This is a good place to give a name to this concept of two-step marketing. Some call it the sieve or the cone, I prefer to think of it as “The Funnel.” There are always two fronts every marketer must confront:
- Getting New Suspects, Prospects and Customers, and
- Converting More Sales From Existing Prospects And Previous Customers
Imagine a giant funnel. Every new lead you get goes in the top. Some of them make a purchase to get in the funnel, others simply respond and give you their name. Do you give people a good reason to give you their personal information? Do you have a systematic method of converting them?
Our first job is to keep filling the top as much as we can with qualified leads (that’s why the main objective is to capture their name!). Simultaneously, we have to be constantly developing backend systems to convert these people and grow our Lifetime Customer Value.
With the Cash Flow Generator, I created a system that brought in ungodly amounts of new prospects and converted them to the tune of $1952 each, in their first year! It didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen by accident! It took understanding this principle and focus, lots of focus, to make it as super successful as it became.
How can you build your funnel? Take out the obstacles to qualified leads! Don’t add unnecessary qualifications… after all, you can always create new products to fit different price points. Use a free or paid offer, but test the offers like anything else. Having thousands of Free Offer leads may not be worth as much as a smaller number of ones who have voted with their wallet. On the other hand, eliminate any unnecessary qualifications that don’t have anything to do with their real qualifications (interest, desire, etc).
Build an army of satisfied customers, and your core audience will buy anything you come out with.
Out of your database you will see an army emerge… an army of customers who trust you and believe so strongly in you and your company, in your products and services that they will literally buy almost ANYTHING you tell them to. In one case, of 255,000 customers I developed, I had a consistent army of between 6-7000, depending on the offer. What did that mean to our company? What can it mean to yours?
25% Of My Army Would Buy Anything We Offered, The FIRST Time We Presented It To Them!
This doesn’t just happen, it takes training. I trained our customers to buy, and buy repeatedly. We trained them with every campaign. I used EVERY package that went out the door to sell them… there were NO wasted efforts!
- NEVER send out ANY correspondence without some call to action offer.
- Always include a cover letter, brochure, lift note and sales letter in every product ordered.
- Always give them something special: an offer or an incentive that’s theirs to keep, regardless of whether they choose to keep their purchase or not.
Do this, and you will have an army of your own to fuel your growth! When you identify your core army, the only things left to do are figure out the new products or services you can sell them, and create the marketing campaigns to do so!
