Creating A Funnel Your Sales Team Will Love
An evenly dispersed funnel is key to consistently achieving marketing and sales success. It can keep an organization thriving even in unprecedented times. Unfortunately, many Salesforce funnels could not look any more uneven. The process of converting a visitor to a prospect and then a prospect to a satisfied customer is where the connection between marketing and sales is needed.
Good vs. Bad Funnel
There are many types of messy funnels, one example being when an organization pays for their prospects then passes them off to sales. The sales team ends up wasting time calling leads that aren’t well vetted. This ultimately causes frustration and a lack of quality prospects.
On the other hand, an effective funnel relies on cooperation between sales and marketing. Marketing can develop promising leads fostered in Account Engagement (Pardot) using email campaigns that connect to an Account Engagement (Pardot) form that then collects the new prospect information. Then, marketing passes off the warm leads to sales, creating more assured success.
Strategies To Improve Your Funnel
When you look at your funnel in Salesforce it should look mostly even across each section, in regard to ratio. Whether it be awareness, interest, evaluation, commitment, or sale, each section should ideally be around the same distribution, getting smaller towards the bottom. This being said, most organizations struggle with one if not more of the sales funnel stages. Spend some time actually looking into what section of the funnel there are problems with and work on determining solutions there.
Problems With Awareness Stage
This is a problem that can be caused by a lack of initial spark. Developing solutions here could include creating retargeting ads to cement the idea of your brand in their mind. Keep the ads short and sweet with hard-hitting headlines.
Problems With Interest Stage
If prospects are aware of you but not interested, you might have a problem with not giving prospects what they want. Try pivoting and actually doing a deep dive into what your competitors are doing and how successful it is.
Problems With Evaluation Stage
When problems with the evaluation stage arise it’s important to establish educational materials for your prospects. Things like drip campaigns, blog posts, infographics, and newsletters are ways to inform prospects about why you stand above the rest without being too promotional.
Problems With Commitment Stage
Once prospects have made it this far into the funnel they’re oftentimes ready to make a purchase, but still want to be sure that you are the right option for them. A trial can be what pushes them into the final closing stage. Adding that free trial option can help set fears at ease.
