Stop Losing Leads: Manage the Sales Funnel with Technology

The sales funnel is a representation of the buyer’s journey from the awareness stage to the action stage. An efficient sales funnel tracks the right lead, nurtures him or her using the right content until he or she is ready to buy your company’s product. Sometimes, the prospects can fall off during the journey. But there are ways of securing a buyer using a Client Relationship Manager (CRM) software that will help convert leads into customers and then brand ambassadors.

Awareness

The sales funnel is shaped like a funnel because awareness begins with a large pool of potential customers. Prospects come with different wants and needs, and so many times some of them will not make it beyond the first stage.

At this stage, the lead has determined a problem and has found your service as a potential solution to that problem. A CRM that’s fit for purpose does a good job of collecting and storing data from various leads. How does that work?

Well, the CRM solutions we deploy have options that allow you to import contact lists in only a few steps. Otherwise, a simple integration with your landing pages will save you the effort of having to copy contacts of thousands of leads for nurturing. Whether it’s via a mailing list or a popup that offers some free goodies, integration into the CRM helps you collect valuable data.

By subscribing to your newsletters, the customer is already admitting to wanting whatever you are selling, at least to a small degree. To ease them efficiently through the sales funnel, optimize your business blogging to serve the customer’s interests. That means your website must be mobile-friendly. Your email must render properly in email clients. Your content must be SEO-optimised, so that only leads who want that content actually make it to your page. And your content must be useful. The same applies to your social media campaigns. Add in good graphics and the right selection of words to grab your audience’s attention and bring their awareness to your offering.

Interest

The interest stage of the sales funnel is where the audience engage with your business. With effective email marketing, you will be able to offer the right kind of messages to them. Here again, the CRM helps you score more points in a variety of ways.

For starters, the CRM allows you to qualify your leads and categorise them based on your interactions with them. This helps you determine whether there is a greater opportunity of closing a deal with one lead or the other. Again, the CRM learns from your customer’s engagement with you; from what they download on site to their mailing preferences, you can sort through a hundred thousand leads and come up with a few thousands who have a peculiar taste for your services. You can then nurture these leads by sending them the right kinds of information.

The good thing is that these steps can be automated. You can set auto-responders for each action taken by a prospect on your website or in a newsletter. Say you are offering a lead the chance to download an e-book among other options. You can set an automated response so that depending on the choice, the lead will receive a message guiding him/her on the next step to take. Without the CRM, you would have to send these messages for each lead or client that opts-in manually; imagine having to do this for a thousand contacts. What’s even better is that you can set a follow-up action in a number of days provided the prospective client takes a particular action. For example, you can remind them if they have not returned after a couple of days. Again, it is possible to standardise and template emails across your organisation so that whoever responds to prospects and clients in your organisation, does so with refined professional language. This eliminates human errors in typos and grammatical mistakes and enhances your credibility. You can set your CRM to use the templates for your automated mails and reminders.

At the same time as the CRM is helping you segment quality leads, your website must have the right navigational cues to reduce bounce rates. E-commerce sites should have filters on all the product listing pages to help visitors find their interests quickly. Implementing a search function in your website is an absolute necessity in this day. Also, social media integration makes it easy for prospective clients to express their interest in or admiration for your product to their connections. This gives you better reach and visibility.

Decision

The sales funnel is coming to a climax. The lead reaches out, seeks answers to specific queries. The queries and decisions the lead makes in your emails and on your website will be available in your CRM automatically. Your email interactions with the lead may be stored in a ticketing system, giving you a historical view of their engagement with your product and service.

At this point, you can reach out with tailor-made solutions. Your CRM’s calendar feature allows you to share upcoming events like meetings and phone calls with other members of your staff who have access to the CRM. You can book appointments right there.

In fact, an in-built call feature in your CRM makes it easy to communicate without leaving the system. If they require specific quotes different from what is available on your product list, the CRM is where to create these quotations. And when the lead has reached out and interacted in this way, it means there is a viable opportunity there. Right in the platform, you convert that lead to an opportunity, and the automated feature is set in motion. Automatic emails can be triggered as events are scheduled and updated in the calendar. Milestones can be chalked off in the project section at the same time and slowly, the lead is nurtured toward the ‘check-out’ page.

On the other side, your products should be properly featured on your website. If there are promotions, the lead should be able to see them here. Popups are important at this stage of your marketing, and they can give website visitors the right cues just when they think about leaving. Through your CRM platform, you can respond to queries faster while tailoring engagement to suit each lead.

Action

As soon as they make their very first purchase, you will see it in your CRM. But to further push the lead toward this stage in the sales funnel, you should employ the right tools to encourage that purchase. Offer as many payment options as possible; from eWallets to credit cards and mobile money, there are many payment solutions to choose from. To build trust, your website should render properly and should also be bolstered with security protocols like SSL certificates, etc.

If they are already registered on your website, build in auto-fill to populate the form fields as and when your customers enter their personal data to hasten the process.

Having made the purchase, the CRM records the leads as customers. Right from there, you are able to send a message of gratitude to your customers and ask for a review of the product or service. Not only will the review serve as a good word-of-mouth for your product, it will also help you fine-tune your product. Your digital marketing campaign will be better off as a result. Here, the sales funnel is a success.