According to data offered by IronPaper and Salesforce, 79% of marketing leads are never converted into sales. If that number leaves you questioning the efforts of your business’ sales outreach, it might be time to take a long, hard look at your company’s sales funnel optimization efforts.
Understanding how to optimize your business’ sales funnel for conversions is crucial if you want your company to remain (or become) profitable. Failure to understand the critical importance of sales funnel optimization could mean your business is in jeopardy. If you want or frankly, need help learning how to maximize your company’s sales funnel, I can help your sales teams excel by showing you and them how to put my “Top Ten Tips” into action.
1) Sales Automation Tools can help increase leads into your sales funnel, but they will not convert those leads into sales on your business’ balance sheet. While sales automation tools are an excellent resource, their effectiveness is greatly diminished by lack of understanding.
If your company is integrating automation into your lead generation strategy, it is imperative sales team members receive extensive training on how to make the most of their new tools.
Regular training on everything from automation hacks to conversion strategies must be a core component of your company’s sales growth efforts.
2) Sales Funnel Optimization is not a standalone effort. If you want to increase the effectiveness of your business’ sales funnel, you must combine multiple factors like sales audits, leadership development, team training and talent acquisition training into your growth strategy.
Your sales funnel will only produce more sales-ready leads if you upgrade your pre-sales efforts. Understanding the numerous factors influencing sales lead quality is essential for improved funnel optimization.
3) Ongoing Sales Analysis Reporting is vital for improved sales funnel optimization. Regularly analyzing every aspect of your company’s sales efforts will allow you to uncover growth opportunities. Sales analysis reports can help you determine weak spots within your sales team, discover bottlenecks within your funnel, and review cross-selling opportunities you might be overlooking.
Do not forget to have outside department heads review your sales reports. It is too easy for sales teams to have tunnel vision where their work output is concerned. Allowing department leaders from marketing or human resources review your sales reports gives a fresh perspective on ongoing growth efforts.
4) Sales Funnel Optimization does not just magically happen by tweaking growth efforts within your sales department. Maximizing sales is a cross-company effort. From your shipping department prioritizing outbound shipments to your e-commerce department prioritizing new product descriptions, each department within your company contributes to team successes or failures.
Your marketing department can develop an improved SEO (search engine optimization) strategy or your accounting department can make fast payments a priority, but without all departments working together, success rates will be diminished.
5) Speaking of SEO, content marketing and search engine optimization must become a top priority if you want to improve your business’ lead quality. How you are marketing your business online has a huge impact on attracting the right type of leads to your company.
Understanding which long-tail keyword phrases to use and how to market those keywords to potential customers is essential for improved sales rates.
If you do only one thing to improve your business’ sales funnel optimization efforts, I recommend working with a content strategist.
6) Developing a Detailed Sales Quote Strategy is another integral component of improving your sales funnel optimization efforts. From negotiation to pricing and the subsequent sales proposal stage, every element of your sales quote strategy must be optimized for conversions.
Address the copy you are using in your sales scripts, understand the approval process required by your customers, and develop detailed strategies for overcoming sales objections. When you make the effort to maximize the potential of your sales quote plan-of-action, you will be amazed at how quickly conversions increase.
7) Automating Account Research for your sales team can have a significant impact on their sales rate. Too many sales team members are spending inordinate amounts of time researching potential sales leads.
If you can reduce the amount of time your sales team spends hunting for new leads and researching potential sales targets, you can increase the amount of time they spend converting those leads into paying customers. Pay attention to new startup companies offering sales optimization tools and you might discover new sales maximization resources your competitors do not even know exist.
8) Speaking of Sales Startups, monitoring what is happening within the IoT (Internet of Things) and sensor startup sectors is also a good idea for those wanting to maximize their sales funnels.
From RFID chips for warehouses to IoT devices and sensors for inventory tracking, there is plenty of advancement being made within these startup sectors.
The more resources you have at your disposal to maximize inventory, the more likely it is you can out-perform competitors and achieve increased sales quotas, targets and/or goals..
9) Social Media Marketing is playing an increasingly important role in sales funnel optimization. Whether you are targeting a B2B customer or hunting for new B2C sales, how you connect with potential customers on social media can influence the types of leads you are driving to your sales team.
I suggest including your sales team in your company’s social media marketing strategy or you could be spending countless hours attracting the wrong type of leads to your sales department.
10) Social Selling needs to become an integral component of your overall sales funnel optimization strategy. Utilizing tools like social listening can help your team uncover fresh sales leads they might otherwise not have discovered.
Develop team specialists who understand the importance of social selling and give them plenty of opportunities to impart their knowledge to the rest of your team members.
I can show you how to integrate these 10 sales funnel optimization tips into your business’ growth strategy. If you have team members who are willing to give full and consistent effort, are focused on improving performance, success is right around the corner!
Call me direct at: +1 (281) 339-7279
Before helming Perpetual Talent Solutions as President, Jim Hickey held several senior leadership roles in both sales and operations for two of the world’s largest Commercial Staffing organizations. Jim is a dedicated professional who has been formally recognized as a Staffing Industry Subject Matter Expert.