How Your Marketing & Sales Funnels are like an Accordion
I made this reference in a conversation this past week, and I though the concept deserved more air time, so here goes.
I am by no means an Accordion Expert. But there is one thing that I DO know about Accordions; and it's that the one machine can both expand and contract and still stay the one machine.
Your Marketing and Sales Funnels are the same.
Or rather, they SHOULD be.
So let's explore where we go wrong in trying to create certainty in the funnel (a precise "sales cycle") and what we could do differently to create more MUSIC 🎵
FAIL: An expected sales cycle LENGTH
So many Marketing and Sales teams fall into the exercise of trying to define the LENGTH of the cycle instead of the critical milestones.
If we're looking at an Accordion, there are a defined number of folds (called Bellows). When the system is closed, it's the same number. And when the system is open it's the same number. But there is a substantial difference in it's length when it's open vs. closed.
And when we're only looking at the length, we end up taking an average.
But when you're actively playing an Accordion, you don't actually spend a huge amount of time at the average. And if you were DRIVING for the average, your song would probably sound pretty weird.
So, what if, instead of looking at the TIME LENGTH of a sales cycle, we stopped to investigate the Bellows? And did some experimenting there?
CREATING MUSIC: Leaning into the movement
In an Accordion, sound is produced when air moves through the bellows to vibrate metal reeds. And yes, I had to look that up 🤣
So, in our Sales and Marketing Funnel, let's consider the air the people that we are looking to help. And let's consider the Bellows the critical stages in our process. And the vibration of the reeds is then the result (ideally a sale).
But it's not STEADY air that creates the sound in an Accordion. It's the MOVING air.
There are a lot of Sales and Marketing systems that measure the STILLNESS in the system. How many people are at THIS stage, or THAT stage. How many people RECEIVED an email and how many of them ACTED on it.
While this might seem like movement, we're not actually MEASURING the movement, we're measuring the stillness.
If you asked most Sales or Marketing Peeps what the MOMENTUM of their system looked like, they probably wouldn't know what to tell you.
And when we talk about "measuring what matters", that is a big problem.
But what if, instead of defining stages and then trying to measure who is moving between each stage and when, we BROUGHT people along with us.
What if we could actually FEEL the movement within the system...
...precisely because people are CREATING it?
Sales and Marketing Teams spend so much time figuring out how to track things that DON'T show momentum that we run out of time to do that activities that DO.
Really what we need to understand is how to move the AIR in the system. And the answer?
HELPING YOUR CUSTOMERS.
Spend more time WITH people, helping them. Or very minimally, a greater percentage of your time than you spend interacting with systems or tech stacks.
Because HELP is the Bellows in a Sales and Marketing system.
And you can either spend a lot of time, or a little time between how helpful you are.
I'll let you intepret how that influences trust 😉
How are you moving AIR through your Sales and Marketing Funnel today? Is there an opportunity to do that with more momentum? Let's chat!
