Robin Blandford
CAMBRIDGE, UK - Every business needs a marketing engine - without one you would have no revenue, no new customers, and after a while your current customers would unsubscribe. Decisions For Heroes has a very distinct marketing heart that we have developed over the last few months. This is how we move people from leads to the heart of our marketing engine "The Repeat Customer" - the very centre of our world. This is where we want people.
It's not about 'being marketed to' - that's not how it works. It's about us having relationships with people, making sure there's as much love as possible between us - that we know them well, and they know us even better. People do not enter this process as a number and get processed through a faceless system - rather it's how we categorise groups of people at each stage, to make sure they're receiving a level of love we're both comfortable with. Danger: Do not over-love someone too early.
Once we have a lead (in green), we start think of them as suspects, first we make sure they are 'Aware' of us - that we exist. Now we suspect we might like each other, is this unrequited love? Maybe we love the idea of having them on-board or vice versa but it wouldn't be good for either of us. At this stage we have a free trial to offer anyone we think fancies us to try and move them to the next category.
Now they're a prospect. We are prospecting each other - they'd like a bit of us, we'd like a bit of them. The question mark here signifies we need more work to go into this phase - we don't have a whole amount of standardised material to share - it's all individual emails and phone calls to move them up to Champion.
We've fallen in love. Champions are our internal lovers - our secret affairs. People who we're now in a relationship with, but the rest of their group isn't so sure. At this point we have fundraising and finance documents to make the internal sale to their board easier. We also have lots of business case material, to make that jump to a nod to go ahead as easy as possible. We'd like to add more tools here as it's the biggest step. We're currently playing with presentations and print-outs that can be downloaded and distributed locally.
The verbal agreement is like our engagement, we're officially a couple. If everything goes well there will be wedding bells in the near future. The question mark here is to show we'd like more payment options such as local direct debits to make this phase easier. A finance document explaining how billing would work would be a nice extra.
I do. That's it, we're married. On payment we send out a lovely welcome pack to each of our teams. It includes some nice t-shirts and some other goodies for the team. We're trying to signify we're not here for your money - we're here for the long haul - lets keep this relationship burning brightly.
Ahh, now we're living together, how's it feel? As our entire existence is paramount on trust, happiness, and love - repeat monthly subscriptions - it is absolutely key we stay in love. .Our repeat customers receive fantastic support, three personal check-ins a year to make sure everything is ok, on-going live video webinars, tips newsletters, and most importantly become part of the feedback process to choose the new features - which we always deliver to exceed expectations.
The concept of the Heart Of Marketing diagram was adapted for us by inspiration taken from Behind The Cloud by Marc Benioff, Salesforce.
