One Sherpa

I haven’t met a business owner who hasn’t had this experience sometime in their life so if you’re feeling like this today then you’re not alone.

Thousands of business owners have felt like this and often for very different reasons.

Here’s a few examples you might relate to:

• Cash flow is just not flowing because customers won’t pay their accounts.
• Staff are leaving and you feel as though no one is left to help you.
• Technology is great except when it won’t work and you feel hostage to it.

So what’s the answer!

There is a well known saying ‘The night is always darkest just before the dawn,’ which is true for all of these circumstances.

If running a business was really easy then you’d probably find more people who were doing it.

Think about this:
When you’re half way up a mountain and feeling tired don’t look up. You’ll only feel discouraged at how far you’ve still got to go. Look back down the mountain and encourage yourself with what you’ve already achieved.

When you feel discouraged it’s time to look back at everything that you’ve achieved to date.

From experience I can tell you that it’s not until you have achieved a few things that you’ll feel discouraged and want to give up. In the early part of your business you’ll be so pumped and motivated that you’ll have no need to reflect.

It’s only when you have been on the road and achieving quite a lot does it seem as though everything is too hard and you want to give up.

So what’s your experience on this?

How hard is it to get a person to move from being a completely cold lead to a raving customer?

I don’t know about you but it seems to me that it is getting more and more difficult to convince people to buy quickly because they have so much choice and also there are so many marketing messages that people are exposed to today.

I have previously spoken about ‘two step’ versus ‘three step’ marketing and it is this longer process which means that as business owners we are faced with more ‘touches’ for potential customers before they are prepared to respond to one of our offers and buy.

Now you might be asking what are the seven touches?

Are you saying that every customer must have seven touches before they will buy?

Seven touches is the number that I use when thinking about how I’m going to bring a cold lead through the process to a raving customer.

I know that the touches can be different for different situations but the most important thing is that I’m thinking a significant number before I can expect any revenue.

Now let me ask you this. Could you justify seven ‘face to face’ meetings before getting a sale?

Think about how difficult it is to set up a face to face meeting when someone doesn’t want to meet you.

This is an expensive way to go from both a Time AND Money perspective.

So there has to be a better way!

If you think about it, the first few touches are much better being done in a digital format.

Customers can research information that you provide them in a non confrontational way.

No one wants to be ‘sold to’ and therefore engaging them digitally can have a far better effect of warming a customer than the awkward nature of a face to face meeting when the potential customer is just not ready to buy.

What’s your experience on this?