Improve your sales life cycle in CRM for small businesses

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today we're going to talk about the way that most people Market their businesses the typical customer life cycle is chock full of waste and holes today I'm going to show you these areas of waste because this is one of the main reasons why so many small businesses fail just after they get started I'm also going to give you a framework that will allow you to recapture this waste and take your business to a completely new level it's really helpful for you to think about your customer life cycle as a series of Milestones that every customer is going to go through so first you're going to do some work to attract interested people who will show up to your website as a visitor or they may they may show up to your social profile then you're going to do work to make that visitor turn into a lead by capturing their information so that you can then follow up and reach out and communicate with them the next Milestone is you're going to take that lead you're going to turn them into a paying customer who actually gives you money for the very first time and then finally you're going to turn that customer into a fan somebody who buys from you again refers all of their friends and also says nice things about you and reviews online as I mentioned earlier the typical customer life cycle is full of holes and waste so let's talk about each of these areas of waste really quickly so first you've done a lot of work to generate interest in your business and you've got somebody who's come to your website they're a visitor but too often what happens is if the person isn't ready to buy today that person ends up leaving our website and they're a completely lost opportunity we have failed to turn them into a lead it's a huge area of waste the second thing that happens is we may actually have really really good leads but unfortunately because we're not following up very effectively we're failing at the opportunity to turn that lead into a customer another huge area of waste and then finally sometimes we get a brand new customer we're so excited that we have this new customer we run back up to go find more customers and we forget to turn that customer into a fan and so we have another huge missed opportunity and we've got potential fans now sitting in the trash can which isn't good for anybody now when you look at this picture it is no wonder why small businesses have such a hard time growing it's because there's waste happening throughout the entire customer life cycle let's use some real numbers as an example of how this plays out in a business let's say for example that we spend a bunch of time and energy generating traffic to our website and let's say that we got a thought we're going to use round numbers here let's say we got a thousand visitors to the site okay and through all of our our work and effort that those thousand visitors turned into a hundred leads okay so we'll the Thousand goes down to 100 here and then we Implement our sales process and those 100 leads turn into 10 customers 10 paying customers okay well what happens if I'm the business owner I'm not happy with 10 customers I want to get up to 20 customers well the default approach that most business owners take is they say okay I've got to go double the investment in my time and my money to get twice as many visitors to my website so that I can have twice as many leads so that I can have twice as many customers the great news is there's a way for you to double your customers without having to double the amount of money and time that you're spending generating leads the answer is plug the holes in your customer life cycle using lifecycle automation life cycle automation is a framework that we created over a decade ago that helps you to evaluate your customer life cycle find the areas of waste and get rid of them like every great sports team has a Playbook your business needs a life cycle automation Playbook and what that is is it's a collection of plays think of these as sales and marketing tactics that you're going to use to plug each of these holes now in lifecycle automation we have three phases collect leads convert clients and create fans and your plays are generally going to fall into these categories so let's walk through a few examples so remember all these website visitors that are basically just going to the trash can what could we do to solve that problem well we're going to put a play in place that essentially Bridges the Gap here okay so in your business depending on what your business is you're going to use a different play okay in your business you might need to run what we call a lead Magnet download play what's that well you're going to create an educational asset a downloadable thing that you can offer to your prospects and when they come to your website if they're not ready to buy that's okay because they have an option to download this free educational guide and what that means is they're going to give you their contact information and you now have just bridged this Gap they've now become a lead so that visitor that would have left before and gone into the trash can is now made it to the next Milestone now if you spend a lot of time out networking and meeting people in person then you may you may choose a different plate here you may have a networking lead intake form for example so that's a form that you're going to have that when you're out in your networking meetings it's a really simple way for you to collect the information instead of collecting that card that ends up down here in the trash can you have a very systematic way to put that lead into your system and maybe even send them some educational information right so you're going to change the game there so a lot of different options for these collect leads plays but what's important is that in your playbook you have the right play to plug the holes for your business now I want you to stop and think about this in your business if you plug this hole and you knew that on your website you had a compelling offer to collect leads for people that weren't ready to buy today what would happen in your business how many more visitors that are going into the trash today would end up becoming leads and eventually become customers now let's talk about the gap between leads and customers the statistics show that some of between 7 and 12 contacts are required before somebody is going to actually do business with you the sad truth is that most businesses stop following up after one or two follow-ups which means most of the opportunity that you have in converting leads into clients is gone it's this way well not a problem because we're going to put in place a play that's going to eliminate this waste so in your business if you are implementing a lead magnet play to collect leads a natural follow-up play over here for converting clients would be a lead magnet follow-up play okay so we'll say lead magnet follow up what is this well you've collected the person's information in a form right and now what you're going to do is you're going to have a follow-up a series of maybe emails and text messages that go out to every single person that requested that lead magnet and you're going to follow up with them to try to get them to take the next step in your buying process now for you that might be a sales consultation like maybe you want to offer a free consult or it might be that you're actually offering the product that you sell but we've got to have that that thing in place so that these new leads are not slipping through the cracks anymore we're plugging that hole now if you have a lot of old leads maybe that have been on your list for a long time and they're not very engaged you might need to do a re-engagement play you might need to send a special offer out to try to get those leads who have been disengaged to re-engage so there are a lot of opportunities here for you the most important thing is that you have the right place to plug your holes and I want you to imagine this what would happen if you knew that every time you got a new lead they were being followed up with consistently and automatically so that they were getting those 7 to 12 touches every single time that's what lifecycle automation is all about the last area we've got to focus on is making sure that our one-time customers always become fans here's a scary statistic up to 65 percent of people who claim they leave one business for another say that they do it because of indifference it's not because they had some horrible experience with the business or they hated the product there just wasn't ever a relationship established it was just a kind of a myth experience we're never going to let that happen in our businesses again because we're going to put some plays in place okay every one of you needs to have a new customer welcome and wow play in place so new customer welcome and wow this is going to make sure that when new customers come in you're communicating with them the most important things you're anticipating their needs you're welcoming them to the family you're establishing a relationship that's going to last forever so we've got we're collecting the leads we're following up to convert them into new customers right we've got our new customer welcome and wow campaign that's coming in here and then we know we want to turn these one-time customers into repeat sales so we can also add plays over here that would generate repeat sales referrals and reviews so I want you to stop again and imagine your business imagine what would happen if you started to plug all of these holes you want to go from 10 to 20 sales this is the way you do it you eliminate the waste that is dragging your business down by implementing your life cycle automation Playbook keep was designed specifically to help you automate your customer life cycle if you'd like to take a look and see what keep can do for you sign up for a free trial today