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

Your customer pipeline - why it matters!

Do you have a customer pipeline? Does having a customer pipeline help you to attract more employer business?

These are all good questions, and they’re exactly the sort of questions that providers are asking, especially since most people in FE know they need to bring in more revenue from employers.

Your customer pipeline matters

First of all, your customer pipeline really matters because it’s a mechanism you can use to help you to be clear bout how likely employers are to do business with you in the near future.

Employers at the mouth of your pipeline are least likely to make a purchase now. That’s because they are just contemplating beginning a relationship with you. Maybe they’ve agreed to attend an event. Maybe they’ve signed up for your newsletter. They have some interest in you and what you do, but the relationship is just beginning.

When you’ve begun building that relationship and employers know you better they’ll be more likely to buy. That is as they travel down your customer pipeline they’ll be moving closer to that first purchase.

Customer relationships also matter

People buy from people.

People also buy from those they know, like and trust.

Helping employers to move along the know-like-trust continuum is the same as moving people down your customer pipeline.

The concept of the customer pipeline helps you to build this relationship at the right pace. It also helps you to avoid the wrong sort of selling.

You want all your employers to move a step further along your customer pipeline every few weeks. You don’t necessarily expect them to buy from you immediately.

Thus, once they’ve signed up for your newsletter, you want them to read it and to start clicking links in the publication. When they know a bit more about you, you want them to get in touch with you and possibly get some information sent to them. A little bit later you want to visit them or establish personal contact with them . . . and so on.

With each activity the employer is moving further down the customer pipeline and further along the know-like-trust continuum. It’s a slow, but often very rewarding, business.

Bombarding someone with “Buy now!” messages will send them out of your pipeline quickly. Helping employers to come to know you better and to like what they know about you will help all aspects of the relationship building process.

Monitoring your customer pipeline

Probably the best customer relationship management task you can undertake in the near future is to work out where employers are in your customer pipeline. That way you will know what sort of contact they are likely to value, and what will drive them away.

Monitoring your customer pipeline will help you to differentiate your approach to marketing and to developing and managing your relationship with individual employers.

Doing this well will be repaid with more business. That’s why the customer pipeline really matters.

See also: Have you created your customer pipeline?

Client Attraction Basics - the ten posts

The ten posts in this series will help you to get started on the task of attracting more business or help you review your current practice.

Apply the advice in all the posts and you’ll be making progress.

The series started with a post entitled:

Can you attract more business now?

This is the best place to begin because this is something you’re likely to be asked to do over the coming months and years.

The second post asked:

Are you turning business away?

If my experience, lots of providers do turn business away, whether they realise it or not. Calls aren’t dealt with correctly. People’s enquiries are lost in the system. Employers are affronted when they’re treated like students and so on. Therefore, the question raises a lot of issues for providers.

Posts three and four dealt with the impression you make on employers.

Will they remember you?
What sort of first impression do you want to make?

Both posts asked you to think of how you are perceived by employers.

Post five focused on your website.

What should your website do for you?

Today so many people visit an organisation’s website before making contact. It’s important to create the right impression on line. If you don’t, you may never receive a direct contact from an employer.

Post six was about metrics.

Are you marketing in the dark?

Do you know what your marketing efforts are achieving? Lots of providers don't, so they don't know if they're spending their resources wisely.

Posts seven, eight and nine focused firmly on the customer and on some of the key tasks associated with building a strong customer base.

Post seven asked:

What sort of customers is further education looking for?

Post eight asked:

Are you building your list?

Post nine was all about the customer pipeline.

Have you created your customer pipeline?

The final post asked you how you were progressing with the task of becoming a client magnet?

Are you on the way to becoming a client magnet?

This is the key question because the modern ways of doing business are built around getting business to come to you.

Which are the most important of the ten client attraction basics?

For me the website and the customer list are vital elements. If you don’t have a good website, you won’t convert interest into action often enough to build your business as quickly as you would like. If you don’t have a list of prospects and customers, you’re not really in business.

What do you think?

Which is the most important of the ten client attraction basics as far as you're concerned?