The Fragile Journey: Where Marketing and Sales Processes Break Down

Do you ever get the feeling that you're doing everything right when it comes to marketing and sales, but just not getting the results that you should?

Marketing is a long and complicated journey, and there are a lot of things that can go wrong along the way. In this article we are going to identify the touchpoints that you should be checking to identify where the issues are in your journey.

---

Part 1: The Leads

Step one to getting a paid ads campaign rolling is getting some leads in the door, but not all leads are created equally. Some questions to ask yourself about your leads:

How much are my leads costing me?

Am I targeting the right people?

Is the offer I'm making attractive?

There's no hard an fast rule for how much a lead should cost, but if you're running a META ad for leads and they're costing more than $25 each then you probably have some issues somewhere along the line. Things to look at include:

• Target demographics - are you talking to the right people?

• Ad copy - Is what you're saying getting through to anyone?

• Creative - Are the visuals of your ad catching your audiences eye?

Part 2: The Responses

At the end of the day marketing and leads is a numbers game, and you're never going to book every lead that comes in the door. So what should you be looking at as a success?

In our experience, a good response rate is 10-12% of leads talking to you. So for every 100 leads you're engaging in the sales process with 10 of them. Some questions to ask yourself about your initial contacts:

• Are your leads qualified? When you speak to them are they are the point where they are ready to talk about a sale?

• How prepared are you for the initial call? A bad first contact is worse than no contact. Make sure your messaging is clear, persuasive, and talks to the potential clients needs.

• Are you getting a lot of no-shows? What is your confirmation process like, or reminders. How far from your first call is your next meeting?

Part 3: The Sales

It all comes down to this. Will your work pay off or will the time, effort, and money be wasted.

In our experience you should be looking at closing the sale on 65-70% of leads that agree to a meeting time with you. Sales is the hardest part of this job, especially in the wedding industry, where we are looking to care for the clients emotional needs as well as their service needs.

If you're not reaching this level of closed sales, some things to consider are:

• Has my lead qualification process been effective? In a sales setting You should only be talking to people who are ready to purchase

• Is our sales pitch resonating with them? Are you communicating your unique selling points in a way that speaks to them? In the wedding industry the choice is often not "do I need this thing?" but rather "who do I choose to provide this thing?"

• Are there any barriers in my sales process? Are there any objections or concerns from your prospects that you're not adequately addressing?

So what's the rub here? At the end of the day You need to be looking at making sure the numbers work for you. The first step to making sure no money is being wasted in lead acquisition is working out where your leads are falling off.

If you need help sorting out any issues with your lead generation, Get in Touch and We would be happy to help you analyse your system and see how we can help