When it comes down to a sales marketing funnel, the first thing to do is to look at the entire process it deals with from the very beginning to the end. Firstly, it would start with the awareness of your brand right up to the post-sales aspect. It specifically deals with how to go about converting a visitor into a loyal paying customer.
Hence, it pretty much goes without saying that a solid sales funnel is the ideal and most important aspect of building an online business. The only way of consistently bringing in sales from a long term perspective is through the establishment of a proper sales funnel. However, there is a more important piece of the puzzle that a lot of people forget about. That aspect is driving prospects to a sale.
Even if you have the best product, follow the best practices or have the most up-to-date information, a lot of that will be null and void if you cannot drive prospects to a sale. So the obvious question is “Why is it so difficult to do?”. Let us take a closer look at a few pointers to find out why:-
- Many services fail to recognise the importance of lead nurturing: This is not the same as lead generation. Even in lead generation, the deck of cards is stacked up against you since most of the users aren’t prepared to buy.
However, if you put in the necessary effort in lead nurturing, not only will you see more sales at a lower cost, but you will also see a hundredfold increase in qualified prospects as well. The message is clear – you will be rewarded once enough people know that you anticipate and care about their overall needs in general. - Not creating a thorough content plan: Once again, the emphasis is on “thorough”. Simply writing and crafting what you personally think will resonate with your audience is not really going to work in the long run. When it comes down to dealing with customer interactions, the option of using crm in salesforce ensures that all aspects of customer relationships are taken care of.
Knowing what they want at every stage is just as important and all of their needs should be addressed systematically. Even something as simple as a ‘Welcome Guide’ is highly recommended. - Not testing your funnel: More than often, the experts will focus all of their efforts at the top of the conversion funnel without paying much attention to the bottom part where actual online sales and conversion rates take place. Here, you surely cannot test all of the pages, so start by prioritizing your best pages. The other vital aspects that you should look at are the conversion value and the ease of implementation.
Finally, the reason it is even called a sales funnel in the first place is that while there are a lot of leads initially going into your sales funnel, only a select few come out as customers and fans of your product. It is all about understanding that your sales funnel isn’t the problem and that it is more than likely that the prospects are not being managed in the right way.
As illustrated above, there are different ways to go about maximising the use of your prospects and with every stage of the sales funnel, one must keep the importance of the prospects in mind. There are no two ways about that fact, whatsoever.