Have you ever played 6 Degrees of Separation of Kevin Bacon?  It’s a fun game where the objective is to trace back how people are connected to Kevin Bacon based on the films they have featured in and co-stars they have worked with.

What is interesting is that the same logic can be applied to a prospect or a client. Let’s start with prospects. We often take how a prospective client has come to our organisation or business for granted, as it’s usually one of the first things they tell you i.e. ‘I heard your radio ad’. If we were to dig deeper though, we would find that it was not just the radio advert that led them there. There most likely were several points of contact; such as advertisements, conversations or social media posts that lead to that prospect finally reaching out.

No Client Analysis

From my experience in digital marketing and SEO, there were times when I would have clients claiming that digital marketing wasn’t working. They took their prospects at face value based on that primary response to the question of where they had heard about them. Yet when my team members traced back exactly how the prospect had interacted with the company web page, social media, along with pay-per-click ads, my team unearthed what led that prospect to make that call. The client could then see how all those various interactions and points of contact had finally translated into that initial contact from the side of the prospect.

Where Did The Referral Come From

Companies allocate huge amounts of money to their marketing campaigns and yet they don’t spend a sufficient amount of time analysing if the marketing they are doing is actually yielding results. More often than not they don’t learn how to trace back to the initial point of contact or to map out how many interactions it took for the prospect to make that first call or send that initial email.

The same must be considered when we look at a deal that is closed. We get excited when a sale is concluded, we congratulate each other on closing it without taking a deeper look at the timeline between the initial point of contact and the deal being closed. Depending on your specific industry, product or service, there could be many steps involved in closing that deal. The most important of which are adding value and building trust which then leads to building a lasting relationship with the client. We often forget to retrace those steps and understand the reason why the client chose your service, product or even a particular representative over everyone else.

How many degrees of separation does it take for a prospect to reach out? How many steps does it take for you to close that deal?