Flipping the Funnel: Company Edition (1 of 13 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
Flipping the Funnel: Company Edition by Seth Godin. Copyright 2006 by Do You Zoom, Inc.
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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Flipping the Funnel

Give Your Fans the Power to Speak Up

(Company edition)

By Seth Godin

In a book called eMarketing, which I wrote in 1995, I said something like “There are only four kinds of people: prospects, customers, loyal customers, and former customers.” The book was ahead of its time, and I was wrong.

For a book called Permission Marketing, which I wrote in 1998, the subtitle was “Turning strangers into friends and friends into customers.” My timing was better, the book was a bestseller, but I was still wrong. Or at least incomplete.

Flipping the Funnel finishes the sentence. Now, I might just be right:

Turn strangers into friends.
Turn friends into customers.
And then... do the most important job:
Turn your customers into salespeople.

The math is compelling. Most of the people in the world are not your customers. They haven’t even heard of you, actually. And while many of these people are not qualified buyers or aren’t interested in buying your product, many of them might be—if they only knew you existed, if they could only be persuaded that your offering is worth paying for.

But how on earth are you going to get them to know about you?

We’re living in the most cluttered marketplace in history. Whether you are selling steel I-beams, scientific glassware, or soccer balls, people are better at ignoring you than ever before. You don’t have enough time to get your message out.

Not only that, but you can’t afford to interrupt all the people you need to reach. The cost of running an ad that gets seen or an ad that gets clicked on or a billboard that gets remembered is higher than it has ever been. You just don’t have enough money to get your message to all the people who need to hear it.

And not only that, but you don’t have enough people. Your sales force isn’t as big as you’d like it to be, and all of your best salespeople are running flat out—without selling as much as you’d like.

But wait.

You have assets that are underused: your friends and your customers.

I define your “friends” as the prospects you’ve earned permission to talk with—even though they haven’t turned into customers yet. And your customers have crossed the Rubicon; they’ve been converted from total strangers to interested friends, and then all the way to dedicated users of your product or service.

And there’s a bunch of them.

You’ve certainly got more customers than salespeople (at least I hope so). And your list of permission-based friends probably dramatically exceeds your list of customers.

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