Week 12: Netchemia Internship

This week my main task has been to create a marketing survey for Netchemia's newest product. Then call the target prospects in Kansas and Missouri and get results to the survey. This is the first step in the 'Sales Funnel' which slowly whittles down the number of prospects till you find a prospect who wishes to buy the product. The funnel seems to involve about 5 main stages.

1. Survey
2. Indepth discussion
3. Product Demonstration
4. Pricing
5. Purchase

The number of potential prospects diminishes rapidly as the sales process continues; the potential value of each prospect increase.

Conversion funnels like this appear everywhere in business. Just do a quick Google image search for 'funnel' and you'll find:

• student enrollment funnel
• marketing funnel
• selling funnel
• Funnels occur in personal life: for example dating.
  

Ideas also create a funnel. And this leads to the product development funnel, for example: many product ideas, lots of computer designs, a few prototypes, one final product. And the product development funnel is just apart of a larger funnel, which is the consumers product choices in the market place.
The funnel is where entrepreneur's have both an advantage and disadvantage.

Advantage: entrepreneur can go with Gut instinct ignore many stages of the product development funnel and create the product which they feel will fill a niche best in the marketplace, this short circuits the funnel and gives the entrepreneur a huge time and money saving compared to well established companies, also allows entrepreneurs to create unconventional products.
Disadvantage: If the entrepreneur's instinct is wrong: the product fails in the market place, most likely their business will go bust. The large company can afford to fail and try again. The large company can also afford to invest more resources into the processes between the top and bottom of the funnel potential increase the value of the outcome.
In effect the entrepreneur funnel is very short bypassing many of the conventional big business process', leading to one offering: just like the big business.

Which is better? Who can say. It comes down to in the individual entrepreneur, the individual company, luck, connections, the list goes on.

Most business seminars today, in any field, will be showing to the audience how to improve the process between the start and end of the funnel, be its Sales, Marketing, product development etc. etc. (and for personal seminars this could be dating ;o).