I am back on the fundamentals that have helped me to successfully perform the education process, in this blog I will talk about the automation portion of the education process.

Vision this, a lead comes through a web form on your website, the next automated step is they get an email explaining just enough about your company and your products that they want to click on the embedded link you have given them inside the email. The prospect clicks on the link and then downloads information from your organization. Two days later they get an email inviting them to a special event where you are giving an in-depth look at your products and offerings. In order for them to participate they have to fill out a full information form with name, email, address, phone number, etc. The prospect attends the special event and invests an hour of their valuable time.

It is now at this point that you should assign this lead to your human sales capital. Your sales person is now playing where they can win, as they are now working with a prospect that has raised their hand and stated I am a much better qualified buyer.

By following this qualification approach you are now educating your prospects much better, you will be running prospects through your funnel like water, and you will need LESS sales people to achieve much higher results than before. In fact may I dare say you could “double your sales” with the same amount of human sales capital you have today!

How do you educate your leads & prospects today?

Through my many years of working with small businesses, just like you, one thing I have come to realize is that “Cash is King”; and everything in the business revolves around budgeting for the current cash on hand and the expected incoming cash. Therefore, “wants” are a luxury that most small businesses cannot afford; and as we know there is a big difference between a need and a want. Small businesses have to be smart with the investments they make in their business, and they are constantly evaluating each investment for how much of a return they can make on those investments.

Typically a small business evaluates headcount (whether it is a full-time employee or a contract employee) as the largest capital investment they make. And it is easy to relate back an additional headcount to the amount of time it will save the “Owner” or how much top line revenue they can make by adding this person. Unfortunately, this is exactly the wrong way to look at this. What a small business should be asking themselves is “Will an automated system free up my time, save me the cost and headaches of hiring additional people, and still perform all the necessary tasks?”

How do you automate your business today?

I am going to break from my sales process blog for a minute here and share with you an awesome experience I had this past weekend.

I attended the Mark Victor Hansen Mega Business event this past weekend in Irvine, CA, as a keynote speaker. I got to meet incredible people like Bill Bartmann , Cameron Johnson and Marshall Sylver , and even better yet I got a chance to hear them speak.

I found the seminar to be incredibly powerful for the entrepreneur, all the amazing knowledge they were getting in a short 3 days was amazing. The “Pearl” I took from the event was this, everyone has the tools for success, it is whether or not you choose to use them.

How cool is it to be able to be on the same stage as the man who wrote “Chicken Soup for the Soul”, what an incredible experience.

My last blog was about the theory of educating your prospects, as I stated I am now going to share with you a few fundamentals that have helped me to successfully perform the education process.

The first fundamental of educating your prospects is to know “Your prospects will buy from you when they are ready to buy, NOT when you are ready to sell to them” (quoted from Michael E. Gerber , E-Myth ).

The second fundamental is “80% of your prospects will buy from someone within 12 months”

Third fundamental is “Of the 80% that buy, on average only 1% will buy from you if you aren’t following up with them on a regular basis with valuable, educational, pertinent and timely information”

Fourth fundamental is “It takes on average 7 touches to get a prospect to take action with you, so don’t give up after three attempts”

Fifth fundamental “Make your prospects follow your educational process, map it out and build the educational process before you attempt to launch”

What education fundamentals have you found that work?

Since it has been a while since my last post I will recap quickly what the first blog was about. Three simplified high level stages of a sales process, education, buying facilitation, and closing. In this blog I will start to break down the first stage “education”.

In my experience 40% to 50% of every sales process and sales cycle is educating your prospects to get them to take action and enter into the buying facilitation process with your organization. How do most companies facilitate this education process? Through the use of human capital, a lead comes in, sales person calls, and starts throwing up all the great things their company can do for them. Sorry to say this is exactly the wrong process to follow.

Don’t feel bad, this is the way I have always done it as well, until now. After coming aboard at Infusion I realized the error of my ways. Why use human sales capital (the most expensive capital within your organization) to qualify your leads? Why not make your prospects jump through a certain number of hoops that you the buying facilitator deem appropriate before a sales rep gets engaged.

In order for this to work the business owner that is selling a product has to realize they must deliver valuable, educational, pertinent and timely information to their prospects in order to gain their trust and build the relationship.

If you are reading this blog and you are a VP or Owner in an organization I would ask you to stop reading right now and make a list of all the great things your company does for your customers.

This is your "Value" and exactly what you should be educating your suspects about. In my next blog I will cover the fundamentals of educating your suspects along with how you can automate this process.

How do you educate your suspects?

I have spent a lot of time trying to simplify for my own internal sales force as well as the outside partner community I work with how to look at what is called the “Sales Cycle”.

In order to simplify the process I have come up with three cycles most sales go through as they enter the top of the funnel to the point they come out of the bottom of the funnel.

Below is my simplified version of the sales cycle I am using:

Education

Buying facilitation

Closing

By looking at the sales cycle in these 3 simple steps I am able to start breaking down each stage into many steps and better educate my sales people as well as our partner community on how to treat new suspects, best avenues for education, when to plug in sales capital, and knowing when to close the deal.

I will be breaking down each stage in separate blog postings as I go along, however before I do that I am looking for your feedback, do you agree a sales cycle can be broken down into 3 categories?