Today I want to talk about the difference between relationship selling, v’s direct selling come off the back of several conversations that I’ve had this week, after the development of my recession proof sales strategy blueprint.
One thing that I’m seeing happen more and more in the marketplace is how people are trying to attract more leads, so they can obviously make more sales. Yes, we need to have leads coming through the door in order to make sales, that’s a given.
But the way that that’s done now is changing.
I’ve made several videos recently around touchpoints. Why touchpoints have gone through the roof. Depending on which marketing company you talk to, the average person ranges from 21-33.
That’s 21-33 times your prospects need to hear from you or see you in order. To be comfortable enough to listen to you.
Then the next step, is having seven actual interactions before they’re comfortable enough to buy from you! Crazy hey…!
So we’re now talking 28-35 different touch points.
To me, that’s a ridiculous amount of time and energy and effort that’s just wasted in, in generating leads. So, it got me thinking and I Googled, “sales costs for new leads versus existing leads”.
It costs you up to x5 times more to generate a new client, than it does to retain an old client.
If you can increase your customer retention by only 5%, you will then increase your profits by a further 25% …!
Businesses who work on referral business have a 70% higher conversion rate on those leads than cold generated direct marketing or selling, and these customers have a 69% faster closing time than cold marketing as well.
Plus, 92% of people that are referred to us, trust us more than any form of cold marketing.
These are impressive stats to get your head around.
The fact is, we still need to develop our legs of marketing, but the landscape has clearly changed on how we do that and moving more away from direct response, to nurturing and relationship building.
If it costs x5 times as much to generate a fresh lead then to retain a customer, where should your focus be leading into, during and post a recession?
Simple really. Capturing leads from multiple sources is important, to then put top of funnel to nurture, educate and build trust through constant messaging, which should all be automated.
Once the trust levels go up, we then move into the relationship building stage. This is where customer retention and following that, referral business comes into play.
Remember you are increasing your sales conversion rates by 70% naturally on a referral. This allows you to invest more resources into after sales care and save on resources going into finding new business.
So, I look at all these different methods of cold marketing that companies are employing, and they’re engaging all these marketing companies. They’re spending tens of thousands of dollars to do try new campaigns to attract. That’s NOT what you want to be doing when cashflow becomes tight.
Simply putting, it’s time to get strategic on who you are niching down to, who your target audience is, what their real problems are, what their needs and wants are so that you can deliver on that.
The next step is building referral partners with, then strategic partnerships.
It goes without saying, improving our communication and connection through sales training, mindset training and leadership training become paramount.
That is the shift from old school marketing to new school marketing!
