How to build and manage a successful sales funnel?

A successful search and paid campaigns will lead to one thing – regular online leads.

But even consistent inbound leads don’t guarantee revenue.

For this, you need to build and maintain a sales funnel that’ll consistently engage with your prospects. In turn, these engaged prospects could be turned into paying users.

By having a well-managed sales funnel, you’ll be ensuring a great tool which can consistently deliver qualified leads to your sales team.

In this sense, you can think about sales funnel as a great tool to manage and close more deals.

Without further adieu, let’s look into the building blocks of a good sales funnel and what makes it exceptionally prolific compared to an average sales funnel.

Sales Funnel as a customer acquisition tool

Before that, we need to consider what makes sales funnel into a great customer acquisition tool.

Today, your marketing and sales activities should be geared towards acquiring new customers.

In this, the sales funnel can act as a helpful tool towards acquiring new customers. By proactively engaging and communicating with your acquired leads, your least-communicative lead to become proactively engaged future customers.

Let’s see how?

First, let’s say that your website is getting a constant stream of online visitors. Without the proper way to engage visitors, most of these leads would slip between your fingers.

By systematically educating the prospects about your product or service, there’ll be significantly better chances of your website visitors becoming paying customers. This requires an effective way of engaging and communicating with your visitors.

All these are easier said than done. Typically, most visitors don’t revisit a website. In this situation, these visits usually fail to materialize into any actual website ROI.

By having a sales funnel, you can systematically engage with your online visitors. This can also systematically feed information to online visitors.

With this in mind, let’s examine how a sales funnel can be used to manage the information-dispensing for your online visitors.

Stages of a sales-funnel prospecting Process

Typically, a sales funnel would have different stages of interaction. This would mean that a

• As shown in the image, the initial stage of your website visit will be probably an online visitor looking for a product without any specific information. This would be usually a website hit or opening an email.
• As the next stage, the visitor could probably review the project and pick-out the right leads. This could utilize various re-targeting advertising methods that are available on Facebook or Google.
• During the next stage, you need to engage with your website visitors. Typically, this would need an in-depth informational article such as a whitepaper or product workflow presentation.
• Next, you need to proactively compare your product with your different available online products. For this, you should compare the different products based on their product specifications.
• With the next step, your prospect could be looking forward to close the deal. In this stage, your sales team will be playing the most active part at converting the acquired prospects into paying customers.

Each of these sales funnel stages will increase the likely hood of your products being purchases. It’ll also consequently product retention as your customers are already well-aware of the value of the product.

A well-managed sales funnel will also improve retention as your customers will be already well-aware of the value of the product. 

This means that they are more likely to stick with their purchase decision.

Why it’s hard to build and manage a sales funnel?

As discussed, a sales funnel can be a great tool to maximize your business opportunities. Not just any sales funnel, you’ll need a well-optimized sales funnel to grow your business.

On the other hand, a negligent sales funnel could incredibly bring-down your conversion rates. By having a less-than-optimized sales funnel would make it harder to complete the purchase. In this situation, it’ll be harder to streamline the overall sales operations.

You may end-up feeling like the sales funnel is costing you more customers than its gaining you…When compared to the direct hard-sell sales approach, it could feel like a ‘stop-and-start’ approach to manage sales through a sales funnel.

In the end, the task of figuring out a working sales funnel could seem like an impossibly difficult task.

You might be tempted to go blindly with a sales template or a pre-build sales funnel such as clickfunnels.com.

As these aren’t custom built for your business, these are likely to do more harm than good through making your business even less accessible for your enterprise.

Functions of an optimally managed sales funnel

Building the right sales funnel involves designing individual part of the sales funnel interaction. In turn, this will help you work on each of the different steps involved within a sales process. In turn, this will help you tackle and mitigate the customer objections throughout the buying process.

Ideally, the sales funnel should be able to fulfill the following objectives.

Provide right information at right point :– You can’t force feed all information to the customer at a particular point. For this, you need to provide the right information to each customer based on their position on the sales funnel. This avoids the prospect getting overwhelmed.

Increase interest level of your customer :– Let’s say that your customers have become aware of your particular product. But they aren’t yet convinced about your particular product/service. Through an optimized sales funnel, you could gradually warm-up and educate your prospect about your product.

Acquire better lead data :– By having a sales funnel, you can acquire more in-depth data about your individual sales prospects. Later, you can plug this data into your Google adsense campaigns. This will help you significantly improve your overall campaign ROI.

More energetic and informed prospecting :– Now your sales team members can build expertise on a particular part of the sales funnel. For example, a particular member could be entirely allocated to closing. This allows the individual member to entirely invest on the closure operations.

By having a well-tweaked sales funnel, you can organize and streamline the sales process to generate maximum number of closures.

Ways to build streamlined sales funnel

A sales funnel can segment different parts of your customer. They can be also utilized to streamline the information flow of information to your leads.

With this in mind, your sales funnel should be able to dispense information in a systematic way. In this situation, you can build a better sales funnel through creating better ways to drip feed information to your customer.

Live customer messaging

Whether its email, text or direct calling, most business people have the common problem of giving the right message to the customers. If you lack a smart way to target customers, they would likely tend to blindly target different audience segments.

The thinkwithgoogle blog perfectly captured this dilemma in its blog about sales prospecting.

By having a live chat option in your website, you can provide specific answers to your customers. This would help them nudge your buyers towards the final purchase.

In the end, the business interaction would be an non-intrusive way of managing your business communication.

Conclusion:-

With umpteen numbers of products being pitched ferociously, it’s getting incredibly hard to acquire and retain customer attention. Having the right sales funnel could boost to your sales success by many folds.

At the same time, trying to build sales funnel from scratch is also incredibly difficult. I hope this blog acts as a primer to start building the right sales funnel. In this situation, you need definite directives towards building the right sales funnel.

If you want to know more about the sales funnel, we could start chatting with our sales team.