Funnels and You (Sales 101 for Artists)
“Hey man, what’s in your funnel for the weekend?” my friend asks me.
“My pipeline is pretty full – I might have an opening late on Sunday though,” I reply.
What I’m being asked is if I have any availability to hang out with him. I responded that I have a full pipeline, meaning that there’s a lot going on and I don’t have much time. This brief exchange makes perfect sense to us both, having worked together in sales at a startup company years ago where words like funnel and pipeline were drilled into our malleable young heads on a daily basis. Over time we started to incorporate this sales jargon into our regular speech and (more importantly) thought patterns, but for someone who hasn’t had much sales experience, particularly many of my friends and associates in the art industry, it might sound like we’re speaking some strange dialect of English.
The idea of a funnel is so critical for sales success that it is forever lodged in my brain. In my humble opinion, if you are a professional artist seeking to make a full-time living from your artwork, funnels should probably be lodged in your brain too.
The idea of a funnel is simple – I’ve used an illustration here. Essentially all unqualified leads start at the top of the funnel and as they move lower they become more qualified at each level until, at the very bottom of the funnel, the prospect becomes a client. Typically the large majority of leads or prospects won’t make it all the way through, but there are several strategies to increase the number of those that do make it all the way through the funnel. I’ll talk about those in a moment, but first I want to explain what goes into the funnel: leads or prospects.
Prospects and Leads
Leads or prospects (I use these terms interchangeably) are essentially anyone who can use your service or product. Once they have expressed interest in your work, they become a hot or a warm lead. Someone who attends an art fair or a gallery where you are showing your work and talks to you about how a particular piece would be great in their office or home – that’s a hot lead. A property manager that you called who wants you to come in and take a look at their lobby as a potential place for one of your pieces, that’s also a hot lead. The same goes for people who contact you through your website or over the phone.
A friend of mine once told me that he believed as much as 90% of his sales were made before he even picked up a phone or sent an email. This is because prospecting – finding potential clients – was a major part of his process. He knew that if he focused on only putting the most qualified, likely prospects and leads into his funnel, he would greatly increase the number of prospects that make it through the funnel to become new customers.
Increasing the quality of leads is one of a number of ways to increase the percentage of closes, or new business. Another way is to increase the total number of prospects entering the funnel, which means reaching more people. This can be done in a variety of ways but some of the most popular and cost effective ways include attending networking events, creating and marketing a newsletter and Internet advertising and marketing. In the case of Chicago Art Leasing one of the things we are doing is sponsoring the local TV show Fear No Art Chicago, which has proven to be a very good way to reach thousands of highly qualified new prospects. I’ll save topics like networking, marketing and advertising for another time. For now, suffice it to say, it’s critical to make sure that you have both quality and quantity entering the top of your sales funnel.
Opportunities and Proposals
Once a prospect has become a lead, the next step is the specific opportunity or proposal. If you are dealing with a private buyer looking for one piece of work for a specific place in their home, odds are good that they will either invite you to test the artwork in their space, visit your studio, or ideally, purchase the artwork on the spot. If you are bidding on a public art opportunity, a hospital (or a health care system of several hospitals), a bank with 300 branch offices or another very large opportunity, you will probably have to get acquainted with the proposal process.
This point in the funnel is all about addressing the need and interest of the prospect. They have indicated that they are interested and hopefully you’ve asked a few questions to make sure that they are qualified. If so, ask them about what they’re looking for… something to keep in mind is that usually if you ask them what they’re looking for they will tell you. There’s no magic or complicated science involved – just let them guide you to a sale. This portion of the process can take as little as a few minutes or as long as months or years depending on the nature of the opportunity. The length of time it takes for a prospect to make it through you funnel is also referred to as the sales cycle.
New Clients
At last, you have a new client and you can move on to the next one, right? Well, not exactly. If you don’t gather information about your new client and stay in touch with them from time to time, you might be missing future opportunities. An individual or a company that has purchased your work once is far more likely to do so again.
Keeping the funnel or pipeline full is important – for every opportunity you complete or close, there is one less opportunity in your funnel. It’s easy to focus only on what’s towards the bottom of the funnel, but constantly prospecting and putting new leads in is the only way to have a steady stream of new business.
In Closing
Ideally the more opportunities you work on, the better you will become at each step in the funnel – from prospecting to closing, and thereby increasing your chance of winning each lead. Not all opportunities will end up as new clients though. If you pay extra attention to how and why opportunities did and didn’t convert to new business, you will also become more adept at keeping leads on track in the future. I’m a big believer in the notion that we learn far more from our losses than from our wins.
That’s all I wanted to impart with this short piece – an introduction to the idea of a sales funnel or pipeline for those of you who may not have encountered it before. I’ll be working on sharing more information with you soon and in the mean time I’m always happy to answer what questions I can.
Kind regards,
Josh Ginsberg
Chicagoartleasing.com
