Flipping the funnel

Posted by Dave at 1:18 pm

You what? Seth Godin is an interesting guy - he describes himself as bestselling author, entrepreneur and agent of change. He's written some fascinating books about marketing, change and work in general. One of his latest idea is 'flipping the funnel.' The funnel is the classic marketing description of how you get customers - you pour lots of 'prospects' in the top, and some drip out of the bottom as customers. He's written a very short ebook that you can download here (in PDF format) that says that companies should flip the funnel to become a megaphone. In English that means using your customers to become your saleforce - on the basis that your customers hopefully :-) out number your sales team, and that they are some of your most passionate advocates. So help them tell the world about you! Two of his suggestions are blogs (Well, you're reading it!) and encouraging your members to use del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service. Don't worry too much about what that means - essentially people (like you and me) use it to 'tag' websites that we find and think are useful, and other people (like him and her) then search to find those useful websites. So, you might stumble across Zopa, and tag it with the words lending, borrowing, people, money, finance, blog etc. Simple huh? Here's an example - search for 'lending' and up comes Zopa! (With Prosper in second place.) It also tells us that 220 people have tagged Zopa with the word 'lending' - and you can see who they are - cool isn't it? Here's the pitch - if you think Zopa is a good thing, go to del.icio.us, sign up, and start tagging Zopa. Lets see if we can stay ahead of Prosper! And 'Thank you'! What else can do to help flip the funnel, and make Zopa members into advocates?

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 9th, 2006 at 1:18 pm and is filed under Non Zopa, Sales and marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.