It’s no secret that leads creation may be an expensive endeavor for a company. From start to end, the average cost of closing a lead is projected to be roughly $198.
Because of savvy consumers, tough competition, and lengthier sales cycles, complicated funnels have emerged, making it easier for leads to “leak.”
Sales and marketing teams collaborate to construct a large and often costly funnel. However, there are methods for organizations to streamline the process and lower the cost of each lead.
Create a buyer-to-customer path.
Before you can consider closing sales, you must first comprehend the three key stages of the buyer’s decision-making process.
When you map out the buyer-to-customer journey, you have a better understanding of what prospective consumers anticipate from a company and which sales methods to use successfully, and when.
The buyer will be at the awareness stage at first. This is where the buyer first hears about your brand, whether through word of mouth or by marketing efforts.
A company must then filter through this large pool of prospects to find individuals who will become customers. Identifying target audiences is critical at this point to guide the correct prospects through the funnel and into the next stage. Businesses may do this by producing high-quality content that attracts the desired demographic without being overly sales-focused.
Prospects can be filtered using long-tail keywords.
While having a large pool of prospects is excellent, it does not necessarily equate to higher conversions and may indicate that resources are being wasted on the wrong individuals.
If your company generates a lot of leads but your conversion rate is poor, it’s probable that prospects aren’t moving past the awareness stage and your sales funnel has become too top-heavy.
One of the reasons your lead generation efforts have gotten so skewed is that you are not vetting your prospects. Marketing teams may assist sales by targeting just people searching for more specific, highly relevant long-tail keywords.
Data may be used to identify possible leaks.
So you’ve identified your target market, they’ve started down the sales funnel, and they’ve even arrived at your website, but they’re not converting. What’s the problem?
The first step in sealing any possible leaks is to evaluate website performance, especially whether the site has high bounce rates, little traffic, short sessions, and low conversion rates.
Google Analytics is a valuable tool that delivers frequent data reports to assist organizations in determining where and why potential clients are leaving. For example, if prospects aren’t spending much time on a page and are clicking away fast, this might signal that there isn’t a strong enough call to action or that the text isn’t engaging or relevant enough.
Increase client acquisition by utilizing behavioral data.
Understanding customer behavior is essential for improving your sales funnel. There are also a variety of behavioral analytics tools available to help discover sections of a company’s website that need to be improved.
Use heatmaps and scroll tracking, or directly solicit feedback from prospects by providing them the opportunity to submit a survey.
Social media data is also an underutilized data source, and for B2B organizations, LinkedIn can be a highly important lead creation tool – according to recent research, LinkedIn was 277 percent more successful for lead generation than other social media platforms. Use it to see who is viewing your profile, network, and establish contacts through the site.
Make little adjustments to have a huge impact.
You don’t always require big adjustments or redesigns to address a leaking sales funnel.A little change, such as a poorly designed call-to-action, might improve your user experience and plug a huge hole in your sales funnel.
Experiment with shifting a call-to-action button to a more prominent spot, modifying the wording, or even changing the font size to see if it results in a significant boost in conversions.
