A sales funnel is a marketing model that illustrates the path a potential customer takes before becoming a buyer. Building your business around a sales funnel is a good idea. You always know how many deals are at each stage of the funnel and for what amount, you can see your projected revenue this month, and it’s easy to see whether you’re meeting your closing goals… or not.
Your new leads are low quality
Quality is always more important than quantity. You can use multiple engagement channels, add every LinkedIn profile you find as a lead to your CRM… but in reality, you’ve failed. A lead should only enter your sales funnel if it matches your buyer persona and has high purchase intent.
But how do you know if the leads in your funnel are of the right quality?
Every deal takes roughly the same amount of time to move from one end of the funnel to the other. It’s important to calculate the average sales cycle time to understand whether your sales funnel is active and working. A clearly defined sales cycle provides transparency for your sales team – they should know whether they are wasting their time or not. And they shouldn’t be wasting their time at all.
Knowing the average sales cycle length allows you to design, forecast, and plan the entire sales process. It is also a key indicator of when your funnel is stagnant.
To calculate your average sales cycle, you need to use the formula:
number of days to close deals / number of deals = average sales cycle
Let’s say you’re the head of a premium SaaS business. In the first quarter, you closed five deals… Deal 1 took 40 days, Deal 2 took 30 days, Deal 3 took 60 days, Deal 4 took 70 days. That’s a long sales cycle, but it doesn’t matter—you’re a premium business. In just 200 days, you closed four deals. You don’t have to be db to data a mathematician to figure that out… 200/4 equals 50.
There is something worth thinking about – Account-Based Marketing .
This is the process of identifying ideal customer accounts and interacting with them individually. It goes beyond personalization for potential how much does it cost to rank #1 on Google? buyers, which involves conducting point-by-point research on the company and then presenting the product and related content based solely on their business. But it is a rather energy-intensive process, so it should be used for potential customers with high checks.
You are not sending enough follow-ups.
Your funnel is stagnant because you are not doing anything to move anything in it.
The best sales managers are those who bfb directory won’t take “no” for an answer when the prospect is the perfect customer for your product.
There are many alternatives in every market. If you don’t push your offer, you are giving the potential buyer time to give their money to your competitor.
Most sales professionals give up after two follow-ups with potential customers. What the hell?
A follow-up is a follow-up email or chain of emails sent to a lead in response to an action taken or if there was no action on their part.
Many salespeople are afraid to send a follow-up letter, make follow-up calls, so as not to seem annoying. And what to write in this letter? But this is business. You need to show a little persistence to close more deals. Follow-ups are not as difficult as you think – just follow a few simple rules.
Refer to previous correspondence or communication in the Follow-up
Write a killer email subject line that won’t leave anyone indifferent and will spark interest in opening your email.
Keep follow-up letters as short as possible – sometimes one sentence is enough.
Use a trigger word related to time : limited, ending soon, now.
Send a follow-up email 3-5 days after the first email , no sooner.
Think about automated follow-ups , as there are now programs specifically designed for this.
For example, you can use NetHunt CRM Automation and create automatic email chains that will adapt and send relevant content to those who opened your previous email and did not respond to it, or did not open the email at all.
Just one follow-up letter can bring you closer to closing the deal.
Automate the sales process inside Gmail
You only use one channel to engage with leads
It is important to diversify channels for attracting potential customers and interacting with them.
Single-channel marketing is communicating with customers through only one channel, whether it’s email, phone, LinkedIn, Facebook, or something else. Many brands believe that it’s more effective to use a single communication channel. Maybe they say that because it’s simply more convenient and because it’s worked before.
With an omnichannel approach to customer engagement, you find, engage, and engage with prospects across every channel they’re present in. This strategy doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a long-term strategy and a step-by-step process that needs to be implemented across your entire business. There are rules to follow—otherwise, you’ll fall back on the number one cause of a stagnant sales funnel: low-quality leads in the sales funnel.
Identify multiple buyer personas for your brand
This information will help your marketing team determine which channels are best to use and what types of content will be most effective on each individual platform.
Provide a consistent user experience across all channels. Your potential buyer may be active on multiple channels, so your messaging should be consistent wherever you are. If you use one communication on your website and write in a completely “different language” on LinkedIn, your audience may get confused.
To find out if you need additional sales tools, ask yourself these questions and answer them honestly… Are we achieving all of our sales goals? Do we know that sales managers are always communicating the right way? Can our sales department get better?
Additional tools speed up and increase the efficiency of the entire sales process. They help you close deals faster and close more of them.
What sales tools help close more deals:
Real customer reviews. Set up a feedback form on your website so that your customers and past customers can honestly share their experiences. Customer reviews give you insight into what’s good and bad about your business – review them regularly and understand where you need to improve. Reviews help potential customers make purchasing decisions.
Tips for making calls and letters. Don’t provide ready-made scripts from A to Z, because your sales team will seem like a robot. Provide tips such as topics for discussion, interesting statistics, product features. This applies to phone calls, letters and everything in between.
Effective LinkedIn Profiles: Every good salesperson has a solid LinkedIn profile that showcases all of their accomplishments.
CRM platform
Price, value, competitors, and relevance are key drivers of many objections. Work with lead objections in a way that keeps them moving up the funnel, not out of it.
