Today, customer expectations are higher than before. As a result, businesses have to rethink the way they approach the sales process. It seems easier to blast people with ads and hope they convert on their own, but this isn’t a good long-term strategy. By increasing your conversion rate at every stage of your sales funnel, you can improve your customer value and increase customer satisfaction.
What’s a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is the process that potential customers go through before making a final purchase. These groups of potential customers should be thought of as a tree, with the roots being your marketing and the leaves being your product or service. Sales funnels are a great way to visualize your marketing process and optimize it based on performance metrics.
Proven Ways of Improving Sales Funnel Conversion Rates
Start By Going After the Right Targets.
For most people, lead generation is a numbers game: Get more leads, talk to more people, and you are likely to get more customers. There are times, however, when things don’t work out that way.
The best salespeople prepare for every sale, even before reaching for the phone. And one of the most impactful things a sales professional can do before prospecting is to make sure they are targeting the right person or company.
One of the keys to boosting your sales is targeting the right prospects. You certainly don’t want to waste time selling to leads that are a complete waste of your time, and you don’t want to put in all that hard work only to find out that the customer doesn’t have a big budget or isn’t well positioned for what you sell.
With the right prospects, though, you can increase your conversion rates and drive more sales. So how do you get those prospects? There is no one size fits all answer, but by carefully reviewing the types of people who are already in your database, you may be able to deduce who else you need to find.
Qualify, Qualify, Qualify!
Developing a lead qualification process is essential to ensure your sales team is not wasting time and energy on unqualified leads.
Qualifying your leads allows you to determine if the potential customer is a qualified prospect. This information will help guide you on whether or not it’s worth the time, effort, and resources to pursue these leads.
Understanding what makes a qualified lead allows you to evaluate better your marketing efforts on the different types of leads you acquire. All forms of marketing, from email marketing to print advertising and social media campaigns, can be evaluated in terms of the number of qualified leads they generate.
The concept of a lead is applied in a wide range of industries and across numerous corporations. Ultimately, the purpose of generating leads is to gain sales. However, for corporate marketing departments, sales teams, and many other individuals/teams within a company, it’s all about closing the final sale.
Sales teams need qualified leads to progress through the stages of the buyer’s journey. As the sales cycle progresses from lead to customer, the terms become less specialized (i.e., you are now compared with competitive brands) and more-specialized (i.e., interested in your specific product offerings). The term “leads” is hence used interchangeably by marketers, sales representatives, customer service reps, and others involved in the process of creating a completed sale.
Make the Most Out of Your CRM.
It’s a well-known fact that sales professionals can get bogged down in all the small details of the day-to-day activities that make up their jobs. They accomplish many things in a day, but it takes them so much time — and there’s always more you could do. This leaves them searching for ways to improve their efficiency and have more free time.
Depending on the industry, you might be writing follow-up emails or lead nurturing. Of course, the worst thing is having to schedule separate follow-up calls after sending an email. But with the number of projects and responsibilities, it can be hard to find time to call contacts. Good CRM software can do the scheduling for you and alert people when they need to make their next call.
Long gone are the days of paper notepads and sticky notes. The times in which you would sacrifice 30 mins each day just trying to figure out where you were going next on your list of prospects is a distant memory.
A CRM acts as a virtual right-hand – instantly accessible at any time so that you know what to do, whom to call, when to call them, and also make sure that you don’t double-book yourself or forget a prospect.