Lesson: How Easy Is Your Process?

0:02Hi, and welcome to this week's episode of the Epic Entrepreneurs podcast where we are all about helping business owners just like you achieve success. So we don't do fancy smancy. We don't do flashing lights. We don't do a lot of things that a lot of podcasts will do. These are just real stories about real people and their entrepreneurial and business experiences. We go into their wins, their challenges, and their learnings. So we hope you enjoy it.

0:37Welcome to this week's episode of Epic Entrepreneurs powered by Action Coach Growth Partners. You likely went into business to have more freedom and flexibility so that you could spend more time with your family, do more things or travel or enjoy your hobbies or whatever it is that you like to do in your spare time. We're here to help you find better ways to make more money, build better teams and get that time back so that you can have that freedom and flexibility. We'll help you simplify things and make sense of business, investing, and wealth building so that you can be epic and achieve all your dreams and goals.

1:10And now, enjoy the show. Today, I want to have a bit of a chat with you about the shift in marketing. Have you noticed that marketing and sales has changed over the years? It used to be that, for example, to buy a vehicle, you had to go into a car dealership, talk to a salesperson and they would show you a bunch of features and benefits and all this stuff and maybe that's maybe you didn't even want to hear all that but that's and and so a lot of car dealerships still haven't shifted to to something different but here's some interesting statistics by the time people get to you by the time they would come into a car dealership or by the time they would actually even go to your website they are already 70 to 80 percent sold I want you to keep that about 70 to 80 percent of the way what that basically means is you if you can just keep them on a good velocity keep them on a good path it's yours to screw up so now here's the other stat that's staggering.

2:2340 % of the population wants to buy without talking to anyone. No one. And there's another very high percentage that only wants to have one interaction with a human. I want you to keep that in mind. So most of us would rather have less interactions with humans than more. So that begs the question, A, number one, how easy is your process? Well, first of all, do you even have a process? So do you have a sales process? And if you do, then what's it like for people? What is the customer experience that your customers go through to actually go from attention interest desire to actually take an action and buying your product it's an interesting question right you know so have you taken a look at your or have you even surveyed your customers to ask them what it would be like to what it's like to buy from you because they're going to tell you what they're frustrated about so the first thing we can do is ease their frustrations if we can eliminate those bottlenecks and you've all had them right where you get to a point and then they want you to fill out I mean how many of you have gone to a website instead of just giving you the answers they want they want you to fill out a contact form you know book in for a session or take you to you know and look we're guilty of it too we all have it we all can make it easier better you know how many clicks does it take to buy something on Amazon sometimes one sometimes two guess what guess who are guess who we're being compared to guess who our competition is it doesn't matter what you're selling people are buying experiences now and what they want to be able to buy and is efficiency they want to be able to click it you can you can I mean you can buy a car on your phone now.

4:22Now here's what the car dealerships have done. You can go on your phone, you can go on your computer, you can get on a website and you can design your car. You can decide what color it is, you can figure out all the engine, the specific, if you're into that sort of thing. You can design your car right there, you can press a button, order it, you'll get a call and basically they're an order taker at that point. So selling has involved to, you know, if If someone comes into your funnel and they're 70 to 80 % of the way, should you take them through an entire long process of educating them on it?

4:58So marketing has become education and communication. There's always been education and communication. Now the education piece of it is way out in front. So if you're going to have an effective sales process, then the marketing needs to get people 70 to 80 % of the way if the marketing frustrates them. So here's the question. When they go to your website or they look you up online, does it have answers to the questions that they're looking for? What's one of the questions they're going to ask? What's the price? You might as well tell them what things cost. And you say, oh, well, then my competitors will know my price.

5:36Well, let me give you a hint. Your competitors already know your price. They already know what's going on. If you don't think that's right, they have tons of ways to do it. We used to do mystery shopping in one of my businesses. We'd call up everybody in town and ask them how much brake pads cost, right? And they'd give us the price and we'd say, all right, well, we're in line. It seemed pretty crazy at the time, but we always wanted to make sure we were in line or a little bit higher, actually. So here's how a sales process works. So I'm going to give you an outline for a sales process. And, you know, just the outline.

6:19And it has to be modified for every kind of business. So first, you have to ask for permission. So would it be okay if I go over how I'd like things to go and what we'd like to achieve today? I just ask permission. Then they say yes. Then you've got to get them positioned well. so in our positioning we say something like which outlines the process essentially that says so first I want to get a feel for where you want to be personally so I'm going to ask you a whole bunch of questions about where you want to go I'm going to ask you a whole bunch of questions about where you are now and then we're going to talk about what's in between which is basically we're going to outline strategies and tactics to help you get from wherever you are to wherever you want to be and then i'm going to outline some solutions and if it makes sense to both of us then i'm going to ask you to make an investment today and we'll get started right away would it be okay if we work that way so you can see i've just outlined the process i've outlined the positioning and i've outlined what's happening now if they have some objections to that process then they'll let me know right then and we can deal with those lessons so permission process will offer the solutions if we can agree on a solution see and I've got that that's your that's your that's your sales process permission process solutions agree then we align and we ask for permission again it's pretty simple so that's what the process we got now here's the key how easy is that process for someone?

8:05How far can they get in that sales process on your website? Can they answer questions? How much is the investment I'm going to make in whatever it is you're selling going to be? How much is it? What is the price? They want to know that. How does it all work? They want to know that. So whatever it is that you need to find out from your clients, find it out and just answer it on your website or in your blog or somehow that's easy for them to do maybe it's a video but we want to you know whatever they're asking we want to go ahead and answer it so that it's easy to do business with us you know is there a button on there that says buy now if that's appropriate for your business now I know a lot of you have customized solutions but great I want to meet with a salesperson.

8:56That's a pretty big step for people these days. If 40 % of them don't want to talk to anybody, holy cow, it's a really big leap for them to want to meet with anybody for anything, even if they're 70 or 80 % sold. So we've got to make that initial meeting with a human very non-threatening because what we have to do is move people from know us to like us to trust us. So if they're going to trust us enough. Our website and our marketing needs to move people to trust so that by the time they actually talk to a human, they actually do trust us. And I think video is a very effective tool for that. If you want to increase your conversion rate, we've got to move people from conversations to conversion.

9:45So in the old days, I mean, you wouldn't go into a bar and say, and you if you're a guy and you're and say hey you know why don't we get married you wouldn't say that to a woman you know you want to have a conversation with them first you're going to have a lot of conversations with them you got to build up know like and trust it's the same in business so we start with conversations these days we don't start with hey buy my thing because i mean does that turn you off or hey buy my car i know let's have a conversation let's find out what you want and what your needs are. Let's take some time to get to know people.

10:24That's what people want. And a lot of that can be done with automation. So here's your home fund. Take a hard look at your process. Take a hard look at your marketing. Say, hey, is my marketing getting people 70 to 80 % of the way down the pipe where they're ready to talk about it? In our case, to talk to a human. We're a human to human business. So we're going to need to talk to human is our process does that for example does this pod is this podcast a good way you're getting to know me better you get to have a feel for what we do if this if this feels good to you then maybe you're likely to have a conversation with me okay if it doesn't feel good to you that's okay we're not gonna have a conversation and that's okay but for those who and that's exactly what we want I want you to think about that for a minute that's exactly what we want we want people to be attracted to us that are attracted to our program and people repelled who aren't going to be repelled so if you're attracted to this and you'd like to learn more about it you know check out our website there's a lot of stuff out there check out our free trainings check out my YouTube channel there's a lot of information out there that's free to you and then you know if you'd like more then reach out you know you have to click one button you have to put your name in to to to let us know who you are so that we can be in touch and get what we call a strategy session.

11:50And that's exactly what it is. We talk about what it is, where you'd like to go, where you are now. We get you some strategies and tactics. And if it makes sense for both of us, then we'll get started right away, just like I said. So, yeah, I'd love to have a chat with you. I'd love to talk to you about improving your marketing and your sales process to get people 70 % to 80 % of the way and then make it super easy for people to buy from you. So enjoy the learning. I'm grateful for you. And until next time, all the best. Thanks for joining us for this week's episode of Epic Entrepreneurs. Here's four things you can do.

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