5 Steps to Create a Sales Funnel That’s Highly Effective

Creating a sales funnel online is highly effective when done right. However, it does take patience, consistency, and it is work. Make no mistake – the ultimate focus here is to increase your revenue. Your sales funnel is like a sleeve that starts with numerous people but fine tunes it down to those who are actually qualified buyers.

There are 5 steps to create a sales funnel that is highly effective.

#1 Feed the funnel’s front end – There are two situations where you can build the top of your sales funnel. You can generate awareness – here the customer didn’t know about your product/service prior. You can get found – here the customer is looking for a solution to a problem. This is where you can use social media, blogging, SEO, press releases, articles, etc. to make your first impressions. 

#2 Turn your inquiry responses into qualified leads – It’s not usually hard to get someone to click on a link to receive something, such as a whitepaper, but it can be more of challenge when it comes to getting those prospects to provide contain information that’s detailed and insight on their business. To be a success you will need to build trust, and distribute content that’s relevant. 

#3 Measure the campaign’s impact – When you develop a system that provides one view of multi-channel campaigns you can develop processes that are automated and can trigger specific responses based on what your potential customer’s interests are, and respond with the appropriate content. 

#4 Identify who your qualified prospects are – During this sales funnel phase it is key to have an integrated approach in place with your sales teams and/or marketing teams. This includes things like defining what a qualified lead is and when it should be handed to the sales department, the sales metrics for when the sales team responds to the qualified leads that are provided, etc. Some companies have sophisticated sales funnels and it’s also where lead scoring comes into place. Lead scoring is a way for your company to tract the actions of the prospects on your site and actually give them a score. When a predefined threshold is reached then a specific sales action takes place. 

#5 Invest in intelligence – Deepening customer knowledge should always be high on your list if you want to get a competitive advantage over your competition. The more competition you have the more important it is to educate your customers but that shouldn’t always happen within the funnel. Social media, blogging, and other marketing channels that are independent of your sales funnel will ensure once that potential customer reaches your funnel they are already a highly educated individual relating to what you offer. 
