Tag Archives for sales process

Any experienced salesperson will tell you that the completion of a sale is only a small part of the sales process. Selling is not an act, but a process. It begins long before any transaction takes place. Carefully identifying and managing all the ways a potential lead interacts with your business to make sure they are constantly engaged is key to ensuring the conversion from awareness to purchase decision. 

At every step of the way, potential leads need to feel like your business is adding value to their experience while being convinced of your ability to fulfill their needs. Creating a sales funnel allows potential customers to interact with your business in the most optimal way so you can influence their purchase decision.

What is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is a visual representation of the journey prospects go through on their way to make their purchase. If you can successfully get prospects from one end of the funnel to the other without them dropping out along the way, you now have a new customer.  

In order to design a successful purchase journey, you need to understand how and when users interact with your business. Creating a sales funnel allows you to visualize each step of the process and the insight it provides can help you set up an effective marketing strategy for each stage

Why the Sales Funnel Matters

According to Pardot, 68% of all organizations have not identified or measured their sales funnel and 79% of the leads never gets converted to paying customers. Without an effective sales funnel, businesses are unable to move leads through the pipeline and cannot identify improvements that need to be made in the processes for effective conversions. A detailed sales funnel can help an organization achieve a variety of goals and help fine-tune the series of steps required to nudge potential customers into making a purchase decision. Some of the benefits of a sales funnel are:

• It can help attract a community that may not be familiar with your business
• Help engage with an audience that knows and understands your business
• Educates prospects who would like to purchase your product or service
• Identifies leads that are about to drop out so you can take corrective measures needed for conversion

The Stages of the Sales Funnel

Creating a sales funnel allows you to track a prospect from the time it first interacts with your business all the way to a completed purchase while identifying all the ways customers have dropped out along the way.

A usual sales funnel has the following stages:

Awareness:

When your customer learns about your business for the first time he is in the awareness stage. Early in the journey, customers are going through exploring options to solve a specific problem.

To target customers during the awareness stage it is important to understand where they are present and find a way to reach out to them with a relevant message. A clear understanding of a customer here will help you develop the right channels to communicate through so you can reach them in the most effective manner.

This is the first impression of your brand, so a carefully crafted experience is key to keeping them engaged.

Interest and Evaluation:

Once you have succeeded in piquing their interest, the potential customer may now consider you as a viable option. At this stage, the customer probably has many questions about your product and how it fits into their lives. The key task here is to provide clarity and remove any friction that may cause them to drop out. Remember, they have expressed their interest in certain ways- clicking on an ad, responding to a form, replying to a sales e-mail and now the onus falls on you to convert that interest into a sale.

Desire:

After a lead has moved from the awareness stage to the interest stage if they are still engaging with your business or your promotional material, it is likely that they have now entered the ‘Desire’ stage. At this point, they are evaluating options and are considering the reasons to choose your product. Many times they are often looking for some validation to their decision, so a well-timed content plan can reassure them they are making the right decision. It could be customer testimonials, case studies from other customers, tutorials, or even discount codes.  

The main goal at this stage is to show prospects what life would be like if they chose your product or service. 

Action:

There is still some ground to cover between a customer deciding on your product and actually making a purchase. But your goal here isn’t simply to get your customer to complete a transaction, it is to ensure they find customer success. This means supporting them with educational material providing the right onboarding experience or even training them to use the product to the best of their ability. 

Delight:

One of the most commonly overlooked aspects in a sales funnel is the delight stage. This is the stage where your sales funnel gives birth to the next sale funnel. Converting customers to evangelists greatly minimizes the number of new customers that drop out in the earlier stages of the funnel. Delighting customers can increase retention rates which can have great implications on a business. Just a 5 % retention rate can result in a 25% to 90% increase in profits.

Lead Nurturing 

Just setting up a funnel and identifying touchpoints isn’t enough. Your sales strategy needs to nurture sales along every step of the funnel and develop and reinforce relationships with buyers that have lasting effects. You can do this by providing the information and answers they need to build trust, increase brand awareness, and maintain a connection until prospects are ready to make a purchase.

Companies who properly nurture their leads see a 450% increase in qualified prospects. And, those who take the time to nurture and grow those customer relationships, see 50% more sales at a 33% lower cost.

Sales Cycle Management:

After the sales funnel is identified, effectively visualized, and the various touchpoints considered, your sales team must create a process to effectively and consistently convert potential sales into customers. Sales cycle management is the process of keeping track of all the stages in the sales life cycle. It involves adjusting them to customers based on their behavior during those key stages. 

A Sales Funnel Has the Following steps:

Prospect:  Involves identifying potential customers. Here it is important to create an idealized customer persona so your sales team can look for prospects that most closely match it. 

Contact: After preparing a list of prospects it is important to identify which stage of the buyer’s journey each prospect is on. This will allow your sales team to more readily identify what the prospect’s needs may be.

Qualify: Here the salesperson identifies whether or not a potential prospect is interested in a purchase and how far away they are from making an actual decision.

Nurture: This involves actively engaging with prospects until they are ready to make a transaction.

Offer: Leads that sign up for demos or trials and are inquiring about pricing are ready to make a purchase. At this point, it is appropriate to make a sales pitch that concludes with an appropriate offer.

Handle Objections: This is where sales representatives listen to customer concerns and consider any counteroffer they make.

Close: The sale is now complete, all questions the lead had have been answered and the transaction is complete. Your business efforts should now be spent on ensuring your customer achieves success with your product. 

Creating and implementing a sales funnel is a series of incremental steps that eventually lead to successfully closing a sale. Spending the time and effort to ensure every stage of the funnel is well thought through and engages the customer in the right way, can greatly boost overall sales number, increase repeat customers, and overall customer satisfaction.

If you have had experience with creating and implementing a sales funnel, we’d love to hear some of the insights you discovered along the way. Please feel free to let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

No matter what industry you are in or how mature your business is, building a competent sales team and an effective sales process takes a lot of work. Without a constant way to optimize sales processes, it is difficult to achieve sales success.

When optimizing your sales processes, there are two aspects to consider; external and internal. On one hand, you can improve the way you present yourself, your products or services, and interact with the customer. On the other hand, you can improve how your sales team plan and do their work.

We’ve listed below a few handy tips on how you can optimize your sales processes both externally and internally.

Sales Process Optimization Tips: External

Add Diagrams to Sales Pitches / Proposals / Documents

Visuals are a great way to simplify and explain things.

Adding diagrams like process maps, flowcharts, and even infographics illustrating how your product fits into your customers’ processes or systems and solves their problems in sales pitches and proposals, can help you convert your prospects better.

Show How They Can Benefit from the Solution You Provide

With an updated flowchart/ process map, you can show how exactly their process or system will be improved and how they can save time once your solution is integrated. Visualization is certainly more effective than explaining it in words.

Explain the Sales Process

In some cases, closing the sale could be just the beginning. Post-sale, you’ll have to keep in contact with the customers by continuing to provide your service or to help them with using your product. This may call for post-sale checkup meetings etc. To streamline this follow-up process you can use,

• Flowcharts to communicate how you would continue to provide your service after the sale
• Gantt charts to highlight the scheduled dates of  the post-sale meetings

Sales Process Optimization Tips: Internal

Map Out Complex Sales Processes

There are smaller sales that involve only one or two customers. And then there are complex sales where your sales team has to interact and communicate with an entire organization to close it.

In cases like these, it helps to map out the sales process since it involves a lot of people and steps. This helps keep everyone on the same page. It can also serve as a checklist the team can refer to when closing a sale.

Analyzing Sales Funnel with Flowcharts

Filtering out the qualified customers from the less qualified is a hard task to begin with! But the job is well taken care of by the sales funnel. The sales funnel/pipeline acts as a strainer to direct qualified buyers through the sales process.

In fact, at the top of the funnel is where all the website visitors are (qualified, less-qualified, and unqualified). The unqualified drop at the top, even before they move on to the next step in the funnel process, the less qualified drop away at each step of the purchasing process, and only the qualified make it all the way to the bottom of the funnel.

At Creately, we normally use funnel diagrams to understand the flow of a user through our website, to the application, and then onto the purchase pages (or not). Some great tools are out there to measure, but we use Google Analytics to understand our funnel and conversion rates.

We actually went and applied the same to our traffic funnel in three steps.

• Identify how our potential customers find out about Creately. The ‘trigger’ to visit the site.
• What their motivations are. Why are they here?
• Identify the pages they land on, and craft a message that resonates with the visitor’s intent and motivations. This will achieve lower bounce rates and far better conversions in a funnel.

It’s easier to map this out in a diagram – a simple flowchart, and here’s ours, How People Discover Creately. Some of the bounce rates are guesstimates though.

We first identified the source for them to come to Creately, then we broke them down by their motivations and where they would go on the site to what landing pages.

We refer to the whole logical sequence as a funnel. 

Identify Your Prospects with Account Maps

Account maps help you identify the decision-makers who are most likely to be interested in your product or service in an account.

To draw an account map, begin with your best contact in an account. Then identify the other leading roles who will be involved in the buying process. Try to figure out how the people on your map relate to each other – the lines of communication among them.

As you identify the friends and foes, who would benefit or lose from your success and how your goals would influence them with the help of your account map or the sales influence map, you’d be able to strategize a plan of attack easily.

Map Out Your Internal Sales Processes

Using process maps you can effectively map out your sales processes to optimize your sales cycles. You can also tailor your process maps according to the solution and the responsible sales representative.

There are a few of benefits of keeping records of your internal sales processes

• It helps get everyone in the sales team on the same page
• It makes it easier to train replacements/ new employees without a hassle
• It helps implement changes to processes seamlessly

Create a Customer Journey Map

A customer journey map highlights all the experiences your customer has with you as well as your organization’s touchpoints (those on your side who interact with the customer).

Gathering this information is important when defining the stages of your sales process. It also becomes relevant in creating content that will grab the attention of the customer throughout the sales funnel.

What’s Your Take on these Ways to Optimize Sales Processes?

How do you optimize your sales processes at your company? What other techniques do you use to improve your sales processes? Do share them with us in the comment section below.

Want to optimize your sales funnel and boost your conversion rate? Here are the tools you need to build a foolproof conversion rate optimization plan.