Why is the sales funnel important in the first place?
The importance of a sales funnel lies in its ability to give you clear insight into what each of your customers is thinking and doing during their purchasing journey. This will allow you to implement the right marketing activity at the right time in order to attract more prospects and convert them into buying customers. More importantly, analyzing your sales funnel will allow you to get an idea of what in your sales and marketing process works and what does not. Quickly identifying strategies that do not work and only cost you time and, of course, money is a big deal. As soon as you figure out where your prospects lose interest in what you have to offer, the better.
The 4 Stages of a Sales Funnel
E
ach of your prospects will pass through 4 stages of your sales funnel, beginning with them finding out about your product or service, leading up to the final stage where a prospect becomes a customer. These 4 stages represent the prospects' way of thinking and in each of them, you will have to take on a specific approach with your outreach to them.
Awareness
The
first stage in which a prospect finds out about your business, products, and/or services. They might find out about you through social media posts, Google searches, ads, by word of mouth, or by reading your blog. If you are lucky, a prospect can become a customer in this initial stage, but chances are that you will have to work for it.
Interest
At t
his point, your prospect is aware of you, and now you have the not always easy task to increase their interest you what you have to offer without being too aggressive about it. The best thing to do is to offer content that provides additional information about your business but keeps the sales tone on the lower side of the spectrum. This content should showcase your expertise, that you are worth committing to and that it helps your prospect make an informed decision.
Decision
When
we come to this point, your prospect is ready to make the purchase and you should be ready to make your best offer. Your prospect will look into different options and packages related to your products and services and it would be a crying shame to lose them at this stage. So, use the tools and options that you have at your disposal to make your offer look too good to pass on. With free shipping, discounts, package deals, sales pages, webinars, or a phone call with your prospect, you’re sure to move in the right direction with them.
Action
The fi
nal and, if you ask me, the most important stage. Why is that? Well, at this point your prospect is no longer a prospect, they have made the commitment and purchased your service or product and have become an important part of your company. The relationship with your new customer should not end after that initial sale. Your goal now is to retain that customer, by utilizing a wide variety of strategies, be it a rewards program, enrollment in an informative newsletter about upcoming events, products, or service upgrades, or just simply asking them to provide feedback on their experience with your business. Retention of customers is very important, one of the reasons for this being the fact that it is always easier to sell a product or service to someone you have established a good professional relationship with than it is with a fresh prospect.
How to Build a Sales Funnel?
Now th
at we’ve touched upon the 4 stages of a sales funnel, it’s time to get into the how.
1. Find your Target Audience
Before
you start selling anything, you need to know who your target audience is so as not to waste time on creating marketing campaigns targeted at people who have no need for what you have to offer. What exactly should you do here? Lots of research, and I mean a lot. Find out what the problems they are seeking solutions for are, the social media channels they most frequently visit, things that interest them the most and, equally important, things they dislike. All this info combined will allow you to implement the next step.
2. Build Buyer Personas
The ini
tial research you put the effort in will pay off as it will allow you to build buyer personas and make your sales process more efficient. Buyer personas are essential to any marketing campaign, and you can create them by using your research and basing them on the following questions:
a. Why will they buy your product/service?
b. What would influence them the most into buying your product/service?
c. How will they use that product/service afterwards?
If all of this seems overwhelming to you, don’t worry, in one of our previous articles, we’ve talked about several free tools that you can use to your business’ advantage, one of them being a buyer persona maker.
3. Generate Traffic
Sounds l
ike a simple enough task, but this step has its challenges, especially if you didn’t do your homework on the previous two. Simply put, if people don’t know about you, they will not buy anything from you. Because of this, you need to put into place different lead generation strategies in order to build awareness of your brand and drive users to your website and ultimately to you and your sales team. This can be done in various ways, for example:
a. Build and optimize landing pages
b. Use PPC campaigns
c. Put effort into SEO
d. Use influencer marketing
e. Guest posting
f. Social media marketing
g. Offer free materials in exchange for an email address, e.g. an informative e-book
Whichever of the strategies you opt for, or a combination of some of them, they should always offer engaging content to your audience to pique their interest in who you are and what you can do for them.
4. Nurturing
At this ph
ase of your sales funnel, you’ve checked off some of the things from the checklist in your sales funnel and you have an interested prospect in your sales process. Keep building upon that relationship by staying in touch with them regularly. But be warned, regularly doesn’t mean that you should get too eager and spam your prospect 3-4 times a week. Once or twice a week is more than enough if the content of your messages addresses their needs. This way you will make sure that you don’t become too pushy and overcome potential objections by the prospect.
5. Seal the Deal
This is whe
re you make your best offer to your prospect in order to turn them into a paying customer. What do I mean by the best offer? Not something that is detrimental to your business, but something that will be very difficult for your prospect to ignore or even completely turn down. Use the tools that you have at your disposal, and this is tricky, because they vary from business to business. You can provide a product or service demonstration, a free trial period for your services, free shipping for product orders, offer special discount codes for them. In this part, you must get very creative and know what your limits are, while still offering something immensely appealing to your prospect.
6. Don’t Stop at the Sale
Customer ret
ention is key in any business, because, statistically speaking most of you customers are going to be returning customers. This is excellent for any business, because it allows you to build a genuine relationship with them, and nurture that relationship. This can also be done in various ways and a little creativity goes a long way. You can offer loyalty programs for customers how have been with you for a long time. Regardless of how long they’ve been with you, engage them frequently and ask for feedback on your products and services so that you can both improve what you have to offer and your relationship with your customers. And never forget about the prospects who turned down your offer. Come back to them every once in a while, to check up on their current situation and try using a different strategy to turn them into a customer.
7. Analyze your Sales Funnel Frequently
It would be g
reat if you could just make one great sales funnel and call it a day. Creating the first one is not easy, and on top of that, you will always have to analyze it in order to keep it efficient so that you can make that conversion and subsequent sale happen. Analyze each step periodically, because business trends can change in a blink of an eye and you need the target audience’s interests accordingly. Stay on top of all of this thing and modify your sales funnel on the fly if need be, so that you can stay at the top of your game.
Building a sales funnel the right way can be a turning point for your business. In fact, we could say that it’s one of the main ways to survive in a competitive marketplace. Take the time to do it right and never stop cultivating it.
In case you want to make sure that your sales funnel is effective, you can reach out to our team today. We are a team of trained sales professionals who can help you define the funnel, from finding your audience to the point of closing a deal.
Sources:
https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/15989-how-to-build-a-sales-funnel.html