Holes in Your Sales Funnel = Wasted Advertising Dollars

If your advertising isn’t getting you the results you want, there are a couple of possibilities to consider:

1. There’s something wrong with the advertising, or

2. The advertising’s fine, and something’s wrong at your business. prospects are entering your sales funnel, but you’re letting them slip away before they become customers.

The story below illustrates the second possibility. I’ll preface it by saying that if you’re in the home improvement business, my wife and I are great customers:

  • Our house is old, so things break all the time
  • We have no mechanical skills whatsoever, so we’ll pay to have someone else do the work
  • My wife takes care of the details, and hates to negotiate, so most jobs are quite profitable for the contractor.

We needed a new backyard fence. My wife called Company #1, a semi-regular advertiser with my company. A salesman came out, took some measurements, and promised to call with an estimate. We never heard from him again.

So she called Company #2, who has also advertised with my company. The receptionist took her name and number. Nobody ever called back.

Company #3 doesn’t do any radio — just newspaper. But we needed a fence. A call to Company #3 brought a salesman to our house. He took the measurements, went through all of our options with us on the spot, got the order, scheduled the job, and walked away with our deposit check. He’ll get the rest of the money on Thursday when his crew installs the fence.

Companies 1 and 2 may decide that the economy sucks, radio doesn’t work, or both. But either of them could have had our money if they’d practiced the most basic follow-up strategy. How many other jobs did they lose because they weren’t paying attention?

How many jobs are YOU losing?

If you’ve got a sales funnel story — a hole you found and plugged in your own system, or a problem you had with a vendor who didn’t seem to want your money — I’d love to hear it. Leave a comment below.

 

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Categories: Advertising, Customer Service, Marketing, Phil Bernstein, Portland advertising, Portland marketing, Sales
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3 thoughts on “Holes in Your Sales Funnel = Wasted Advertising Dollars”

  1. Okay, I have to admit, I looked in the mailbox last night and there was a *postcard* from company two, saying that someone (a named rep) would call me. Don’t know how long ago it landed there, but there hasn’t been a call. It’s been a couple weeks.

    Just wanted to be fair with the facts…

    The Wife

    Reply

  2. So we know that they kept your information long enough to send you a postcard. Did they neglect to give that information to a salesperson for follow up? Or did the salesperson just forget to call?

    There’s a hole somewhere in Company 2’s funnel — they need to find it first, then fix it.

    Reply
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