Discover the
Five Stages of the
Customer Buying Cycle

Want to understand the customer buying cycle?
Making the most of where your contacts are in their customer buying cycle is critical.
The best kept secret to successfully converting contacts into customers is this:
Keep everything simple!
The more complicated you make the process, the greater the chance that either you or your team will not use it.
And when that happens, you miss opportunities and lose sales.
These five stages show what your contacts need at each stage of the customer buying cycle and what you can do to influence them in their buying decision.
Get to know the five stages!


Managing Your Data/Contacts
Ensure that you keep all your contacts in one place! Know where to find a phone number, add a tag/note, or set a quick reminder. All this can be done with a clear timeline to keep your CRM organised.
All of this is easy to do with popcorn. You can see exactly what you need to speak to someone about, at exactly the right time.
Managing your Leads
Recreate your sales process in visual sales pipelines. That way you can always see exactly how many people are in each stage of your process. You could also look to add a pipeline for each month of the year, then along with the reminder, you can drag a contact into the month they need following up in, making it much easier to give sales a push when you need to.
popcorn’s CRM has smart tracking tools built in! You can create completely unique finger prints (more than an IP address) for each contact. After they open your email, you can track them to your website for up to three months later.
Nurturing your Prospects
Whether it’s social media, telemarketing or direct mail, your marketing should always have several strings to it. But sitting at its core should be email marketing. You'll want the intelligence email marketing gives you to tie all the marketing strings together.
This is most effective when it’s combined with your CRM database and website traffic. Used with lead scoring, you can now see what your contacts are genuinely interested in. What's more, popcorn can use these tools to automatically spot buying behaviours and hot prospects for you.
You will know where your contact is being led every step of the way – from a direct mail campaign to their visits onto your website. You can then set automated responses so that you know when and how to follow up. Or, you could use popcorn’s segmenting tool to identify specific contacts and export the list.
Turning Contacts into Prospects
This is where popcorn brings all this intelligence from your CRM, email marketing and website tracking together. Now you can identify the golden nuggets that are customers who are in the research and buying cycles.
popcorn identifies them as hot, warm or cool prospects, based upon their engagement levels, allowing you to segment your contacts. If you want to target contacts based on specific categories, it will only take seconds!
Now you can choose what to do with them. You can pick up the phone and speak to the hot prospects, add them to a sales pipeline, export the list to give to an external telesales company, send a targeted email or tag them to bring them into a bigger campaign.
Remember – when you segment your database you typically see a 60% improvement in contact engagement. Importantly, your customers also prefer it, as they only receive the messages that are relevant to them.
Turning a Prospect into a Customer
Now that you have segmented your contacts and picked the hot prospects, it’s time to start nurturing the others through your sales pipeline.
There are a couple of ways our users do this. The most popular is to either manually progress them or create work-flow automation based upon their engagement. That means you can progress your contacts to the next stage of your sales process. You can drag and drop the contact along and see all their details in a single click.
Alternatively, you can use the segmented contacts to send targeted mails that will support you, driving more engagement and enquiries.
When you are at this stage of the sales cycle, it is often best to pick up the phone. As they're the customers you've nurtured, typically this will only be a handful of contacts. Base it around the intelligence that popcorn has generated: you should be able to have a meaningful conversation from it.
Our users sometimes find they can either generate too many or not enough hot prospects. This is where you can adjust the scoring, to refine what is flagged as a hot, warm or cool prospect, which will then all be automatically added into your New Prospects sales pipeline.
Sales pipelines are a simple and visual way of managing your sales process. You can easily evolve it with your sales process as you refine it.
Turning Contacts into Prospects
Congratulations! You've taken advantage of your knowledge of the customer buying cycle. Now you've nurtured a contact from being an anonymous name in your database, right through to being a loyal customer.
So can you forget about them now?
Not at all!
It is 60% cheaper to retain a customer than it is to win a new one, so build yourself a Customer Management Cycle (like your sales pipelines) and map that into popcorn. You not only retain them as a customer, but turn them into an advocate and get them referring new business to you.
Ensure that your customers are always kept up to date with what’s going on in your business, and more importantly, ensure that you tell them what they care about. Give them the opportunity to upgrade and move around your products/services, ask them for for referrals – and get in touch with them regularly, especially before their renewal date.
All of this can be mapped and managed using popcorn’s CRM, Sales Pipelines, Email Marketing and Reminders.
See how popcorn has helped users with their customer buying cycles...
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