Hewlko News - Creating a sales cycle
Mapping the customer journey
Do you find your workflow unreliable and often experience feast or famine? The exercise of mapping your customer journey could be the key to creating a reliable stream of clients. Or at minimum, give you some tools to enhance your overall customers experience. In this newsletter we take you through a typical customer journey, depending on the product or services you are selling and your overall goals it could look a bit different, however the core stages will still be the same.
First Stage – Customer Aware
Awareness
This stage is the first touchpoint that your customer will have with your brand. The following channels are a few examples; social post, word of mouth, google search, advertisement, etc.
Engagement
From that initial touchpoint, they might visit your website, read some reviews and spend a little time learning about who you are and what your business does.
Subscribe
This is the stage where they decide they like what they are seeing and want to follow along or bookmark your company page for future use. Examples of this could be a social media follow, engagement or subscribing to a newsletter.
Second Stage – Sales Process
Convert
At this stage the potential customer has learned about your offering but probably needs a little more information. This stage is typically a mini commitment or some sort of effort on their part. This could look like an email, filling out an online form or a phone call.
Excite
After learning more about your brand and service, this is usually the time for an in-person meeting where you get to understand the client needs and gather more information to create a well thought out proposal. This includes getting the customer excited about your offerings and service levels.
Proposal
The proposal could be quickly approved, need revisions or be declined. Once the proposal is reviewed and approved you move to the contract and deposit phase. If it has been declined you can skip to the third stage.
Contract + Deposit
This is arguably the most important phase, as there is no real commitment on either end until the contract is signed and the deposit is made. But if you have outlined expectations ahead of time this should go smoothly.
Third Stage - After Sale Process
Training + hand off
At this stage, the work has been completed but depending on the length of the project you may want to do additional check ins to measure customer satisfaction. For me, this stage looks like taking the client through their packaged branding files, guidelines, review of the back end of a website and product training.
Reporting
If the project is ongoing we create a report template to update monthly or quarterly with results of marketing and sales efforts.
Fourth Stage - Retention Referral
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
The Net Promoter Score helps you to understand what went well, what didn’t and let’s you know if the customer will be interested in promoting you. Armed with this set of data, you can either look at ways of mending a relationship where a project didn’t go well. Or use this information to write a testimonial in your client’s own words for them to post online.
Advocacy
This is the stage when a client refers you to friends, family or acquaintances looking for similar services. If you did the NPS step and have written some testimonials, here is where you can create a template to guide your clients on how to post. Time is money, so I like to send along a gift card with this request.
Case Study
A successful project is one that should be celebrated and a case study ensures future clients understand how you can help them too!
For each step above its best if you map out the customer process and the internal process at each step. Then you can start to measure things like close rates, revenue metrics, churn rate and more! I recommend using Steve’s Excel Template here to help start you off!
This month’s newsletter was built using the framework learned from the below sources.
Value Journey Worksheet – Digital Marketer
Customer Journey Mapping Template – Steve Whittington, Author of Thriving in the Customer Age
Q&A with Santana Blanchette,
Business Development with Everbrave
Santana Blanchette is our first Q&A for 2020! This month I chatted with Santana Blanchette with Everbrave to gather her insights on how a strong brand foundation combined with inbound marketing can support your business growth.
I love the journey Santana has taken from freelance writer to intern, marketing coordinator, project manager and finally to the business development position she holds today.