TWO WAYS TO WIDEN YOUR SALES FUNNEL.
Hitting The Wall
If you’re like most other small and medium-sized businesses we’re talking to, you’ve hit a wall with referrals as your primary driver. While word of mouth remains the most powerful tool for sales and marketing, it’s entirely dependent on the size of your network. Most businesses today can’t grow based on referrals alone. That leaves companies with a difficult choice: Do you try to widen your funnel by increasing the size of your salesforce, or do you instead turn to the web for search-based customers? Some companies focus on the web because they think it’s a more economical way of broadening their reach. But this is something of a false economy. A powerful website requires a great deal of thought and planning – and a host of features to attract cold prospects, like video and other resources. These are not nearly as expensive as they used to be, but they have to reflect the same professionalism that’s expected of your company.
Complex Decisions
Hiring more sales staff is also costly, and your company may have already saturated your known prospect pool. These are complex decisions that require sober second thought, and trusted marketing advisors. We don’t believe in an instant marketing program. It has to be properly built and then continuously updated to remain
relevant. The old way of launching a website and then going silent for years at a time simply doesn’t work. It actually undermines your company’s image. A regular course of even limited marketing activities is much better and also makes it far easier to gauge performance – what works and what doesn’t. In the digital age there are no easy answers. But we’re confident that eventually and inevitably every company will need an active web presence to succeed.
