via Pixabay

We all dream of success, isn’t it so true? Bring value to other people, give them what they want and be a success in business as a return favor. That works for love, fame or money, but the most important part here is that giving should go first. Being the first to give is a typical quality of a truly proactive and smart person, efficient in all fields of life: from family and friends to career and business.

Understanding such a proactive approach and why it leads to success, we can employ it to the full to achieve cusses faster.

Here is why it's important to be proactive in client communication and how this can be used to grow your inbound customer acquisition funnel. 

What proactive really means for our lives

This is not just being active. Being proactive means taking responsibility for your life, understanding that your behavior depends only on your own decisions but not on the environment. And taking full responsibility for the consequences of actions.

If we feel like our life depends on circumstances — the only reason for it is a choice to let these forces take control. Between an irritant and your reaction to it — there’s a freedom of choice for this reaction.

Acting “natural” sometimes makes us a reactive person. As a result, you are influenced by external conditions, like weather or boss’s bad mood, and lose control of what happens next.

Proactive people are motivated by values. Your own values help unleash the power inside and take actions no matter what. And if high-quality work is a value, the results will be great no matter how sunny or rainy today it is. 

This is highly important. Chances are you saw people who have serious health issues but still enjoy life. When I see this, a thought that comes to my mind is "Damn, I have to be stronger in front of my challenges."

This is inspiring. Being proactive, you don’t just live a meaningful life, you empower people around you.

What is the fundamental of success?

Proactive people are, in the first place, initiative people. If we want to live a full life, we must take action, driven by our inside power and values.

Being initiative means finding ideas with good potential that bring value, and then making them become reality.

Every success happens twice: once on your mind when you just plan it, and for the second time when you execute and make things real. At every step initiative is crucial. Lack of initiative leads to working for a non-perspective job for years or getting stuck in a relationship that makes you suffer.

Proactive approach in career and business

"Initiative"' is an excellent way to get a great job. Complete professional courses, become an expert in a specific field, suggest enhancements to current business processes and create an efficient presentation of the solution. No surprise that such people are noticed by their bosses and move up quickly. And it’s a key factor not only of a successful career but for profitable business, too.

At work, initiative and passive people differ from each other greatly. Their efficiency is also one thousand percent different. Initiative people are the core of any company, setting a direction and influencing others.

Let’s take a sales team for example. If sales reps do not get any good quality leads from the marketing team for a while, an initiative person finds new clients through outbound prospecting and closes deals. What a passive one does? Just complains about the colleagues.

Any employer dreams about an initiative team but when it comes to running a business, the gap is even greater. Starting a business itself is already a significant initiative. And every next step hardly ever comes from external forces but is only a result of teamwork. Therefore, when initiatives stop — the evolution and growth immediately stop, too. Like everything on this planet, every system can grow or degrade. There is no middle point. So if the system does not generate value and expand, it dies. Sooner or later.

Valuable change in customer acquisition

Building a relationship between businesses and customers does not differ that much from personal relationships with friends or family. In both cases, we must find a balance between investments to relationship and getting results. 

If we are not supportive of our friends, they will feel the same towards us. If we are not interested in our family’s problems, they might not be keen on ours, either. The same rule works with clients: if we do not bring them value first, they do not want to pay. 

That’s why, when we form an online sales funnel, we must be proactive on each and every step of the sales funnel. Not only in ads, which is an initiative by definition but on landing pages, during phone calls, follow-ups and other levels of the funnel.

The problem is that modern users have a really distracted focus. Studies show that most people do not even remember how exactly they got to your website nor would they memorize your brand easily. Was it a Facebook Ad or Google Ad network or even via email marketing? They just don’t know. They have too many thoughts in their heads and quickly forget unnecessary information. 

And then they surf your landing page, learn the case studies, there is a chance that they will lose focus again. That’s why, adding a call to action to every page is so effective and important, but we can boost this step’s efficiency, even more, using a proactive approach.

Proactive approach example

Just offer a solution to their problems at the right time and you’ll reach a dramatic growth.

A recent example I dealt with is the PromotionStep agency lots of clients visit the pricing page before asking for a free website audit. We know that some of them need quick help with understanding what plan is the best fit for them or what services they actually need. So, this is a good chance to help and proactively start a conversation. 

What we did is — wait for 30 seconds from the beginning of the session on the page and show a help message. This message worked tremendously well: 3 times more effective in case of conversions than any other on the website. Why? Because we provide value with perfect timing. The key is not to interrupt and annoy, but help. 

Similar logic is very useful for further steps of the funnel, too. For example, after having a phone conversation with a potential customer, a sales rep must take responsibility further and initiate a follow-up message in a few days with more information. This business process and further follow-ups dramatically boost your sales process.

If you’re building a sales funnel of a complex product or service, it can contain over 10 steps. Here is a typical B2B funnel consisting of 12 levels:

•  online ad
  • landing page
  • retargeting ad
  • website
  • case-study download
  • phone contact
  • test purchase
  • payment
  • receive a product
  • use of the product
  • retargeting ads
  • upsell

If you take responsibility for every step of the funnel and proactively communicate with people, you’ll see the right effect.

If you increase efficiency with a proactive approach only by 7% at each level of the funnel, it will result into 125% more orders. If you reach 15%, you’ll get a 435% increase. So, this is definitely worth trying.

Your inside power awakes everybody around

«The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove.»  Samuel Johnson

A proactive approach is a natural power of human interactions, taken from history and life experience of millions of people. For sure we just MUST use this power in our lives and relationships between businesses and customers. 

Every day we see the unwillingness of other people around us, but we can make a change with our inner power. Being proactive by yourself and applying a proactive approach within your customer communication you not only achieve the measurable results in customer acquisition and sales, but you also empower people around you.

Maybe, this is one of the most valuable results of everything that we do.