How do you ramp up prospects to become your customers? If you are in charge of marketing or business development, your job is to get as many prospects on the business on ramp as possible and keep them away from the off ramp. There are many marketing mediums that make this sound like a rather easy thing to do. However, with the many choices that consumers have, and the fact that most prospects are savvy enough to research their choices before they ever talk to a sales rep, on-ramping can become a tricky proposition.

Expectations are that new prospects can be ramped up to full-fledged customers in short order. Many times, those expectations make converting prospects into customers like getting on a roller coaster. Roller coasters only go one way down a preset rail. There is no choice once you get on a roller coaster. Everyone goes in the same direction at the same speed. Everyone has the same experience. What works for one works for all. All you need is a little marketing to get them over the hill and whoaaa, there they all go! Here comes the sale! They all buy and come to a stop back at the turnstyle. Round and round it goes, the same way every time.

Real customer conversion does not work like a roller coaster. It works more like a highway. Drivers have choices to make when they are driving on a highway, like the speed they will drive, when and where they get on the highway and when they get off. Highways have on ramps and off ramps. On ramps are places where vehicles can get up to speed in short order to match the pace of the cars on the highway. Off ramps are just the opposite: they are designed to decelerate vehicles from high speed to a stop. Is there an on-ramp or an off-ramp for customers at your business? If you are being honest, you probably have both. Unless you are in a business where there is no competition and no other choices for customers to make (like a public utility company, for instance), then your marketing needs to take this into consideration. There are things we can do to increase a customer’s interest in our products and services to on-ramp them, and things we can do to make them get off our highway in search of the competition’s route.

Where do you begin when trying to get customers on the right ramp? First of all, figure out what choices your customers have. What is the competition doing to try to get them to make a purchase? What influences them to buy from one and not the other? Are there other ways for the customer to get what they want without buying your product or service? When you strategize your marketing, you need to consider all the choices your customers have to meet their needs without you. From there, market to make your products and services look better than the other options. Secondly, think why a customer might leave you for your competition. This typically falls into one of four areas: a better price, better quality, quicker delivery, or better customer service. It is hard to gain a new customer, so don’t open the off ramp to them once you have them sold. If you are losing customers to one of these areas, fix it. Make it a strength and then market it to your customers.