How to Optimize Your Sales Funnel: Talk Only to the Right Leads
You want to sell, right? This is clear, assuming you are in the Marketing or Sales sector, or even if you are the CEO of a company. But for this to be possible, it is necessary to find people who wanted to buy and this can be a little difficult.
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On average, only 3% of your audience is currently purchasing and actively looking, and 6-7% would accept to receive an offer. This conclusion is from Chet Holmes , file of The Ultimate Sales Machine .
In other words, to optimize sales, in addition to having a limited number of opportunities in the market, it is necessary to attract and convert as many of this market segment as possible in order to get the most desired customers.
Source: Digital Results Blog.
The challenge is to be able to attract and convert as many leads as possible with the potential to reach 3% ready to buy, or the bottom of the sales funnel . The ultimate goal, of course, is to optimize the resources invested in acquiring new customers ( if you're not already familiar with the concept of Customer Acquisition Cost, you'd better have a look here before proceeding ). But what happens, in most cases, is to attract a portion of each stratum of the pyramid.
What to do in this case?
Many companies think that the solution to achieve the desired number of customers ( reach the goal ) lies in expanding the focus of customers, opening verticals, closing a customer at any cost (even if losing money ). We believe the solution is to focus on your target audience, go after the ICP and optimize the sales funnel to accelerate it.
At the end of this post we will give you tips and strategies to optimize your sales funnel and find good leads.
How to optimize sales
ICP : define your Ideal Customer Profile
Do you know who your ideal customer is? In which segment does it work, what pain does it need to address, its average ticket, how does the decision process work, etc.? All these (and many more) information will make up the Ideal Customer Profile , or Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), as it is more commonly used. Without this, there is no way to optimize sales.
ICP is widely used in B2B companies that follow an Account-Based Marketing strategy . In this model, a commercial contact will meet the needs of the company or a company team, instead of serving individuals individually, as is the case with SMBs (small and medium-sized companies). Another important point to highlight is regarding the buyer persona: is it the same thing?
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Source: Propeller CRM
No. While both terms designate characteristics of potential customers, ICP refers to the B2B company that will implement your solution. Buyer personas are people who are part of the ICP team. We already have a spreadsheet to help you think about your company's buyer personas, so let's focus a bit on creating the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
Where to start sales optimization: stay tuned for Product-Market Fit
When setting up a new business, finding a business segment is essential to ensure the longevity of a business. This stage of the business is called Product-Market Fit (PMF) and indicates that it was possible to find a niche, sector or type of business that benefits from your solution or product.
To reach the FMP, it is necessary to get 10 paying customers, with the same characteristics, and with no direct relationship with anyone in the company (father, mother or friend), who are able to use your product and see real value in the solution.
Once you've hit the FMP, it's time to look at your current customers and see what they have in common. In the case of Meetime, for example, we saw that our ICP are SaaS companies that have the need to conduct videoconferences.quality demonstration , record calls and monitor the different points of contact of the pre-sales and sales teams.
So, to build your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), ask yourself: What are the characteristics of a company that can buy and love my product/service? See below:
Characteristics of companies that may buy and love your product or service
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<![if !supportLists]>o <![endif]>How the decision-making process works
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Terminus has a great template for creating the Ideal Customer Profile and we suggest you download it and take a look. Once you have your ICP and are able to define the buyer personas (who you're going to talk to), it's time to start optimizing your sales funnel!
Strategies to Optimize the Sales Funnel
In our blog, we've talked a few times about ways to shorten the sales cycle and speed up the purchase funnel for sales optimization.
In them, we gave suggestions on how to make the buyer get to the moment of purchase faster. All suggestions are valid and you should take the time to take a look. But for this to be possible, you need to have a working sales funnel.
What does that mean? Being able to select the right leads, with a purchase profile, and send them to the sales team. This not only optimizes the resources of the marketing and sales teams, but also allows salespeople to take an unhurried consultative approach.
Below we list some super efficient strategies for optimizing sales through the sales funnel:
Update or improve the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
By knowing, and documenting, which companies do best with your product or solution, your marketing and sales team can use those characteristics as part of lead qualification. In other words: profile information can also be taken into account during Lead Scoring (your lead scoring and ranking system)!
Since we covered the ICP creation process in detail earlier, let's go straight to the next point, okay?!
Update or refine Lead Scoring
Once you've got your ICP and buyer personas built, it's time to take a look at Lead Scoring. There are many indications on how to do this, but we use Marketo's model and that results in the table below:
If you don't already know, Lead Scoring is nothing more than a scoring system to be used to track the evolution of leads and classify them according to fit, interest in the product or solution and the probability of closing a deal with yours. company. It can be fully customized according to the reality of the company, so it is a great resource for automating the passage of leads from marketing to sales.
In our Marketing and Sales SLA spreadsheet, we have a Lead Scoring template that you can use, as well as ICP and buyer persona templates. Take a look here!
BOFU materials for hand-raising campaigns
Raise-of-hand campaigns are ones that encourage leads to show interest in the solution or request a business contact . They can be done on social media or with email marketing, but for best results, having support material that shows the benefits of your product or solution is one of the keys to success.
This is where the success stories come into play! E-books, spreadsheets, whitepapers and even blog posts that show results achieved by competing companies are great ways to get your leads' attention. This type of campaign also creates a sense of urgency that can speed up the buying process, so go for it!
Cadences of exploration to find the right opportunities
Did you know that most salespeople give up on a lead after three contact attempts? At the same time, the winning sales team found that the number of responses nearly doubles after 7 attempts.
In other words: when the objective is to talk to a qualified lead, the best indication is to follow well-structured cadences with multiple points of contact before giving up.
In this content about cadence flows you can see exactly how to build one that is appropriate to the reality of your sales team.
Tough questions asap
One of the biggest mistakes we've addressed in this lead bottleneck post is putting the tough questions (those where the salesperson fears the prospect might say no) too late in the sales funnel.
An example of a difficult question might be: “Is solving problem X a priority for your company right now, Mr Prospect? ” This causes a large number of dropouts to happen at the bottom of the funnel, directly impacting the seller's performance.
Ideally, in order to avoid this scenario and be able to generate sales optimization, it is best to anticipate difficult questions as much as possible and ask them during the diagnosis. At this point you will already know who is interested in your solution, but you will be able to validate budget, pain, purchase intent and priority before proceeding to the solution demonstration stage, or equivalent, and submitting the proposal.
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Indication of similar customers
The moment right after closing a contract is one of the best times to ask for referrals. So, take the opportunity to ask: can you refer me to two other companies that you believe could take advantage of our solution like you?Doing so will ensure that you have a number of highly qualified leads in your pipeline that can be worked on by the marketing and sales teams jointly.
So, did you understand how to talk to only the right leads? We hope these strategies focused on optimizing the funnel can positively impact your operation!
Do you have other sales optimization strategies? Leave it in the comments and help us expand this post
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