The first part of a split session on Tuesday morning at LSA19 focused on the challenges associated with acquiring small business customers in a noisy and competitive market. The session was presented by Dan Olson, CEO of UpCity.
Dan kicked off the session by detailing how the traditional customer acquisition ‘funnel’ has transformed into a cycle (shown below), that begins with the engagement phase.
During the early phase of the stage, it’s important to create speaking opportunities for leads and have a web presence that utilizes organic search fundamentals, business listings and social media. The later phase includes optimized lead capturing and email nurturing.
The convert stage entails moving quickly on leads and not stopping at the first phone call. It’s important to remember that building the “recommendability” of your products and services starts sooner rather than later.
The final stage, delight, is highlighting your brand narrative through quotes, case studies and reviews. He told the audience to ask themselves, “How do we delight customers? How do we design great experiences where they are delighted and ready to tell the next person about it?”
To conclude, he demonstrated the significance of word of mouth by providing several statistics, including one from G2Crowd and Heintz that said 92% of B2B buyers are more likely to purchase after reading a trusted review, as well as one from iMPACT that only 33% of businesses are actively seeking out and collecting reviews.
