Your customer pipeline (2) - Building friendships

Your customer pipeline is a great tool for helping you to decide which employers are most likely to work with you and hence which employers are going to be of most value to you in the long run.

Used well your customer pipeline will help you to differentiate one employer from another and to make a judgement about how much resource to spend on building relationships with particular employers.

In simple terms you can use your customer pipeline to help you to work out how much value to place on an employer and hence how much to spend marketing to that employer.

Turning strangers into friends

Employers who don’t know you are strangers.

It’s really difficult to sell to strangers. You don’t know anything about them. You don’t know about their needs and wants. You don’t know what keeps them awake at night. You don’t know if what you’re selling could be what they might want to buy.

Marketing to strangers is costly and not particularly rewarding. It’s hit and miss. You might be lucky, but then again, you might waste a lot of time and money trying to build a relationship with someone who has no intention of buying from FE – ever.

FE providers who don’t use the principle of the customer pipeline are doomed to sell to strangers forever, because they don’t take steps to convert strangers into friends. They don’t take steps to get employers into their customer pipeline. They don’t monitor employers’ progress as they travel along the pipeline.

Friends, on the other hand, are a little bit closer to you.

They are beginning to learn a bit about you. You know a little bit about them, too. You also know just how close you can get to them, because they send out signals, and if you’re on the ball, you pick those signals up.

In marketing terms friends are happy to learn more about you but they’re probably not ready to buy as yet. They will probably sign up for your newsletter. They might follow you on Twitter.

Make a hard sell to them, or bombard them with marketing messages, and they’ll disappear. They’re not that close to you as yet.

Yet, they’re in your pipeline. That means you can develop relationships with employers, provided you take care.

Pay attention to your friends

When you’re looking to find new employer customers it will make more sense if you focus on your friends.

Help them to travel a little bit further along your customer pipeline. Help them to get to know you better by using the knowledge you already have of them to tailor what you offer them. Just make the offers without frightening employers away.

Pay attention to your friends for other reasons, too.

It will also be cheaper to market to them than trying to convert more strangers into friends. You already have established ways of getting in touch and keeping in touch, so the hard work of relationship building is done.

You hope your friends will become customers in the near future. That means you hope they’ll do business with you. It’s a reasonable expectation. You’ve taken time to build the relationship. You know they like you a little, so there’s more chance of making progress. You’re not talking to strangers.

After that, provided you manage the relationship well, they could become clients, making multiple purchases from you, or fans, or advocates and so on.

Use your customer pipeline to differentiate one employer from another

You can differentiate all the employers who are in contact with you using the concept of the customer pipeline.

It’s worth doing.

Remember the basic points in the chain or in the pipeline: suspect, prospect, customer (makes a single purchase), client (makes multiple purchases), fan, advocate and lots of other types of employer in between. Vary your approach to marketing depending on where an employer is in your pipeline. Targeted marketing will be more effective. It will also save you money.

As you plan your new campaigns remember that clients are worth more to you than customers. Fans are worth more than clients Advocates are worth more to you than just about any other customer.

They’re all worth more to you than strangers.

When you start to think about it, your customer pipeline should encourage you to spend more time, money and other resource on your existing employer customers than on new customers.

It’s strange then, that so many providers focus on turning more strangers into friends, than on helping friends become customers, clients . . . and so on.

When you think about it, focusing your marketing efforts on strangers doesn’t really make sense ….. does it?

See also:

Your customer pipeline – why it matters