Brainstorm
It’s important to realize that all sales and marketing channels have choke points. As soon as you remove one choke point, another one will appear somewhere else in the funnel. This means there’s always room for improvement. I recommend using quarterly brainstorming sessions to bring together key executives, including the CEO, sales, marketing, and product leaders, to come up with creative ways to address the latest choke point using the techniques described in this article: Analyze your customers’ motivations and see if it’s possible to come up with a motivation that overcomes those concerns.
When running these meetings, it is extremely valuable to australia mobile database have a flowchart of the sales and marketing funnel process as one of the starting points for discussion. Without this diagram, you are unlikely to find that all participants have the same understanding of what is going on.
I also recommend writing the client’s concerns and possible counteracting motivations on a whiteboard or something similar during the meeting.
In my own startup, I found that I was naturally drawn to the role of someone who tried to think like a customer and represent their perspective to the rest of the team. In other companies, it’s not always clear which executive has the best natural inclination to play that role. I recommend that you choose someone from your executive team to play this role and encourage them to become very familiar with how your customers think. This will only happen if they spend time with a lot of customers, listening and asking questions. Then in your quarterly brainstorming sessions, it will be their job to make sure the customer’s voice is clearly heard.