My day job is in marketing and we use sales funnels a lot. What’s a sales funnel? It’s a method of understanding the sales process. It starts with “Go to market” (i.e. make a loud noise) and ends with multiple sales (sometimes it goes beyond sale if you’re offering support). At the top of the funnel are the target customers. Being a funnel, the top is wide and aims to suck the prospects down, hoping to make them consumers. Many will qualify themselves out as they hit key stages of the funnel. Okay, so a funnel doesn’t work like that, just got with it. As I said: funnels are used a lot in marketing but I have never seen one applied to the book selling process. Here is my take. Constructive feedback welcome.
Why is a sales funnel important to writers? It doesn’t matter whether you are published by a ‘traditional’ publishing house or self-published: you need to know how readers select books. We are all readers but, somehow, we always forget how we act when we put on our writing hats. It’s probably something to do with self-delusion: that people will ‘just know’ that my book is different. That seeing, touching or hearing about the book will have a profound effect on their decision making. We forget that reading is a) a big ask involving a great deal of time and, yes, money b) right at the very end of the sales funnel (book buying) process.
Click on the image to see the funnel in all its glory.
The funnel is colour-coded. The separations demonstrate the different physicalities at work: ranging from outside the shop (real or virtual) to inside the book (ditto).
Written by Adrian Robinson
21st July, 2011
