the goose

I’ve been happily playing a lot of backgammon to while away the evenings here at Piehole HQ.  It was all going pretty well, mostly because P had never played before and was ‘easy meat’.  It didn’t last however.  She soon figured out something that I hadn’t.

As your players more around the board in a game of backgamon, they become more and more valuable.  It takes effort to get pieces all the way around the board, therefore the ones that are almost there have a lot more ‘energy’ stored up in them.

Why?

The closer a piece is to your home board, the less energy (or throws) it takes to get them ‘home’.  Self evident you might think.  It takes at least 3 ‘throws’ to get a piece from the opponent’s board to mine while it takes less ‘throws’, the closer the piece is to home.

So what has this to do with my sales funnel?

Prospects that have signed up to the email newsletter are less valuable than prospects that have picked up the phone and called.  Prospects that have called us are less valuable than those than have bought.  Those that have bought are less valuable than those that have upgraded. Customers that have upgraded are less valuable than those that recommend your services and refer customers.

Now consider how you spend your marketing budget (or dice throws if I really need to keep up with the analogy).  Why would I spend the same amount of money and/or effort marketing to ‘leads’ as I would ‘referers’.  Referrers are more valuable and yet, at the moment anyway, we don’t really do much to thank them for their loyalty.  They are on the same email list as all the others, they get the same promotions but we don’t really do anything special to look after them.  This seems wrong.  These guys are worth more therefore we should think about spending more on marketing to them.  For example, maybe we can provide them with better discounts or upgrades.