an automated voice system pick up asking them to select their choice? “Press 1 for support. Press 2 for sales. Press 3.... ” Why don’t you just tell me the movie you want to see? (Seinfeld fans will get the joke.)
• If someone answered, was the person on the other end both courteous and knowledgeable? Does that person know where to direct the customer to the next step of the sales process? You’d be shocked how many businesses direct leads to people either answering the phones or managing the e-mail that have absolutely no clue about what happens next in the process! That’s just crazy.
Just a side note: You’ll have to use your imagination to apply this to the various types of businesses throughout the book, because I don’t have space in the book to give specific examples for every one of them; but I’ll try to make it as transparent as possible as we move along. Let’s continue with a few more examples:
• Is contacting you through your website a simple process?
• How quickly can they expect a response? I once e-mailed a website through their contact form, and they responded four months later. I’m not kidding. In the reply, they answered my question with another question. I’m still waiting for the next response!
• When landing on your website, is the next step clear as day, or does the customer feel like they’re being dumped into a messy closet?1
• Is it easy for the customer to pay you? You may or may not be surprised by how many companies make it almost impossible to give them any money.
As you can see, we’re already knee-deep into the customer’s experience at this point. Most companies don’t consider this stage as part of the customer experience because the customer isn’t really a customer yet, but why? The potential customer is “experiencing” through every part of the sales process, and every interaction with your company. Your company has a goal to turn potential customers into customers, so why wouldn’t you treat this with the same level of gravitas you treat the latest Snapchat campaign? It seems only logical that we would treat this as part of the entire customer experience. Just like our single, dating man buying flowers as he sets out looking for true love, the experience starts the moment he pulls into the parking lot.
Do you think about the whole customer experience?
Let’s talk more about what’s happening in this stage and how to ensure you’re allowing the customer to move quickly to the third stage with as little friction and resistance as possible. So let’s back up by starting at the beginning of Stage Two and assume our business now has a lead.
Great! Success! Stage One worked!
But uh-oh, I’ve got news for you.
Leads Are Worthless
Every business wants more leads. In the traditional world of sales and marketing, leads are everything. Here’s some counterintuitive thinking for you: leads are worthless. They’re not worth the paper they’re written on. Everyone says they need more leads, more leads, and more leads! Give me the Glengarry2 leads! It’s like we’re feeding some frenzied drug addiction, but leads are worthless unless you know how to move leads from this stage to the next, and then into happily ever after, after that. More so, the very act of getting a lead is a giant waste of time and money if you haven’t carefully thought through this stage of the buyer’s journey and the stages that follow. As mentioned a few pages back, go ahead and drive leads to your front desk, but do you know how many leads aren’t being followed up on?
Do you know how many leads receive a single call back, but no more?
Do you know what happened to the Internet leads that came in last week, or last month? How many of those leads resulted in business?
I can think of many client examples where I started looking into this and found that sometimes more than 80 percent of leads weren’t even receiving a call back.
Now before you say, “Those idiots! That’s ridiculous!” let me tell you that this is never that surprising to me; in fact, it’s almost the norm. Most companies do a terrible job with leads and have a poor understanding of what it takes to move a lead to conversion, let alone the next stage. Leads are worthless.
Creating Gravitational Pull
Leads come in two ways: inbound and outbound. With inbound marketing, the leads come to you. They’re attracted to you through your sales and marketing efforts, and they reach a point where they raise their hands and say, “I’m interested.” With outbound marketing, you find leads and create opportunities through traditional sales efforts like direct mail and cold calling.
There’s outbound sales and marketing efforts, and then there’s gravitational pull. If you get the Customer Loyalty Loop right, the gravitational pull is far more likely to occur.
Depending on the business type, every type of lead needs to be treated differently. For example, a traditional brick-and-mortar business has a lead the moment a customer walks into the store. For a hospitality business, a lead happens when someone comes into a restaurant to review the menu before making a decision for lunch.
How many companies track their lead-to-sale ratio? I can tell you—hardly any. Here’s a tip if you’re in a more traditional type of brick-and-mortar business: start tracking how many people walk in the door, and how many leave with or without making a purchase. Even larger retailers need to be tracking lead-to-conversion ratio. This data will allow you to tweak, tailor, and improve this part of the customer experience.
For an online retailer, a lead might be someone who makes their way onto a website with the intent of buying and fills out a form for more information. As you see, leads come in a couple of different forms. Leads, however, are entirely worthless unless we’re able to attract them in the first place, persuade them to raise their hands, and get them to trust us enough to convert to a customer. Then, we have to deliver a remarkable customer experience, and bring them back to do business with us again and turn them into an advocate for our respective businesses. Without doing all of those things, a lead is worthless. The point here is that a lead is useless unless you take them to a place of happily ever after. To bring them happily ever after, you need to understand Stage Two, which focuses primarily on your salespeople, front-line customer-facing staff, and the sales process. Everything that happens right now has the potential to impact what happens later on.
The customer is the single-most expensive thing for a business to acquire and the only real true asset a business has. For some businesses, even getting the customer to Stage Two is a huge hurdle and a massive expense. If a company wants to maximize growth, then it needs to understand the value of a lead versus a long-time relationship with a customer. Historically, companies have believed that revenue growth was simply about driving as many new customers to the business as possible and converting as many sales as they could, but it’s a lousy way to do business. Every organization needs to understand the new requirements in the second stage and treat the sales process as an integral part of the customer experience.
Breaking the Loop in Stage Two
A moment ago, I mentioned the importance of the sales process. It’s so foolish not to treat this as part of the customer experience. Through Stage One, you’ve created a mental image in the mind of the client. If we think back to the original and traditional customer lifecycle, then we’ve successfully created awareness. Both your advertising and marketing efforts have led the customer to this point, or maybe they’ve gotten here through referral or word of mouth; it doesn’t matter, although not all referrals and word-of-mouth customers are necessarily good, and we’ll talk about that later. Either way, think about this for a minute: Imagine the incongruence if back in the 1920s you would had read one of Hopkins’ famous purity ads only to travel to the Schlitz factory and find it filthy and
dirty, with bags upon bags of garbage piled outside the front door? Imagine a stream of sludge outside where you expected to find a crystal-clear basin of water flowing into the lake. There’s a significant incongruity of the mental image you initially had expected between what you’re experiencing. When this happens, the loop is broken. As we move into the conversion stage or the “business environment” your prospects find themselves in, we need to understand this is very much a part of the customer experience. This includes everything from the actual environment (this can be offline or online), to the people they deal with and how they’re treated, and information they get from other sources.
There’s one thing that can break down the entire loop. It’s really scary because you can do so well right up until even after the customer has done business with you the first time, and yet you can close the casket, ensuring they’ll never do business with you again. It’s hard to imagine that the process can be broken any step of the way by this one thing, but it’s there. And that one thing is incongruence. In other words, something that doesn’t fit the overall experience, or that doesn’t make sense. The piles and piles of garbage outside the Schlitz factory are incongruent, and they break down all the hard work we’ve done to get the prospect to that point. Let me share a brief story to illustrate my point.
Last year, I held an event for clients in Toronto. The night before the event I booked two rooms at the gorgeous Shangri-La Hotel, one for me and one for a good friend of mine and guest speaker at the event, Shawn Veltman. The check-in experience was incredible. I was whisked away from my car, which was driven off quickly by the valet parking attendants, and inside I was warmly (and magically) greeted by name. It was like they knew I would be walking in at that very moment, and everything was happening just for me. “Good evening, Mr. Fleming; it’s great to have you staying with us.” From there, I was given a small cup of hot Japanese oolong tea, and a hot face and hand wash cloth as the front desk attendant swiped my credit card, and finally I was escorted to my room. I turned around looking for my bags, with a slight moment of panic, only to be told my bags had already been sent up to my room. Shawn’s experience was no different. He was amazed at the attention to detail throughout the entire experience thus far.
A few hours later, I met with Shawn, and he asked me a very peculiar question. He asked, “Did you notice anything distinct about the bathroom?” I pondered the question and responded, “Well, it had a TV!” Shawn said, “You’re right! It had a TV, but what else?” I kept inquisitively pointing out all the distinct and interesting things I had noticed, but it seemed like I just wasn’t getting it right. Finally, Shawn gave me another clue. “Noah, did you sit down to use the toilet?” I thought about it for a moment, and said, “Yeah, I did.” “Great!” said Shawn. “Did you notice anything then?” I thought for a moment and then finally he blurted it out: “One-ply toilet paper.” I thought about it again, and he was right. Here we were in Toronto to put on the first-ever Evergreen Summit the next day, which was all about ensuring your experiences are congruent with the story you want to tell and the things you want customers to remember about your business. The hotel had spared no expense up until this point, but then cheapened out on one small area. Let’s be honest with each other here; nobody uses one-ply. It’s terrible. In fact, a football team recently traveled overseas with two-ply because they were warned their hotel only carried one-ply.3 Since I’ve talked about this, I’ve ruffled a lot of feathers. I’ve gotten numerous e-mails from people who claim that maybe the hotel was being eco-friendly, or people don’t care about such trivial things, but they’re both wrong. It’s a small detail, but it’s a detail that matters. The key questions to be asking yourself in this situation are these:
• Which areas of your business are you cutting costs on that might be impacting the overall customer experience and feelings your customers have?
• Where are the incongruities in your business?
I’ve done this work with many of my clients in the process called the Evergreen Experience Audit. We engage in many specific exercises to learn where the incongruities might be impacting the overall customer experience. We don’t just look for one-ply toilet paper. We look at the whole experience and each stage of the Customer Loyalty Loop. Now the story I just shared really should be in the next chapter, after the prospect has converted to a customer and the experience has begun, but it illustrates such a valuable point for Stage Two. This is the first time major incongruities start cropping up between what you say and what you do. This is primarily true in the sales process.
Understanding Your Sales Process
When I ask many potential clients about their sales process, they sometimes look at me like I’m crazy. They say things like they don’t have a defined sales process nor do they see the need for one. They say things like, “But our business is different.” Here’s the thing: everyone in business has a sales process. The only difference is that there are those businesses who have clearly defined each step of their sales process and those which have not. I’m not suggesting that you must have five rigid steps that are meticulously followed each and every time a new lead comes in or a person enters your business, but what I am suggesting is that your customers follow a process to the point of conversion. Moreover, you’re foolish not to be aware of that process and to be continuously asking yourself the question, “How will we improve the overall customer experience at this stage?” It’s all part of the whole customer experience, and this is one of the best opportunities to create added value for your customers. This value adds fuel to the fire that the customer will continue to move through the loop, resulting in sustainable long-term growth and profitability. It doesn’t matter if you’re a local restaurant, a freelancer, a major retail store like the Apple Store, or a complex B2B manufacturer—you still have a sales process. This chapter is called “Conversion Without Coercion” for a reason. Traditional books on sales and marketing and the psychology of influence often deal with coercion. The tools of influence are presented as tactics, and we’re told that the tactics can be used throughout the sales process to coerce the prospect into buying. The Customer Loyalty Loop is focused on conversion without coercion, and we do this by making each stage of the customer experience so good that potential customers can’t help but do business with us. Tools and tactics have a place in the various stages of the loop to help us move customers through each stage of the buying cycle, of course, but they’re not the primary tools to move customers and prospects from one stage to the next. I look at the tools and tactics as merely a bit of added effectiveness to simply doing what you need to do to allow the customer to move freely through the whole experience. Conversion isn’t really about the persuasion tactics to sell; it’s more about understanding how the buyer buys and allowing them to get their own their own. In the rest of this chapter, I’ll delve a bit deeper into the science of the experience in Stage Two, and we’ll develop a better understanding of what the customer is feeling at this point. More important, I’ll provide you with the tools to equip your salespeople and front-line staff to seamlessly move the customer through this stage to the point of conversion.
Creating an Experience-Driven Sales Process
Let’s continue to think about the sales process. What are the most important parts of the experience for a potential customer in Stage Two for your business? Suppose marketing has done their job and the new lead has come in. Your salesperson’s phone is ringing, or there’s a new list of leads that have come in through your website. What are all the key stages, conversation points, and hurdles you must cross to get the customer to the point of conversion? How can you reduce friction, increase desire, but at the same time maintain fluidity? There was a time and place where the answer to these questions might have been pretty cut and dried, but the times have changed. Today’s buyer is equipped with more research, there’s more competition, and the customers have higher expectations. The sales process in most organizations hasn’t been fully adapted to th
is new business environment. Thankfully, I can bring your organization up to speed relatively quickly. Think of this like the choreography of a Broadway show without the typical “song and dance” we just discussed. Each stage of the process should be carefully choreographed, so everyone dealing with customers hits their marks, but continues to build trust to show the customers that we have their best interests in mind. That’s the difference between the conversion through manipulation and persuasion tactics, and simply allowing the customer to convert without being coerced.
If we think about our earlier discussions, including everything from cognitive biases to the formation of false memories, or stoking the imagination through the power of anticipated memories, what’s left to do here? It turns out quite a bit. The experience at this stage will be remembered based on the cumulative experience of the entire sales process from start to finish. It will be recalled based on how seamless and engaging your salespeople are, or how the phones are answered (which is a soft and straightforward metric), or to how much value your salespeople bring by asking the right questions. Obviously, there are dozens of other factors. However, the more exciting thing is that if you get this stage right, it sets the foundation for long-term growth. This stage has a profound business impact on many key areas like increased revenue and customer loyalty, but only if you get it right. Achieving those results is almost impossible without a clearly defined sales process as it relates to the customer’s experience. Customer loyalty isn’t something that starts after the sale is made. It begins long in advance of that.
The traditional idea of selling is broken. Today’s customer has so much choice that companies need to differentiate themselves from the competition. We can do that by treating the sales process as a definitive part of the customer experience. That’s the problem with treating the sales process as a place where persuasion tactics can overcome what’s desperately needed: value that sticks. At this stage, prospects only want to know one particular thing. They want to know that you have their best interest in mind and that you’re looking to satisfy them and improve their condition. Let’s talk about what that means and how we do that.