Time to #FlipMyFunnel on My New Year's Resolution

By now, you know I have an insane passion for flipping funnels. I live, breath and dream about flipped funnels.

I had the honor and privilege of hearing Kwame Johnson, Executive Director of PowerMyLearning, speak at the #FlipMyFunnel ABMies a few weeks ago. He leads an amazing organization that works to put educational technology in the hands of children who truly need it and provide training for teachers and families to ensure it gets utilized effectively.  

Wanting to connect his message with the audience, he used the #FlipMyFunnel model to illustrate the non-profit’s approach serving schools and families in need.

Here is Kwame's entire deck in case you want to check it out (and I recommend you do):

Before I go any further, allow me to give a brief background on the #FlipMyFunnel model for those who aren’t familiar. The idea was developed by Sangram Vajre, CMO and co-founder of Terminus, as a way to help business-to-business (B2B) marketers grasp the concept of account-based marketing (ABM).

The traditional funnel is largely inefficient in driving revenue for businesses that sell to other businesses because there are multiple decision-makers involved in the buying process.

The #FlipMyFunnel model challenges the status quo by focusing only on best fit customers/accounts who are most likely to buy. The four stages of this model help create the best possible customer experience in target accounts.

Here are the four stages in case you aren’t familiar:

1. Identify - This stage involves identifying your best fit customers/accounts
2. Expand - Here is where you figure out who you need to influence within each account
3. Engage - At this point, you spread the message about your offerings across a variety of channels that make the most sense to your buyer
4. Advocate - If you’ve succeeded in the previous three stages, you now have new customers who are raving fans and can’t wait to tell their peers about your company

Inspired by Kwame’s keynote speech, I thought it might be fun to apply the model to my New Year’s Resolution.

We’ve all struggled with keeping New Year’s resolutions, myself included. A research study by John Norcross, Distinguished Psychology Professor at University of Scranton, found 77% of participants kept their resolution for one week and only 19% kept them for two years.

Change is hard and challenging your own personal status quo to make a better life is even harder. It’s so easy to stick with what we know and what is comfortable. And there are a million distractions in our lives every day that attempt to throw us off track.

But what if we could flip our past history of failed resolutions and actually succeed this year?

As Oprah says below, 2017 is another “chance for us to get it right.”

This year, I want to finally become proficient in speaking Hindi. I say “finally” because I have attempted this several times with wavering levels of commitment.

Why is keeping this resolution so hard?

Here are a few reasons:

• English is my native language. It’s far easier to default to that when I don’t know the Hindi word for what I want to say.
• The Defense Language Institute Language learning Difficulty Scale rates Hindi as a 3 on a scale of 4 as one of the hardest languages for Native English speakers to learn.
• It takes an average of 48 weeks of consistent practice to become proficient which requires a ton of consistency and commitment.
• The words are not written in English alphabet letters, which makes reading and sounding things out pretty difficult.

Now that we understand the challenges of keeping a resolution like this, let’s take a look at how the #FlipMyFunnel model might help me achieve my goal.

Identify - In this stage, I need to state exactly what I want to accomplish. In this case, my goal is to speak conversational Hindi with ease.

Expand - Once the goal is identified, I need to determine who can help me accomplish this goal. I have several friends that speak Hindi that I can practice with. Even my friends and peers who don’t speak Hindi can be sources of accountability and encouragement throughout this journey.

Engage - This is where it really gets fun. There are a variety of ways I can engage myself in the learning process. The primary way is through Rosetta Stone, an intuitive foreign language platform. But that will only get me so far. Immersion is also key here. Since I don’t live in India, I will need to find other ways to immerse myself. I can watch Bollywood movies with subtitles and listen to Bollywood music to hear how different words are used together. I enjoy meals with my Hindi speaking friends to practice the language in a different setting.

Impact - If you know the B2B model, this last stage means creating advocates to spread the word about your business. On a personal level, success means the level of influence/impact you have on others. Learning Hindi will enable me to speak with 490 million people worldwide, according to Vista Worldwide. Some time ago, there was a Hindi speaking lady who didn’t understand she could pick her seat on my Southwest flight. Had I been able to speaker her language, I could have explained to her the process and helped make her flight more comfortable.

By applying the #FlipMyFunnel model to my new year’s resolution, I can “flip” my chances of success for 2017 and finally achieve my goal of learning to speak Hindi with ease.

The model ensures the goal is clearly identified, the support system with helpful people is present, the right tools are available to engage with and the impact is broader than myself.

By keeping this model front and center, I have a much greater chance of actually achieving this goal.

How can you use the #FlipMyFunnel model to keep your new year’s resolutions? Leave me a note in the comments.