Top 5 Similarities Between 'Bridgerton' And The Sales Funnel

An article we liked from Thought Leader Gaurav Kumar of Beyond Codes, Inc.:

'Bridgerton' And The Sales Funnel

A few years ago, the TV series Bridgerton was all the rage with my teenage daughter.

I got a bit wrapped up in it too. Their zany speech and behavior, the gowns, the mansions, the cutlery, and, most of all, the dances. The feminist in me scoffed at the guardians of young ladies whose life purpose seemed to be to get their kid hitched to the perfect suitor.

Then one day it dawned on me that those pesky guardians were training their debutants to treat their dance card like I use the sales funnel at work. If the mamas and papas of Bridgerton were handed our sales funnel, they may just do really well with it!

Notwithstanding the politics of reducing a young woman’s life purpose to betrothal, there were several strategies that the mamas and papas of Bridgerton follow that are perfect in the contemporary sales scenario. They don’t go into the debutant season blind. They devise a full strategy and then execute it to the T.

Here are the top five lessons that the Bridgerton parents teach us about running a holistic sales funnel:

1. Don’t Be In A Rush To Fill Up Your Dance Card

The mamas and papas of Bridgerton train their debutants to carefully pick the names to put on their dance card. They advise their wards not to get lost with too many prospective partners but rather to go for gold.

In sales, that is the equivalent of overcrowding the top of the funnel with the maximum amount of leads—to quickly jam up your bandwidth with as many suspects as possible. This carpet bombing approach in sales is aptly called "spray and pray," for the entire sales force goes berserk in indiscriminately throwing darts into the dark at all the possible suspects in the universe and then leavse it to luck, or a fluke, to get some of them to convert to a qualified lead. Such an approach leads to a 2%-3% closure rate.

The best lead generation companies don’t overcrowd the top of the funnel. They get higher closure rates because they start the process with a relatively controlled pool of "smart suspects."

They don’t go after an indiscriminate number of suspects just so they can boast to others about how many people they are "dancing" with.

2. Research Before D-Day

Smart mamas and papas of Bridgerton and their wards are highly research-driven. A great amount of prep goes into the lead-up to the debutant season. A debutant will not enter a ballroom without all the necessary research already done by her guardians. Sales professionals can learn a bunch from them.

The sales equivalent of this is that prior to the first approach toward a prospect, a smart sales professional or team would have collected all the necessary information required to determine whether a prospect is a potential match or not. This includes the discovery of the prospect’s budget (or a ballpark estimate). What were their prior purchases? What are the economic pressures of their industry or within their company? Who is the competition? And finally, there are the office politics, the hierarchies and the decision-making influences that will go into making the final purchase decision. Interestingly, it is in these mechanizations that the entire plot of Bridgerton plot lies.

3. Approach Qualified Leads Only

A savvy debutant is very selective over who they place on the dance card. Several qualifications must be met for a prospect to be awarded the debutant’s attention, let alone be added to her dance card.

The sales equivalent is a company that stacks its funnel with...