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?

Are you on the way to becoming a client magnet?

Are more employers working with you this year than last? Are you earning more of your organisation’s income from employers this year than last? Are more employers working with you for a second or third time?

You want to be in a position to answer all of these questions positively.

If you’re achieving this sort of success and, if you’re hoping to achieve even more success in the future, there’s a good chance that you’ve accepted that client attraction marketing really works.

That means you’re applying the lessons set out in this series of posts.

• You’ve defined a market that you are going to serve.
• You know who you want to attract to work with your organisation.
• You’ve made sure that prospective customers from your chosen marketplace can find you.
• You’ve made sure you are memorable in a positive sense when customers interact with you.
• You’ve created a great website that really is the hub of all your marketing and business communications.
• You’re building your list of prospects and customers.
• You’ve created a customer pipeline.

Congratulations. You’re making progress.

Getting business to come to you is vital in the modern world of FE because, for the future, you’re likely to have limited amounts of money to spend on more conventional approaches to promoting your organisation.

If you adopt client attraction you can do more with less, in one sense so the cuts in budgets may be less serious for you than they would be otherwise.

However, you will have costs. It’s just that your costs will be calculated in different ways.

• Client attraction costs in terms of staff time.
• Client attraction costs in terms of skills. You definitely need people who have skills that can be in short supply, for example, webmaster skills.
• Client attraction doesn’t need to cost a great deal in terms of financial outlay.

Client attraction helps you to build your business for the longer term, so it’s a valuable approach to marketing, to promotion, to selling, to business building and to building long-term relationships with employers.

That’s why, now you’re on the road to becoming a client magnet, you’ll want to continue travelling in the right direction.

This is the tenth and final post in a series about client attraction basics.

Have you created your customer pipeline?

If you’re going to succeed in bringing in more employer business and more new employer business, too, you'll need to differentiate your list of customers and potential customers.

A good way of doing this is to think about employers as making a journey through your customer pipeline.

• Customers enter the pipeline via a wide funnel.
• They then travel along the pipeline.
• When they reach the end of the pipeline they have become your advocates and promoters.

Many employers will never get that far down your pipeline.

However, you need to know where employers are in the pipeline to help you to decide how to manage your relationship with them. You need to do this for several reasons.

• You deal with employers in different ways depending on where they are in your pipeline.
• You allocate differing amounts to resource to managing your relationship with them when they are at different points in the pipeline.

In marketing terms the employer enters your pipeline as a suspect.

When you know more about the employer and you think there is a possibility of doing business with him or her, then the suspect becomes a prospect.

When you do your first piece of business with the employer, he or she becomes a customer.

As you build the relationship the customer becomes a client. You start to tailor what you do to meet each client’s expectations and offer a differentiated set of products and services.

Clients with whom you work well become your fans and will, if asked, promote you, or give you a reference.

A few of your fans will become your advocates. These are the employers who take the initiative in promoting you. They are always looking for opportunities to let people know what a great job you do. These are the people who reach the end of your pipeline.

Your customer pipeline is an essential element in building your business.

Have you worked out where each employer sits in your pipeline? If you haven’t, you need to.

This is the ninth in a series of ten posts about client attraction basics.

Are you building your list?

If you’re going to attract more business you need a list of prospects and customers and a good list, too.

I’m not talking about the lists you buy in or the lists on your database.

I’m talking here about the lists you build – one address at a time.

Good lists take time to build because when you build these lists you are starting to build relationships. As you know building relationships takes time.

So how many lists do you need? There are three that will really help you to attract more business.

Your opt-in list

Your most important list is your e-mail opt-in list. This is the list of people who have agreed that you may contact them from time to time and they welcome your contact.

That doesn’t mean they have given you permission to send sales messages to them every day. In fact, you’d be wise to limit the number of sales messages you send out to this list.

The people who have opted into your list have given you permission to send them interesting and useful information that they will value. That’s what they want and that’s what they expect.

Your challenge is to make sure that your communications fulfil their expectations because you can lose people from your list as well as gaining them.

Your Twitter list

You also need to be on Twitter.

Attractmorebiz is on Twitter. Find us here.

I’m on Twitter. Find me here.

You need to follow people and organisations that you are interested in and which serve your marketplace. As a result some of them will follow you.

Again, the rule is to make your tweets interesting and that means avoiding too many sales pitches. It also means remembering that Twitter is at the heart of the social media revolution. Social is the word to remember. You’re creating links and relationships with this list. Be social. Communicate. Interact.

So get onto Twitter and get a Twitter list going.

RSS Feeds

This is a different sort of list, and it’s strictly not your list. You don’t directly know who is on this list but you can check how many of them there are.

When you blog – and, of course, you should be blogging as well as tweeting and building up your opt-in list – you should offer your readers the opportunity to subscribe to your RSS feed. This means that each time you post an item on your blog they will be notified about it.

The majority of people still subscribe to blogs via e-mail, which means your blog post ends up in their e-mail inbox, so remember to make sure that your RSS feed allows for this type of subscription.

All very basic stuff, but it will pay off in time and if you keep working on list building.

We have a growing opt in list and a monthly newsletter that is starting to be passed around. We know this, because people join the list as a result of receiving a newsletter from a colleague.

We are growing our lists of followers on both our Twitter accounts.

And, yes, statistics for our RSS feed show increasing numbers of subscribers.

These are the ways to build lists and to build business. Make sure you are building your lists in all these ways.

This is the eighth post in a long-running series about client attraction basics.

See also: What should your website do for you?

What sort of customers is further education looking for?

When I run workshops to help providers from the further education world to enhance their approaches to employer engagement I always ask the question in the title.

Sometimes the question isn’t taken very seriously. Sometimes the response is given in a way that suggests I’m asking a stupid question.

Sometimes, in fact most of the time, the response is:

“We’re looking for organisations with money to spend.”

Good start

Thinking like this is a good start, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough.

Just because an employer has money to spend doesn’t mean he or she is going to spend it. Neither does it mean that the employer will choose to spend any money with an FE college or with a private training provider.

You need to do a lot more to identify prospects you may wish to develop relationships with, and ultimately gain business from, before you are in a position to answer the question in the title.

Do they have a problem?

Individuals and employers are more likely to spend money to help them to address problems than they are to spend money on things that are nice to have.

Unfortunately, lots of training and many qualifications are viewed by employers as nice to have, but not essential. The world won’t stop turning just because someone doesn’t have a qualification or isn’t given time off to attend a development programme.

Yet, employers will often throw money at the business problems they are facing and take action to deal with the issues that impact on their abilities to achieve.

They will look for a solution once they find a problem that is affecting their ability to achieve their objectives.

This presents you with a very clear question to answer.

Are you selling solutions to problems?

If you think you have the answer to this question, there’s another that is even more important.

Are you selling solutions to the sort of problems that employers are interested in solving?

In order to give a positive answer to the question you need to stop selling training, qualifications, NVQ, Skills for Life, Apprenticeships and so on as development programmes for individuals. They need to become solutions to business problems.

You’ll get more interest from more employers if you make this shift.

Are they willing to do something about their problem?

The answer to this question is, of course, about the real difference between needs and wants. An employer might have a whole series of needs, some of which you might help him or her to identify via your organisational needs analysis.

However, until the need is clearly pressing, that is until the need is keeping the employer awake at night, it’s going to be an uphill job selling a solution to the vast majority of employers.

Finding employers with money to spend is relatively easy. Finding employers who are prepared to spend their money on your solutions is the difficult bit.

Can they make up their minds?

You must have experienced this sort of situation. You’ve been to see the employer. You’ve got on well with the people you met. You’ve put together your proposal and sent it off . . . and nothing has happened.

You ring. You e-mail.

Nothing seems to be happening.

Well, you need to look to yourself first, and check that you really have been speaking to the right people. If you haven’t been working with the decision makers, then they probably don’t even think there is a decision to be made. After all, you haven’t put a proposal to them. There’s a proposal somewhere in their organisation, but they aren’t looking for it and they have no commitment to doing anything with it.

Then there’s the issue of the choices you have left the organisation with. Have you given them too much choice or too little? Have you made the various options clear? Make a point of checking that your prospective customer knows what the choices are and the benefits of each.

What’s the decision-making process in the organisation? Is it complex and convoluted? If it’s a long and drawn out decision-making process and you don’t have a strong advocate on the right committee, your proposal may never be reviewed in any detail.

When you find yourself in any of these situations make a judgement. Are you going to get anywhere, or should you write off your efforts?

Good customers

Employers who have problems they are prepared to do something about, and who have the money to buy a solution, are to be found in all sectors of the economy. They are there in the public sector and in the private sector. There are people in large organisations and in small ones who are prepared to commission work from colleges and from other provider organisations.

Your challenge is to seek them out, and build a relationship with them, because these are the customers you really are looking for.

This is the seventh post in a series of ten about client attraction basics.

Are you marketing in the dark?

Lots of provider organisations are.

Marketing in the dark is the act of spending money and other resource on marketing activities and not having any idea which approaches are working.

Marketing in the dark is a very common activity.

• Just how much business does your prospectus bring in?
• If you didn’t have a 16-18 prospectus, would you still fill your programmes?
• If you stopped advertising in the local papers, or if you increased your advertising, do you have any sense of how your change in behaviour would affect your income and enrolments?

Metrics matter.

You really do need to measure the impact of what you’re doing, if you’re going to know where to spend resource on bringing in more business.

So what do you measure at the moment?

What do you need to measure to be sure you are using your marketing resource well?

Leave your comments below.

This is the sixth post in a series of ten about client attraction basics.