Sign up for our webinar where we'll analyse data from 49.5 million emails
Discover the data, tactics and trends shaping successful prospecting in 2023 - based on 49.5 million emails.
Posted on: August 13, 2020
Reading Time: 5 minutes
Category: Lead conversion
A sales funnel exists whether you visualise it or not.
It’s called a customer – or buyer – journey.
And if you don’t understand how it works you drastically limit your chance of efficiently converting leads into sales.
Let’s look at how you can best understand your sales funnel, deploy your understanding and fix it when it breaks down.
As ever, we’ll start with the basics (dear Henry).
A sales funnel is a visual representation of a journey: It starts when your prospect first makes contact with you and it ends when they make that purchase.
There are more people filling your funnel at the top (the first touch point) and far fewer as it narrows at the bottom (the purchasing decision).
As prospects journey through the funnel they become greater qualified – until they become a converted lead and are left in the welcoming hands of the sales team. But, along the way, many will drop out – and those who do not fit may receive a helping shove to leave the funnel.
As with the customer journey, the sales funnel is usually divided into three broad stages (although these can be further fine-tuned if required).
Understanding these stages means you can effectively address customer’s needs and accurately forecast future sales.
The stages are:
This early in the customer journey, prospects are still identifying their challenge. They are asking questions and more aware of pain points (or symptoms) than they are the problem itself. At this stage they are looking for authoritative information.
They want content that will guide them through a topic – think blog posts, videos and guides.
By now the prospect is a lead – they have a name and you probably know about the sort of organisation they work for and the position they hold.
Your named lead has by now named their problem. They are no longer just feeling it, but actively looking into solutions for it. The bird’s eye overview will not suffice – they need granular detail. They may not yet be comparing specific companies but they are looking to understand the range of options available for them.
The content that serves your leads best in this stage includes in-depth guides, comparison-style checklists, pros versus cons lists and case studies.
At the bottom of your funnel your qualified lead already knows exactly what the problem is, has decided on what is the best solution for them and is ready to make a purchase.
Their questions and concerns here are provider-driven. It may be to do with specific benefits, support packages, payment options and so on.
The best content for the bottom of the funnel are frequently-asked-questions pages, service/product features videos, live demos and side-to-side comparisons with competitors.
A defined sales funnel benefits both your prospects and your sales.
As with all things in life, the source of your greatest successes can also be the sources of your greatest frustration.
A broken sales funnel is one that leaks or has become clogged. You are losing leads, winning too few of them or they simply are not flowing through as you would expect.
So how do you begin to speed up your sales process? Here are some great starting points for investigation:
A start-to-finish sales funnel that will make your sales more efficient.
Here’s all the info you need:
Best of luck, Henry!
Discover how Sopro helps hundreds of businesses sell more. We do the hard work, so you can do your best work.
Craig Mathewson
We all love a perk. Here’s how you can use incentives to convert your B2B leads into customers – and …
Share