Flip the Funnel: How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones

BLURRING PERSONAL, PROFESSIONAL, AND PRIVATE

If the thought of three worlds—physical, digital, and virtual—wasn’t daunting enough, let me take it one step further. Not only are there essentially three platforms where peer-to-peer connectivity takes place and where you’ll likewise need to interact with your customers, you’ll also need to consider that every customer has three primary personas that they draw from across these three environments (Figure 11.2).

Figure 11.2 Shifting Persona Set

Source: © Joseph Jaffe.

The personal and professional components of this framework seem simple enough to understand, except for the fact that our personal and professional lives today blur together radically; nowhere is this more evident than with the millennial generation.³⁹ In fact, a PricewaterhouseCoopers study released in 2009 documented 88 percent of respondents from this segment, who stated that they sought employers (professional) with social responsibility values that reflected their own (personal). This represents another kind of “flip”—our ability to attract and retain the best and the brightest is no longer solely in our control. I believe that companies that do not respect, empower, and allow their employees to freely blog, upload, share, create, comment, and moderate content are going to find it increasingly difficult to win the talent war. Your IT and legal departments are ...