What is a sales funnel? Instructions on how to build a quality sales funnel
Sales Funel – Sale Funel is a model that helps administrators have an overview of converting potential customers into business customers. What is the true nature of a Sales Funnel? How it works is for you to continue following the article below.
What is a sales funnel?
Up to now, businesses are no stranger to the sales funnel model.
In essence, the sales funnel will simulate the impact process to convert purchasing leads into purchasing actions. The further down the funnel you go, the higher your potential to buy.
Basically, a sales funnel is divided into 4 layers:
- Visitor:After identifying the target audience and customers. Businesses will deploy different marketing methods to influence these audiences and lead them to the website. Then, they will become visitors.
- Potential customers (Lead): are visitors to the website who are interested in the products that the business offers.
- Qualified Lead:are customers who have clear “signals” of wanting to buy (Put the product in the shopping cart, return to the website multiple times or sign up for a trial,…)
- Customer:are people who have completed the purchase process.
Instructions for building a quality sales funnel
As part of the knowledge above, you probably have a better understanding of what the concept of a sales funnel is. But how to build an effective sales funnel for your business?
Step 1: Understand your customers
A big mistake businesses make when implementing marketing is not understanding their customers well.
Marketers who do not clearly understand what their customers want are the biggest reasons why an entire campaign fails.
In fact, nearly 60% of start-ups fail because they expand too early (invest heavily in the market, hire employees, etc.) without a good understanding of the people they are serving.
“Customer research” takes a lot of time and effort. That's why marketers often skip this step.
People who understand their customers deeply will easily create content marketing with content aimed at each step in the customer funnel.
You can refer to some ways to research customers below:
Understand demographics
Demographics will determine the characteristics of the market through:
- Age
- Sex
- Occupation
- Salary
- Location
This information will give you a clear understanding of their purchasing decisions.
Use the “PSYCHOLOGY” of your target market
Understanding the psychology of shoppers is the most important step when writing ads or any content marketing campaign.
If you understand their personality, their views, their life mistakes. Then create engaging advertising content – this will increase your conversion rate.
Emotions are developed by observing the media.
Step 2: attract awareness
In this step, you must attract as many people as possible to know you. You need to do your research properly, knowing exactly who you are trying to reach. That's all the information you need to create the highest level of awareness for your business.
There are many ways to increase customer awareness of your company's products such as:
- Facebook ads
- Google ads
- Fanpage
- Website
- Youtobe
Step 3: establish a relationship
Once you create high awareness for your business in many of the above ways, the next step is to build relationships with the people you reach.
The simplest way to do this is to give them a valuable product via Email (Documents, ebooks, discount codes,…) So you can collect a quality email lead.
Once you have an email list, you can start sending them valuable information through quality articles on your blog website.
Email marketing allows you to build closer relationships with potential customers through continuous interaction. From that foundation, you easily convert into paying customers for your services.
What are the things you often misunderstand about sales funnels?
Misunderstanding #1: Your lead-to-close ratio dictates your success
Your lead-to-close rate may only reflect your success at one point in time. But to maintain this “success”, you need to identify the sources that bring the highest customer closing rate and focus your resources there.
Obviously, customers from different channels will react to your product/service differently. For example, for B2B businesses, the Sales Benchmarks report, customers and employees are the group that introduces the most qualified leads, with a closing rate of 3.63%; Meanwhile, potential visitors from social networks are 1.47%, and from paid search is less than 1%.
Therefore, to sell effectively, you should spend tracking the sources of the most quality and successful leads, understanding the time you spend connecting and closing with each customer. A more targeted sales funnel approach like this allows you to allocate your time and energy more strategically.
He then explains, “To sell effectively, it is essential to track the sources of your best and most successful leads. Understand the time you spend connecting with a lead and ultimately closing the sale. Track the efforts and successes and failures coming from each source.” This more targeted approach to sales funnel organization and optimization can allow you to allocate your time and energy more strategically.
Misunderstanding #2: The more leads, the better
In sales, there is a belief that “more is better”. Simply calculated, if the number of potential customers doubles, sales will double. Theoretically, yes. Of course, to do so requires great resource optimization, you have to work smarter, not just harder, to create more and more value.
In fact, up to 71% of leads are wasted (according to sales expert Ken Krouge in a post on Forbes), the main reason being not responding quickly enough. According to statistics, only 27% of potential customers are contacted. Meanwhile, for companies that combine resources well (both cognitive, human and technological), this rate can be up to about 92%.
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Companies that try to contact prospects within 1 hour determine their quality (true level of potential) 7 times faster than companies that try to contact customers after 1 hour; and 60 times more than companies waiting 24 hours or longer.
So, it's clear that you don't need to get more potential customers, what you need to do is focus your efforts on interacting with the potential customers you already have. To increase your conversion rate, you need to proactively respond to leads as quickly as possible.
Myth #3: Leads that don't convert immediately are worthless
When you look at your sales funnel, you may see that some leads are actually “stuck” at a certain stage in the funnel. After a period of communication via email or phone but still not creating a conversion, these customers will be reclassified to the potential customer group. However, sales teams often make the mistake of assuming they will never convert. This is completely wrong.
According to Dr. Rachna Jain, a business strategist and psychologist, says a big mistake sales funnels make is “the assumption that leads are worthless if they don't buy right away.” According to Jain, if someone doesn't buy your $47 product today, that doesn't mean they won't buy a $2,500 product the next day. Leads don't always convert in a straight line…
In fact, the modern sales funnel model is no longer a straight line. To adapt to change, you should not ignore relationships with prospects who are not ready to buy. Even though future opportunities won't bring you any immediate benefits, allocating resources to staying connected will help you increase your overall performance, and you'll be pleasantly surprised!
Misunderstanding #4: Closing orders as quickly as possible
Sales automation tools are increasingly common. As a result, salespeople spend less and less time interacting with prospects because they trust the ability of these tools to speed up stages in the sales process. They also think that they only have to put in less effort but still ensure higher sales.
However, in reality, stretching your sales process “properly” helps you increase your efficiency a lot. You can use automated tools to shorten the time spent on repetitive tasks, but it takes more time to interact with customers. Increased lead nurturing and training will boost conversions. Pursuing a long sales cycle, you can:
- Gain a better understanding of customers' explicit and implicit needs
- Clearly identify the problems they may encounter at each stage of the buying process
- Build credibility and status as an “expert” that customers want to work with
- Provide additional value to potential customers to increase loyalty and trust
- Catch the right moment when potential customers are ready to buy
- Gradually increase the value of transactions with real potential customers
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BIÊN TẬP VIÊN FHC
