The path a customer travels from the moment he feels the need to purchase a product or service until he finally acquires it, is known as a sales funnel or Sales Funnel.
When we use a funnel in the kitchen all the content we pour in the wide end up coming out the narrow end. The basic difference with the sales funnel is that unfortunately this doesn’t happen. In the funnel that refers to business, not everything that enters through the wide end will end up arriving at the narrow end of the funnel. A sales funnel would be like a kitchen funnel with small (or large) holes that let their contents escape and prevent everything that has entered through one end from ending up at the end of the funnel.
Knowing what phases make up your funnel and where these small “holes” are located will be the decisive keys to optimizing the process.
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Sales funnel stages
Absolutely all sales funnels have the same phases. The difference will be that in each company, each stage takes place in a different way. Therefore, you should know which stages of your sales process belong to each stage of the funnel.
Identifying where leads escape at different stages of the funnel will help us optimize our process.
In a urCollection blog article we talked about the best sales techniques to build customer loyalty. The AIDA sales technique is very similar to the sales process that takes place in a sales funnel.
0.- The need arises in the client
This stage of the process does not intervene directly with the company itself. It could be said that these are the elements that will enter the funnel. In order to be able to commercialize something, it is essential that the product is of interest to someone.
What do I mean by this? There will need to be a niche market for the product or service we market.
There are different tools or resources we can use to find out which products are of interest to the public. Google search tools such as Google Correlate, Adwords or Google Trends can give us valuable information about what the public is looking for on the internet. We can also visit informative or Marketing Blogs to learn about new trends.
1.- Attraction to our company
Y, when our company has found a specific market niche… How do you make this information visible to your target audience? At this stage of the sales funnel are the stages that help us to make our potential customers aware of our existence. Aspects such as SEO or SEM are involved, announcing us, presenting a product that solves the customer’s need, presenting quality content and demonstrating total knowledge about the customer’s problem.
This phase is therefore very important. We must ensure that as many people as possible are interested in a product with the same characteristics as the one we sell in our company.
The competition is very tough and positioning ourselves in search engines will be an arduous task. The little holes I talked about at the beginning of the article will leak leads as we move through the sales funnel. Here we will escape all those who have not managed to make us visible.
In addition to positioning ourselves in search engines we can advertise in different media to try to reach the maximum target audience. This type of action requires a previous study to know which media can be more interesting to advertise and reach the maximum of Leads.
2.- Interest in our product or service
Once we’ve got the Lead to know us (either through direct marketing or through Inbound Marketing), the next step is to make our product more interesting than the competition’s.
Many Leads will have visited several competing sites with products like ours. We have probably lost some of the Leads of those who visited our website or saw some of our ads. The Lead wants to check and make sure that our product meets the expectations of what you are looking for.
Therefore, to maintain the flow and prevent them from escaping we must awaken their interest better than the competition does. Offering added value, showing knowledge and solving problems will be indispensable to get interest in this stage of the funnel.
3.-Decision, desire and conversion
As the funnel narrows the lead is better informed. Therefore, if you have not yet left the funnel, we will have to carry out the necessary negotiations to awaken the desire to own our product. Offer added value, positive opinions of those who are already customers about your product (success stories), … In short: you must offer something that turns the Lead into a client.
This is the phase in which we have to take out all the artillery so that we don’t miss the Lead through some of those holes we were talking about. It will be time to use our best selling techniques to get the maximum number of Leads pass to the next phase of the funnel.
4.- Action: we close the sale
Eaching this stage requires a lot of work and commitment on the part of the sales team and the company.
Working on the actions to be carried out at each stage of the sales funnel will be what makes us achieve the closing of the sale. Therefore, a lead that buys becomes a customer. A customer who will be necessary is totally satisfied with the acquisition. Working on the actions to be carried out at each stage of the sales funnel will be what makes us achieve the closing of the sale. Therefore, a lead that buys becomes a customer. A customer who will need to be completely satisfied with the acquisition.
5.- Customer loyalty: final stage
A satisfied customer is a repeating customer. It will also be a customer you recommend. Therefore, you will help us at the decision stage with your experience to turn other Leads into customers.
That’s why the sales funnel phases don’t end with the sale of the product itself, but with when we get customer loyalty. We must turn our customers into promoters.
Perfecting your sales funnel
Defining which procedures you are going to develop at each stage of the process based on past successes or experiences will be essential to achieve the perfect sales funnel.
Know how the commercial management of your company will help you with the funnel holes. The commercial management ranges from the initial market study that helps us to find market niches, to get to sell the product. Thanks to our CRM Demo that makes an exhaustive follow-up of the whole sales process, we will be able to see in which stage the process has some failure and where it works better.
To perfect your sales funnel you need to know as much as possible about your sales management. Thus design the different actions, strategies and sales techniques that will benefit your sales funnel .
And you, have you already found the holes in your sales funnel? Have you identified where your Leads are escaping?
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