Download my mindmap of the great Bryony Thomas (@BryonyThomas) talking about her book and methodology called Watertight Marketing. Bryony was speaking at the October event at the Bath & Bristol Marketing Network. Founded by Martin Wright this network is aimed at agency side marketers.
The book is laid out as follows and my mindmap tries to follow this, but is a poor substitute. You can get a free chapter and other stuff from the Watertight Marketing website.
Part One of Bryony's process doesn’t make for easy reading/listening. She maps out leaks in all your sales and marketing set-ups (yep, even mine) that squander our precious funds and time. Taking a look how real people really buy things, she exposes the Thirteen Touchpoint Leaks, and turns the usual way of tackling them on its head for faster payback. Then, just for added discomfort, she introduces us to the Four Foundation Leaks. These relate to marketing attitude and a company’s internal workings. By the end of this section you’ll have identified your major profit leaks from amongst these seventeen.
Part Two gets us to look at a purchasing decision from the buyer’s perspective, mapping the way that real people really buy things onto the Watertight Marketing framework. It’s an operational model that’s easy to follow and means your marketing will deliver long-term sales results. You’ll know what you need to say, how to say it, when, and to whom. This is the bit where she talks about the "logic sandwich" amongst other things.
Part Three takes the concepts above and shows us how to apply them in practice. It works through fixing the Touchpoint Leaks with case studies and a fully worked example. It will equip any small business with what they need to plug the gaps they find. It challenges the picture that a classic sales funnel visual paints in our minds. Just because you can draw a neat funnel, does not mean that there is one. In reality, the buying decision, and the marketing and sales process a business has in place to support it, is much more irregular. We see this for sure in the sales & marketing activities to law firms around the UK.
Every time we see, or refer to, a sales funnel or sales pipeline, she recommends we think like this (well this is the order I think of them in, buckets, funnels & taps) :-
Your Bucket: Those things that come together to keep your customers your customers.- Your Funnels: The tools and techniques you use to channel that interest and move people through to trying you out.
- Your Taps: Ways of generating interest in your offer.