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Fixing the Gaps in Your Sales Funnel

Sales funnel is a marketing tool designed to convert leads into buying customers in a systematic way which involves several stages. The concept of a ‘funnel’ is based on the fact that for every sequential stage in the sales process some percentage of leads get through while others are lost or stay behind.

For businesses, it is reliable indicator of marketing success, or failure. It tells them exactly which part of the sales process is connecting with the audience and which part isn’t

Identifying Problems in the Sales Funnel

A sales funnel can make or break a company. It’s imperative you analysis each part of the funnel to see what is working and what isn’t.

If part of your sales is a landing page that doesn’t convert, then you need to analysis what isn’t working. It could be that the lead acquisition is too generic, or maybe 50% of all the visitors leave without even looking or clicking on your sign up button.

Low click-through rates against a high number of visits on a landing page, could also be a sign. Something isn’t “speaking” to your customers.

The first step is to identify which part of your sales funnel people are dropping off or not responding to.

Read: What Sales Experts Do to Keep Their Sales Pipeline Up and Running

Fixing the Problem with Lead Acquisition

Marketers use inbound and outbound marketing approach to get people to their site. Some examples include landing pages, surveys, and opt-in subscription to newsletters or free content.

Traditional outbound marketing use advertising such as Google AdWords to generate leads. However, this method doesn’t always guarantee a high volume of qualified leads as this can be exploited for financial gain.

Other companies create a buyer persona to guide them at this stage because it helps generate more responses using the concept of an ‘ideal customer.’

The most common problem at this stage has to do with high bounce rate and getting a high number of low-quality leads. Online analytics tools such as Google Analytics reveal how many visits a page has vs. the percentage of those who have taken action.

Experimenting with the client acquisition tool might help solve the problem. A/B testing or split testing, for instance, can help you pinpoint which specific feature or element in your client acquisition tool has the greatest impact in getting more response from your target audience.

Studies have shown that even slight changes in page layout, content, or CTA can influence viewer perception and user experience.

Landing pages should also address specific ‘pain points’ or areas of interests instead of being vague or too generic. Unique value proposition’ (UVP) or ‘unique selling proposition’ (USP) helps create a distinction between you and your competitors, and makes your business stand out.

Fixing the Problem with Lead Nurturing

Nurturing leads is just as important as the initial stage of acquiring them. Unfortunately, this is where most sales funnels start to atrophy and experience massive loss of volume.

This can be attributed to an inefficient email marketing strategy or not being able to follow up with potential customers in a timely manner.

Setting up an email automation can help simplify the task for you. However, to be effective, you need to segment your prospects to stay relevant with them and not sound too generic.

Fixing the Problem with Lead Conversion

Converting leads into buying customers shouldn’t be too difficult if you didn’t have any issue with the acquisition and nurturing stage.

Problems arise when a company tries to fast-track its conversions by skipping other processes. This is usually the case with most traditional outbound marketing which attempts to speed up the sales cycle by hard-selling their leads and prospects.

Companies should be able to provide potential customers with alternatives when making buying decisions. Upselling and cross-selling are among the best and effective ways to seal any gaps in your sales conversions.

Call to action words and phrases (CTA) can also influence the way customers respond to an offer or invitation.

Unlock the Power of CRM for Your Small Business

Being able to monitor your sales funnel and fix the gap between customer acquisition and lead conversion is what elevates your company from all the rest.

Small Business Dream is built around this concept of sales funnel, which involves customer acquisition, maintaining customer relationship, and driving sales. It’s a sales and marketing tool aimed at helping small business owners like you. We’ll be looking forward growing business with you.

How Sales People Can Look Desperate and Some Tips to Avoid It

Sales people are constantly under pressure to perform within the company’s standard. Attrition rate in the sales department is fairly high — as much as 50% a year in some companies.

Most of the time, they would resort to desperate measures in a last ditch effort to reach the monthly or weekly quota. But as we know these futile attempts made no difference other than making them look desperate.

Surviving this job requires persistent effort and a high degree of salesmanship acquired from years of experience and training.

What Persistence is Not

One of the roadblocks to becoming a successful salesperson is the lack of understanding of the customers and the sales process. In order to succeed in a highly competitive market, a salesperson should know the difference between persistence and pushing too far.

Here are some telltale signs that a salesperson has already crossed the line:

1. Salesperson does all the talking.

Sales people can become overly enthusiastic to the point where they start taking up most of the conversation. This usually puts customers on the defensive, especially if they don’t have any intention of buying the product. Some salespersons are not so conscious about it, but it’s actually off-putting to most customers.

2. Salesperson offers ‘solutions’ prematurely.

Businesses provide solutions to their customers’ ‘pain points’. If it’s something that has real value to the customer, it won’t be too hard to make the sale.

However, giving ‘unsolicited advice’ by offering a ‘solution’ too soon can be misconstrued as pushing the sale. Although not necessarily wrong, it would be much better if they would hear from the customers first before going any further.

3. Salesperson gets too ‘salesy’.

Nobody likes a pushy salesperson and people’s natural reaction is to back away if a sales person tries to tell the prospect what is good for them, even if the prospect wants what the salesperson is selling.

Be honest about your product or service and never over-promise — and definitely never lie. A salesperson needs to lead the prospect to water, not try to drown them.

4. Offer discounts too soon.

If not done correctly, offering discounts right off the bat can actually send a different message to the customers. It could mean one of two things — it’s cheap quality, or it’s previously overpriced.

Either way, customers will have a negative impression about the offer, especially those who prefer quality and value over price savings.

5. Criticize others.

Badmouthing other companies betrays a lack of confidence and could undermine the company’s reputation. However, it doesn’t mean sales people couldn’t give their honest opinion about a certain product or service. They just have to put it in context and not use it to promote their own.

Lead Them in — Don’t Push!

The notion of smooth-talking salesman has long been gone. It’s no longer just about the personality or creating a good first impression.

We now live in an era where customers make buying decisions based on facts and not just on some 30-second TV, or YouTube commercial. Hence, we don’t expect customers to just pour in or take the bait right then and there.

We need to cultivate their minds and educate them about the benefits of using our products or services instead of shoving them down their throats.

Converting leads to buying customers doesn’t have to be that hard, if we only take time to nurture them. There are 3 ways you can accomplish this:

Know your customers better. Contacting each potential customer at random will only lead to frustration. You need a tool that allows you to keep in touch with all your contacts and be able to sort them out in the most efficient way. CRM applications like Small Business Dream can make this all possible with less effort.
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Follow-up your leads. Your initial contact with your customers can give away some clues about the things that they like or are interested in. Have them fill up a quick survey and ask some basic information, or you can invite them to your mailing list for a weekly or monthly newsletter to learn more about the benefits of using your product or service.
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Be patient. Unless you’re very lucky, you won’t get the sale on the very first engagement. On average, it takes around 4 to 7 engagements before a deal is made. So be patient and wait for the right opportunity. You don’t want to annoy your prospect with your incessant calls or reminders about the offer. But if your leads are already ripe for the picking, by all means get to them and close the deal as soon as possible.

Being a salesperson doesn’t have to be too difficult with today’s latest innovation in sales and marketing. Small Business Dream simplifies the work for you, so you won’t have to sweat it out just to get things done.

Visit us at www.smallbizdream.com to learn more about our suite of tools which include sales funnel, survey engine, email autoresponders and more.

How Technology Is Changing Sales Forever

Technology has shaped the way we do business, especially in the last fifteen years. Over the course of its transformation, the sales and marketing aspect of business has evolved from one mode of customer engagement to the next.

This paradigm shift has had a lot of implications in many of today’s small to medium enterprises. Accessibility to products and services coupled with the growing number of online users also meant that the competition for customer attention will be more relentless than ever.

There are number of ways our recent technology in sales and marketing has affected the business sector. However, our focus will be the most prominent ones and have the greatest impact to customer engagement and sales on a global scale.

Major Shift from Traditional Marketing to Omnichannel Marketing

Before PCs and smart phones were adapted for consumer use, customers had no way of interacting with the businesses since everything was basically a one-way communication between the company and the audience (also known as traditional outbound marketing).

But as more people are starting to gain access to online services, this type of customer engagement had slowly become a thing of the past.

Some companies took their old marketing approach and moved it online (YouTube commercials, online ads, online stores, etc.). However, unlike traditional media, online consumers are able to make their voices heard through the social media, comments section, forums, online reviews, vlogs, and the list goes on.

This sparked a new era of customer engagement and the birth of omnichannel marketing. Businesses are continuously harnessing the potential of social media, blogs and online sites, using the latest CRM technology to manage their contacts and maintain customer relationship.

Bigger Opportunities for Small to Medium Enterprise

Big companies used to occupy a large portion of the market until the Internet reached full status at the turn of the 21^st century. They stayed top-of-mind through promotional ventures and ads, while small businesses struggled to make an impact.

But with the major shift from traditional marketing to online customer engagement, things are about to change. Today, it is not uncommon to find multi-million dollar businesses with a solid online presence coming from the lower echelons of the business sector.

Social media, email marketing, content marketing — to name a few — enable business owners to expand their borders far beyond the reaches of traditional marketing.

However, unlike TV ads and other promotional material, it is by far the most cost-effective method when it comes to promoting brands and maintaining customer loyalty, so much so that even long-established companies followed suit and retrofitted their businesses with online marketing strategies.

More Businesses Competing for Online Space

Competition is the natural outgrowth of this technological innovation in customer engagement.

During its infancy the Internet relied heavily in physical servers to create a virtual space for users worldwide. When cloud computing went full swing, this limitation was done away with.

Consequently, competing businesses have also grown by the millions using the Internet as the battleground for online supremacy.

To see just how much competition we’re dealing with, try searching the word ‘car’ in the Google search bar and you’ll find over 5 billion search results just for the word.

Assuming that you’re doing car sales, this meant that establishing your online presence would be an uphill battle unless you have the technical know-how to outmaneuver and bury your competitors.

Because competition is so fierce, businesses must continue to innovate and find new ways to stay relevant. Content marketing has become a buzzword and now businesses are flooding the market with blog posts, podcasts and videos. But because there is so much content, it is hard to stand out with a simple 500-word post.

Kijiji featured some up-and-coming rap artists in one of its campaigns. A Montreal rapper made a song called “Gotta sell my stuff” which received over 830,000 views on YouTube. This is the type of content marketing that will be successful — fun, entertaining, and inclusive. Content marketing is not about talking to your customers. It’s about including them into the conversation.

Improved Customer Service through CRM

Since the advent of customer relationship management tools, customer service has improved by leaps and bounds. Companies don’t have to pull numbers out of thin air when trying to figure out their customer’s specific ‘pain points,’ creating value for their customers, and improving customer experience.

Mobile CRMs such as Small Business Dream features customer acquisition tools, including sales funnel, card scan function, survey engine, Google Analytics, coupled with an efficient follow-up system to keep track of every customer engagement, upcoming calls, or scheduled appointments.

By emphasizing a customer-driven approach to sales and marketing, businesses are able to keep a steady flow of qualified leads and repeat customers.

Visit our site at www.smallbizdream.com and experience the power CRM technology for your small business.

Stay in the Lead – KNOW Your Customers Better

As a business owner, spending some time to know your customers can make a big difference in reaching out to them and improving your sales. More people — millennials especially — are starting their own businesses, whether it’s home-based or a small brick-and-mortar store.

Starting up a business is never easy, much less running it. But with the right tools and know-hows on how to get the job done, you can accelerate your growth and not be left behind.

One of the most effective ways to achieve phenomenal growth in any kind of business is by taking a customer-centric approach to marketing and by putting the customers first.

What’s at Stake

Companies who fail at communicating with their customers have been known for making the worst marketing flops. They assume customers will like a certain kind of product or service when the fact is, they want something else. The result is often a totally useless product that completely misses the target market.

To make up for this, companies will try every trick in the book just to get people to like it. They would spend millions of dollars on ads and promotional materials to no avail in hopes of recouping their investments.

If all people care about is how they can take advantage of the business opportunity with little or no regard to customer satisfaction, they have to stop and rethink their strategy; otherwise they go out of business.

The key is to know your customers first and foremost, and define your unique value proposition. Spending some time to know your customers and making them your priority will always pay off in the long run.

Why Businesses Fail

The vast majority of businesses that failed are those that are just starting up. Bloomberg reports that for every 10 startups, 8 will crash and burn within the first 18 months.

In a study conducted by Peppers and Rogers Group, 70 percent of the customers leave a company because of poor service and 60 percent fail to convert into customers because they felt customer service is indifferent to their needs.

Some of the reasons why businesses fail include:

Failure to innovate

Customers can grow tired of the same old stuff. If you’re stuck with just one particular product or style, your chances for growth and expansion is very slim. When it comes to your marketing strategy, innovation is also key. If you don’t have a web portal, a landing page, or even just a social media account to your brick-and-mortar business, you’ve already lost a substantial amount of potential customers to your competitors. The time you stop innovating is the time you start losing ground to them.

Failure to differentiate

What is your unique value proposition? Customers tend to remember brands or companies because they are among the few who stand out from the rest. If you’re trying to compete with an already existing market, you’re going to have a tough fight ahead of you. Find your own niche, do something new from time to time, but try not to go overboard. Otherwise, you might actually get the opposite of what you want.

Failure to communicate

This, perhaps, is the most crucial part and where most companies would either float or sink to the bottom. The majority of traditional outbound marketing practices are just one-way communication. They don’t care if you’re listening or not; they’ll just say what they want you to hear. We all know how that turned out in some companies — and it’s never cheap.

Keeping your lines of communication open for your customers enables you to stay ahead of the competition by knowing exactly what they want and by giving them the right products and quality service that they deserve. To be successful, you need to have the right tools to bring your business closer to them and accomplish the task much faster.

Small Business Dream’s Survey Engine is an amazing feature that allows business owners to create their own customized surveys with very little effort. Or, they can interact with their customers via email, social media, or on the phone using its automated and semi-automated features.

Small Business Dream simplifies the work for you by providing a CRM designed specially for small business owners like you. We provide you with a suite of tools to know your customers better and boost your sales in ways you never thought possible.

What Sales Experts Do to Keep Their Sales Pipeline Up and Running

Businesses have been constantly evolving for the last twenty years and are starting to adopt a different approach to lead conversion. Unlike traditional outbound marketing, ‘soft sales approach’ involve several stages in the customer’s journey which lead to a sale or repeat business.

This process can be seen in a company’s sales pipeline. Sales pipeline can be viewed in different ways but the basic idea is the same: “How do I get my leads from point A to point B, and what does it take to get them there?”

Stages in a Sales Pipeline

Companies differ as to the exact number of stages in a sales pipeline. However, most companies will agree that six to seven stages hits the sweet spot. We’ll go through each stage and see how experts lead their prospects from one point to another.

Stage 1 — Generate High Quality Leads

Sales and marketing experts would often use the social media, invite people to a social event, or use an effective content marketing strategy to get as many potential customers as possible. Making the sale at this point is the least of their concerns. It’s more about getting people interested in what they have to offer.

Stage 2 — Educate Leads about the Benefits

What’s in it for them? Leads should be able to see clearly how a company or a specific product can help solve their ‘pain points’ through opt-in subscription to weekly posts or monthly newsletters. Email automation and autoresponders can help accomplish the task via drip emails.

Stage 3 — Get Feedback from Viewers and Subscribers

Being able to collect information from opt-in viewers and subscribers allows businesses to refocus their strategies and be able to address individual needs. Some CRM applications like Small Business Dream enable business owners to collect information from online subscribers and viewers using a survey engine, similar to Google Surveys offered in Google Analytics Solutions.

Stage 4 — Qualify Prospects

This stage will assess the possibility of converting leads to business opportunities, by weighing certain factors such as viewing activity (click and open rate), specific interests, occupation, income, and so on. The result will determine whether they would eventually turn into opportunities or if they needed more time in the previous stages (Stage 2 and 3).

Stage 5 — Assign Lead Scores

Each qualified prospect receives a lead score which indicates his level of interest. Investing more time and money on a qualified lead is considered profitable since the likelihood of conversion is very high. Those who received higher scores are given more priority while those at the lower end can be cycled back to Stage 2 or 3.

Stage 6 — Close the Deal

This stage provides the end-result of all the marketing efforts to win a potential customer. Some of the best-known practices at this stage include upselling and cross-selling. Others will include a ‘post-sale’ where customers are encouraged to patronize their product through follow-ups and having them sign up for loyalty or point cards.

Maintaining a Healthy Sales Pipeline

Maintaining a steady flow of leads, opportunities, and sales is critical in any business. If at any stage the sales pipeline gets bogged down and fail to meet their goals, the company could take a hit and seriously affect their bottom line. Some ways to keep the sales pipeline up and running include:

Checking the conversion rates by stage
Making constant improvements on every stage
Closely monitoring the sales cycle
Holding regular sales pipeline meetings

Running a business shouldn’t be too overwhelming with today’s modern CRM that can store, analyze, and keep businesses attuned to the customers’ needs.

At Small Business Dream, we give you the most up-to-date CRM software to keep track of your customers and provide you with the right information to stay in business.