Just a quick thought today… Do you understand your market’s natural sales cycle, when related to your type of services and/or products? Or, have you spent too much time determining YOUR sales funnel? Do they match up? I believe one of the biggest mistakes we can make as business owners is to set up our sales funnel, with a serious lack of understanding our market’s sales cycle and the new implications of the empowered, social customer. When they are not aligned, you end up trying to herd people through, what seems to be a senseless maze, and end up lowering your conversions exponentially.
So what’s the difference between the sales cycle and my sales funnel?
Every audience, every segment within your audience, has a natural sales cycle they go through when making a purchase. For some products and services its short and straight-forward, for others it’s lengthy and complex. It’s a process, a flow that happens leading people from awareness to purchase to loyalty, you’ve seen it before, here’s an example of the visual you should get:
Image courtesy of SiliconAngle
The sales funnel is what YOU set up, a sort of navigation for your market from initial contact to purchase to wherever else you want to send them along their journey. It’s a path you determine, HOPEFULLY based on a deep understanding of your market, their sales cycle, and their empowered, social consumer state. You’ve seen it before:
Image courtesy of DataDial
Hmmm…
Does the sales funnel you’ve determined to be the most productive, REALLY match up with the natural sales cycle that your market goes through? Something to think about… I’m just saying 
[Note: This is just a basic question, in a later post, I'll discuss why I believe the entire idea of a sales funnel has to change, to match the new sales cycles impacted by the social web... but we'll save that for another time.]
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Looking forward to connecting with you!
Maria 
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