The sales funnel is the key to building strong and productive customer relationships. It is a powerful tool for achieving the strategic goals of any business. The funnel allows a lead generation firm to assess the effectiveness of its sales process and identify weaknesses. The right approach covers all stages, from generating leads to closing deals. It ensures that your conversion rates increase and adapt to changes in the requirements of potential customers. In this article, we will cover the following aspects:
- Review popular sales funnel models;
- Benefits that it can bring to lead generating companies;
- Tips on how to build a robust sales funnel.
What is a B2B Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel represents the ideal customer journey that they follow from when they first interact with the brand until they make a purchase. This is one of the most effective ways to check at what stage of the decision-making process a client is, and based on this, plan subsequent actions. The challenge for any company is to guide a prospect down the sales funnel to help them make a purchase.
Importance of Sales Funnel for a Lead Generation Firm
A high-quality sales funnel allows you to effectively convert potential clients into regular customers. Here are some more benefits it brings to the business:
- It improves the interaction of the marketing and sales teams.
- It allows you to build strong relationships with customers.
- It demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of the lead generating companies at every stage of the sales process.
- It increases conversion and customer retention.
- It helps to clearly plan every action in the sales process.
- It allows you to increase your sales.
Popular Models of B2B Sales Funnel
The primary sales funnel model was created back in 1898, it was called AIDA, and included the following stages:
- Awareness. At this stage, potential customers learned about the product.
- Interest. It is assumed that here a potential client assesses the value of a product or service.
- Desire. This is the step where a potential customer wants to purchase items after talking to sales representatives.
- Action. It is the successful closing of a deal when a customer purchases a product or service.
As the business process and the market changed, new models began to emerge, covering additional stages. The most popular of them are:
- Forrester Model. It reflects the degree of interest, interaction, and influence that an individual has on a brand over time. This model makes the main focus on covering the best lead providers and high engagement of potential clients.
- McKinsey Loyalty Loop. This concept demonstrates how customers make purchasing decisions and subsequent interactions with the brand.
- Heinz Model. It combines community awareness, brand value assessment, loyalty, and decision making.
How To Build Perfect B2B Sales Funnel
The base model used four main steps to guide the user to make a purchase. But since its inception, the decision-making process has changed significantly, and healthy competition in the market has made it even more difficult. Nowadays, most customers use the Internet to learn more about the company and the products they offer. That is why it is essential to create a sales funnel that would exactly suit your business’s specifics. In other words, the approach should be unique and based on the preferences of potential customers. But below, we’ll take a look at the necessary steps that will allow you to build an efficient model.
#1. Attract Customer Attention
Today, the market provides customers with lots of offers, and the time for making decisions is shortening. So if you want to succeed, you don’t have to wait for the client to mature. Take the initiative and focus on raising customer awareness of your product or service. They need to understand that your brand is the best solution to their problem. To do this, you should create high-quality and useful content. But it should be balanced; you should not provide too much information. How to understand what content is significant and valuable for your customers? Make an analysis of the market and your target audience. An effective sales process is when a company clearly knows all its potential nuances and aspects and knows how to manage this data competently. This process also involves the usage of sales lead generators, after which you should maintain their awareness.
#2 Keep Relations With Clients
Many customers delay a purchase, as it is crucial for them that the supplier has previously demonstrated the expertise. That is, sales offers alone are not enough for a customer to make a deal with you. But creating relevant and targeted content is what will enable a business to succeed. It is a good idea to use the CRM, which allows you to automate some of the marketing steps, thereby maintaining and developing customer relationships. It also enables sales representatives to respond promptly and make offers at the very moment when the customer is ready to make a purchase.
#3 Showcase Your Value
Many independent studies suggest that a customer is ready to make a purchase when they see that a business can solve at least 3 of their problems. This is why it is essential to know the pain points of your target audience. When you know exactly what the client’s problem is, you can quickly demonstrate an effective solution with your services. Therefore, to show your value, you have to create a scenario of how your business completely meets customers’ needs. In turn, this information should be available to sales representatives to easily demonstrate this to clients.
#4 Focus on Best Leads Providers
About half of the purchases in the B2B area are made through growing potential customers. As such, it’s always worth helping your leads at every stage of your sales funnel and interacting with them regularly. However, if they don’t end up becoming your customers, it’s also an invaluable experience. It allows you to understand the shortcomings of the existing model and develop an adequate solution.
#5 Build Relationships After Closing a Deal
The classic sales funnel ends at the previous stage. But modern market conditions dictate additional rules. Help your customers repeat purchases to increase your sales. Keep in touch with them via email or profitable deals. For example, offer them a discount if they will use your services again in the future.
Conclusion
An effective sales funnel is built on a thorough analysis of the target audience. But quality leads generators are just as important. Since building a powerful funnel is an individual process, it makes sense to use professionals’ services. A trusted company will help you set up a sales funnel quickly and with a reasonable investment. Turning to the experts from Belkins, any business can forget about the constant loss of leads and non-closing deals. Become more successful by partnering with a top-notch lead generation firm.
