Chances are your sales strategy is generating a decent amount of leads, but for some reason you find the funnel getting clogged up. Managing any type of business can be complicated and you often find yourself with low conversion rates, cluttered sales processes and a lot of important data that gets lost in the mess. It’s not always easy pinpointing the exact problem in your sales funnel. Actually, more often than not, there are multiple issues that are causing you grief. With over two decades of experience, helping all sorts of businesses improve the way they manage their sales and customer relationships, we have seen a lot of clients, with a lot of problems. However, there are a few key issues that we see repeating themselves in many of the companies we help improve.
Tip #1- Keep it together (automatically)
You’ve invested time and money in developing a marketing strategy that generates leads to your business, but a clumsy lead management method can cause you to lose a large amount of those potential customers. Automatically importing and mapping your leads, can help you organize all your potential deals in one place.
With an automated system and with all information pouring into one place; your team members will know exactly how many leads they have on queue, where they came from and any other information that might be important to their sales pitch. You’ll never lose a lead again!
Tip #2- Get it while it’s hot
When following up on leads, timing is everything. Waiting too long to respond to a potential customer can cause him to stop considering the product all together. We want to make sure we NEVER let a lead go cold. According to a research, conducted by insidesales.com, the optimal time to respond to a new lead is within the first 5 minutes after they’ve filled out their details. The study showed that companies that tried contacting a potential customer up to an hour after obtaining his information had 7 times more chances of qualifying the lead, than those who waited for over an hour to reach out.
The study also revealed that Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days to engage with potential customers and its best if you do it at the end of the day, at around 4-5 pm. That being said, each business has its own analytical data that can specifically indicate when is the best absolute time for its salespeople to reach out to leads
You can include more information about your product, a coupon or a link that allows them to schedule a demo. a timely helpful response will help you move your leads further down the funnel.
Tip #3- Rank your leads
When it comes to leads, you absolutely have to play favorites. Even if you are a newbie at sales, you know that not all leads are created equal. A recurring problem we see with our clients is that their sales teams waste too much time on non viable customers. Why not prioritize your leads? Each industry and segment have specific parameters that indicate whether a lead is likely to become profitable.
Customized fields that include any and all information you choose, can determine those grades and help decide which prospective clients you should go after first. The ones more likely to convert into paying customers. This way, you’ll also be able to spot the future customers that might require a little extra effort, but are still worth it, because they can generate a large transaction. Maybe you’ll want to send those over to that one sales person you know can close the deal? Finally, there are bound to be some non-relevant leads in the mix, setting up a smart grading system means your team won’t have to waste too much time with those ones.
Tip #4- Make it flow
Many businesses tend to get almost to the very end of the sales funnel with a potential customer, only to lose the deal because it took them too long to send a quote, they failed to collect payment, or they didn’t get a client’s signature in time. If you want to reduce friction on checkouts, forms and transactions, give your people the advantage of having all those processes done automatically.
A predefined process will serve as a constant reminder for your staff, so they can move on to the next step effortlessly and with greater satisfaction on the client’s side. This kind of activity stream will increase your deal closure rates and keep all your client information tidy and organized, creating a strong advantage for your customer success team later on.
Tip #5- Across the (Dash)Board
Another problem we hear about from our clients is that they find it hard to have a constant view of their sales funnel. They track data on an excel spreadsheet, they find statistics in an analog file and in general- information is scattered all over. Not having an updated view of your sales data hurts your employees’ performance, your KPIs and your revenue. There is actually a simple solution to that problem.
The dashboards allow you to see all the fluctuations that are happening in the pipeline, in real time. These preferred views will enable you to address problems and make informed decisions in a timely manner.
So, let’s review…
Any business can experience occasional issues with its sales funnel, especially as it grows and evolves. Lucky for you, you are probably experiencing the same problems that we’ve already helped many of our clients fix. In this article we detailed just some of the issues that businesses might face with their sales process. We shared with you the time proven solutions we’ve developed in order to solve those issues: We suggested you automate your lead generation process and keep them all in one place. We gave you some interesting statistics regarding the optimal lead response time. We proposed you grade and prioritize your leads. We explained why an automated workflow can help you close more deals. Finally, we showed how dashboards can give you full control over your entire sales process.
Many businesses are now working with a sales CRM software in order to improve all the different aspects of their sales funnel. Using such a system allows you to retain all of your data, run smarter more efficient sales efforts and give you a clear analysis of your entire sales funnel.
