by Tony Vidler 
There has been a significant paradigm shift in how professional services marketing and sales functions interact.
A fundamental change to how we understand and use the knoweldge of the consumers emotional buying cycle has already happened.
The traditional view of “marketing generating leads” and then “sales converting leads into customers” held that there was a natural mortality built into this process…of 10 prospects entering the sales funnel,some would simply not survive the grueling process.
The ratio that most people in financial services have grown up with is 10-3-1….marketing generates 10 leads, which the salesperson then goes to work on. On average 3 of them will agree to meet with the salesperson, who will in turn convert 1 into an ongoing customer. From those expensively sourced potential future client opportunities, 9 out of 10 are casualties of the process. They were cannon fodder.
The new thinking is straightforward: Every potential client who we engage with our marketing can become a client if we continue to engage with them in a relevant way thereafter.
It is a blinding flash of the obvious perhaps, but it is the advent of technology in the form of cost effective information management, delivery tools and infrastructure, and the abundance of content and design strategies that permit us to see well-established facts in a new way.
The million-dollar-question for an advisory firm in the past was “how can we get more prospects from our marketing?”
In the new paradigm the question is “how will we engage with everyone effectively and meaningfully until they are ready to become our customers?”
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