Getting Sales Is About Keeping The Funnel Full

How often do you hear about a new company and immediately decided to go out and buy their product or service? Not often or more likely never.

Keeping the sales funnel full means that you have to have customers in all stages of the sales process in order to have regular sales. You need customers who;

Just found out who you are
These customer will not buy from you today or tomorrow. But they might and it is possible that they will in the future. This the initial awareness, and customers will only do business with people they know. Maybe they'll even refer you!

Hear about your for the second time
Maybe they see your advertisement or their neighbour told them that your company was great. This increases interest and the chance that the potential customer will buy as they are thinking about you for a second or third time.

Want to learn more
They have heard enough about you that they are intrigued and wonder if you can actually do what you say you can. The customer is ready for more information regarding how their particular needs can be met. Here is where you have to make sure that there is little risk for them to buy.

Purchase
Only after all of these warm up steps are they finally ready to buy something from you.

Some sales processes take minutes, some hours, and others months. I've heard of sales processes taking years, but with persistence and getting in front of the customer, you are able to move them through the sales funnel.

If you only focus on one part of the funnel at a time, then you would have a lot of sales once in a while, but things would not be steady. This is tough on your cash flow (and your nerves!).

If you only focus on one part of the funnel at all, you may never close a sale as you have to keep customers moving towards the close.

But the biggest mistake is just not having enough in the funnel! The math is simple.
100 potential customers hear about you
10 potential customers want to learn more
1 potential customer buys

You have to go after at least 100 customers, to get to that 1 sale. So remember that to get your sales off the ground, it is going to take a lot of work!