Flipping the Sales Funnel
08/29/2007 Post By: Andrew Kamphuis
Last week Gareth posted a good little blog post on funnels and tracking sales.
Most sales people are familiar with funnels. You start with prospects at the top, some of the prospects hop out, and a small portion funnel out the bottom as customers. (In Gareth's graphic from one of our customers, it started with 847 shopping carts, and ended in 178 people checking out).
Most marketers spend time trying to figure out how to steer more prospects in the top of the funnel, knowing it's a numbers game, and more prospects in at the top of the funnel means more sales will come out the bottom.
One of my favorite authors, Seth Godin just released a short (and free) e-book entitled Flipping the Funnel (PDF Link). He talks about flipping the funnel and turning it into a megaphone, by basically using your customers to market for you. In three sentences the book summary is: "Turn strangers into friends. Turn friends into customers. And then... do the most important job: Turn your customers into sales people."
There are several 'Web 2.0' examples in the book, and all in all it's a great read (probably takes about 5 minutes to read the e-book). Here is the link again.
(There is a fairly lengthy example/sales pitch for Seth's own product called Squidoo in there - but don't let the sales pitch for Squidoo spoil all the examples and the message)
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