Sales Funnel Inversion – The Niche Marketing Technique
Make your selling process more effective and get higher quality by reducing the number of prospects you target.
There’s no doubt that today’s sales environment is callous for businesses across all industries and sectors, so it isn’t too surprising that many of us tend to think a problem can be solved by throwing more identical procedures at it. Increasing prospect lists is a common sales tactic used by many businesses, and ramping up how many people your sales team speaks to daily is a commonplace technique. However, bear in mind that the wider you cast your net in the attempt to drive up your sales, the more money, time, and resources you spend, and the returns on your investment may be quite limited.
<span style="font-weight: 400;">This is where sales funnel inversion could solve your problems.</span>
<b>What Is The Problem With The Standard Sales Funnel Model?</b>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The standard sales funnel has long been a staple in the industry, so why should you turn it upside down? The answer lies in doing things differently to increase returns on investment and boost your sales figures exponentially. </span>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The regular sales funnel model typically involves speaking to large numbers of prospects even if they may not require your service or product – for example, all your existing customers. Your sales team will generally use the brief time that they spend with those customers trying to persuade them to purchase something they probably neither want nor need. Essentially, this means you’re throwing your product at a lot of people hoping that in some cases it’ll stick. This just wastes your energy, time, and resources while resulting in quite a low hit ratio.</span>
<b>So, How Will The Inverted Sales Funnel Help?</b>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">When you turn the regular sales funnel upside down you focus on only selling to fewer people who are extremely likely to want or need your service or product. This, in turn, means you expend fewer resources and a lot less time on closing a deal.</span>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Of course, some people argue getting in touch with fewer prospects leads to less sales. This sounds plausible. So, why is this not the case? </span>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Salespeople naturally become nervous with the inverted sales funnel concept since they think they’ll automatically end up making fewer sales. However, think about this: Imagine you typically get in touch with 1000 prospects and make 20 sales. When you turn your sales funnel upside down, contacting 50 carefully targeted prospects using a personal and knowledgeable approach, it’s still possible to make those 20 sales. If you even lose one, closing only 19 deals, you’ve still saved all the extra time you would have spent on talking to those 950 extra prospects. Also, when this time is used correctly for more niche selling and marketing, it’s possible to increase your overall sales significantly.</span>
<b>Will This Approach Be Better When Taking With Existing Or New Customers?</b>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">You’ll find that this approach works equally well with both. If you’re launching a brand new product you’ll find it more effective when you market first to your niche audience rather than attempting to sell it to everybody initially. Select those prospects who are most likely to appreciate and understand the uniqueness of your offering and how it can meet their requirements. If you do this, you’ll develop greater credibility as well as a better reputation with early adopters, and then you will be able to harness this to expand your marketing strategy to a larger audience.</span>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">This approach makes sense too when you’re talking about your existing customers. As an example, if a telecommunications company uses cold calling for its whole customer base to try to sell its new long-distance out-of-country plan, even if they haven’t made any of those types of calls, they’re just wasting both financial resources and time. It would be better for them to utilize the data they have already about their existing customers to target those who regularly make long-distance out-of-country calls.</span>
<b>How Do I Get This Marketing Approach Right?</b>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">To be successful with niche marketing you first need to have a clear understanding of the elements that set your business as well as your products and services apart from your competitors. When you can identify these elements and articulate them, you can then progress onto the next stage – defining the best customers for what you have to offer. As soon as you’ve defined this, you’ll be able to build a personal and highly targeted marketing and sales strategy that sells to this defined group while building up valuable relationships at the same time.</span>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">One more essential thing to do to get this marketing approach right is to get your marketing and sales teams to work in closer conjunction so that marketing activities will support the sales teams’ targeted approach. Promotions, advertising, and any other type of marketing tool should also directly speak to that identified niche market that is being canvassed by your sales team.</span>
<b>How Does This Approach Benefit My Organisation?</b>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The benefits of taking this approach to sales and marketing within your organization are multiple. Not only will this approach lead to considerable cost savings and optimization of resources for your business, it will also lead to increased sales overall. Not only that but there’s another vital extra benefit – your brand reputation will improve in the long term.</span>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Consider the amount of damage your brand’s reputation is suffering each time your sales team irritates somebody with junk mail or cold calls that try to sell products to them they simply don’t need. It’s worse to do this to existing customers since you should understand their needs better. By simply turning your standard sales funnel upside down you can avoid this problem, saving your company’s reputation and helping to build stronger relationships with existing customers while reaching out to a broader spectrum of potentially interested prospects who already need what you’re trying to sell.</span>
