Typical vs Ideal Customer Lifecycle

Today we're gonna talk about the way that most people market their small businesses. The typical customer lifecycle is broken. In fact, this is, this is one of the main reasons why so many small businesses fail just after they get started. So what I want to talk about is 3 specific areas of waste that we see happening in small businesses. And I wanna offer up to you a framework that will allow you to recapture some of those lost opportunities and take your business to a new level. So the typical customer lifecycle is a, is kind of a 3-part approach where businesses go out and they engage in activities that will attract people to their business. You might have activities that you do online with your website where you're trying to drive traffic. You may have customers who are referring you or you're, you're trying to get word-of-mouth interest in your business, or you may have other direct advertising campaigns. All of that energy is to get interest in your business so that you can apply your sales process. You may have a very short sales process or a very long sales process, but you have some method that you use to acquire new customers. So let's say, as a little case study here, let's say that you spent $1,000 and about 10 hours of time in efforts trying to generate interest in your business and that that produced 100 leads and that you converted 10% of those leads so you created 10 new customers. That's kind of a typical flow that might happen. Well, what happens if you want to say, "Well, I'm not happy with 10 customers. I want to get 20. I want to double the number of customers that I'm getting? Well, usually where small businesses go, the levers they pull is they're gonna come back over here and say, well, why don't I double the amount of money I'm spending or the amount of time? Or why don't I double my sales staff? Well, what I'm gonna share with you today is that there are some options for doubling the number of customers that you're getting that will be far less expensive than just going around and starting to double things. So let's talk about some of those areas. The first big area of waste in small businesses is lost traffic. So how many of the people that are coming to your website today, or that are hearing about you through their friends or word of mouth or responding to your direct advertising, how many of them are not ready to do business today? And so they just sort of leave, right? They come to your website and they leave, or They hear about you, then they forget about you, or whatever. Well, what if there was a way for us to capture the information of those people in a way that we could follow up so that when they are ready to move forward in the process, we're there and we're following up with them? We'll talk about that later, but this is the main area. Most people don't have a mechanism for that. Most businesses have a bunch of traffic either coming to their website or calling them on the phone or coming into their store and they're not capturing it. They literally have traffic that is going straight into the trash can. So let's say we do capture a lead and now they go into our sales process. Well, most businesses are awesome at closing up what they would call hot leads, right? These are our hotties. We do a great job. Nobody has a real problem with that. It's kind of a natural instinct. The problem is if somebody's not a hot lead, most of the time they get labeled as a bad lead. Well, they're not a bad lead, they're just not ready to buy today. Because they're not ready to buy today when you need to make a sale or create sales doesn't mean they're a bad lead. Now granted, some of them are bad leads that are never going to buy, but the principle here is it takes up to 7 contacts before a consumer is ready to do business with you. They want to, they want to understand you, they want to have interactions with you before they're ready to do business. So it takes this amount of time. Well, the problem is most small businesses stop their follow-up between 2 and 3 follow-ups, which means you've done a little bit of the work, and what's likely going to happen is that, that prospective customer is going to now go off and do business with somebody else, or just forget about you altogether and never do business with anybody. So this is a significant problem and a major source of waste, lost leads. What if we had a system and an approach for taking these leads that weren't hot today and taking them all the way through to the finish line? We'll talk about that. Okay, the third area of waste— this is a huge one— is we are literally losing customers. What does that mean? Well, it means a couple different things. Sometimes a customer will just up and leave your business. They stop interacting with you and buying from you. And this is sad. Do you know the number one reason why people choose to leave one business in favor of another? You might think it's a massive customer service failure or they hate the product. No, actually it's sad. It's really sad, especially for small business owners. 65% of people report that they leave one company over and go to another one because of indifference. In other words, why did you leave, you know, company ABC? I don't know, I just didn't— well, what that means is we have not done the work to make sure that every new customer knows we love them and we care about them and they're getting great service. And that is an easy problem to solve. It is a travesty that small businesses are losing so many customers. It's not just repeat sales, it's also referrals. A lot of the word of mouth that brings new people in happens because we nail it for our customers. So these are the 3 distinct areas of waste that may be happening in your business: lost traffic, lost leads, and lost customers. So instead of just implementing the typical customer lifecycle in your business, let's turn that into the ideal customer lifecycle. Lifecycle marketing is a framework that we created at Infusionsoft to help you do exactly that, to get rid of the waste that we've talked about, the wasted traffic, wasted leads and wasted customers. There are 3 distinct phases inside of lifecycle marketing: your system of attracting new people to your business, your system of selling, and your system of wowing. So the first phase of lifecycle marketing is the attract phase, and there are 3 components to this. The first thing that we're gonna help you to do is we're gonna help you identify who your target market is, who are the best customers, who are the people that you should be out attracting. You might look at the customers you've already attracted and see what the commonalities are among them. We're gonna get really clear about who we're targeting. The second thing we're gonna do is we're gonna make a little bit of a shift to the way we attract interest to make sure that we're not losing out on the traffic. And so what we'll do is this: we'll help you identify places where you can go and find people that are your targets, but rather than just letting go of them if they're not ready to move forward, we're gonna create— we're gonna use this tool we call a lead magnet. That's why we've got it drawn up here. The lead magnet is a thing that you create that has a lot of value for your target market, and we're going to offer that to them in exchange for them giving you their contact information. So you're going to collect a lead in exchange for this. So they'll— that might look like a web form that shows up on your— a lead capture form that shows up on your website where you capture somebody's name and email address and and possibly their phone number. Okay, so now we make sure that we're not just having people come to our website and then go into the trash bin. That's the, that's the very high-level overview of the attract phase. Then we move on into the sell phase of lifecycle marketing. So this is where we're going to help you to avoid losing leads that we've been losing before. So we're going to have a system of follow-up that specifically focuses on those leads that aren't hot and aren't ready to buy today. Here's what that might look like. What that might look like is we create together an automatic follow-up system where we've just captured a lead. Now we're going to send that person a new email or an email to follow up with them, followed by potentially a phone call that might go out by you or one of your salespeople. Maybe another email goes out. We can do things like SMS messaging, and the whole goal of all of this is to create those interactions. Remember we talked about the, the 7 contacts that are necessary. We're gonna create that system in your business so that like clockwork, you know that every new lead that comes in is getting the follow-up that they need to be turned into a customer. Now, it's not reasonable to think that we're gonna convert everybody just because we start to follow up with them. Some people just aren't ready to buy today, so we'll have another approach for longer-term nurture where we'll continue to, to stay in touch with these people over time in a longer-term nurture program. But all of this, the goal of this, is to turn more of these leads that have been just going into the trash can into customers. Now, what are we gonna do for all the new customers? Well, we want to make dang sure that every single brand new customer that comes into your business is wowed. That's why we call this phase of lifecycle marketing WOW. So we're gonna make sure that like clockwork we have a new new customer wowing process. That might also look like some follow-up. We're gonna lay the love on thick and have a series of automatic follow-ups that go out. In this case, we might send them a direct mail package. They're a brand new customer, it might make sense to send them a gift. We're gonna send them emails and follow up and make sure that they know that we love them. And then we're gonna not just stop there, we're gonna have ongoing follow-up systems in place as well. Now all of this Obviously is going to create a customer that buys more, but we also have specific systems that we can put in place that will help you to collect more referrals because that's one of the, one of the main elements of the wow phase is getting referrals. So lifecycle marketing is a system that will help you to annihilate these areas of waste in your business and to have in place, we're gonna fill this entire system that makes it so that you have a business that is literally going to the next level automatically. So this is what lifecycle marketing might look like in your business. Now you might be sitting there and saying, Scott, cool, but number one, where am I gonna learn how to do all this stuff and where am I gonna find the time to implement all of these things? Well, the good news is that is why we exist at Infusionsoft. We've been doing this for 13 years and we've helped thousands of small business owners to implement lifecycle marketing. We know what works, we know what doesn't work, and we're here to help. The other thing is our software, our technology, is built specifically to help make this process right here be something you don't have to think about. Our technology allows us to be completely automated, which means all of these things happen automatically without you having to think about it, and we'd love to help you with that. I want you to stop before we close today and ask yourself this question: What would it be worth in my business if I had a system that completely eliminated all of these trash cans? I knew that my— everybody that was coming to my website, I was offering something of value to capture those leads. They weren't just bouncing off. And all the leads that I have today were being followed up with systematically like clockwork to be turned into customers. And that every new customer felt the love and they were being wowed and they were giving us referrals. What would that be worth to you and your business. We want to help you and your business succeed at Infusionsoft. That is why we exist. So please come to our website, we have lots of information about lifecycle marketing, or pick up the phone and talk to one of our consultants so that we can help you to take your business to the next level.