In business your sole goal is to increase your leads and sales in order to grow.

It’s one thing to develop strategies to increase your website traffic, but what are you doing to actually convert these visitors when they hit your landing pages?

This is where a well thought out and effective sales funnel comes into play.

So what do we mean by a sales funnel?

A sales funnel is just a fancy way of describing the process you lead your leads starting from when they’ve expressed an interest in your products and sales right through to the actual sale.

Typically sales funnels describe four stages of a customer’s buying decision. These are creating awareness of your business, generating interest in your services, the key decision to purchase your products and then the action to actually place an order.

Once you understand the stages a typical potential client will go through before engaging your services, it’s time to create a funnel designed for maximum conversions.

Research

If you’ve done some market research before starting your business then you’ll have a head start with this one. However the first step of creating any sales funnel is to do your market research.

What are your customer’s pain points and what are their interests? Do they have any expectations and where do they spend their time? Are you more likely to engage with them on social media or another platform?

Buyer personas

The second step expands slightly on the first. It’s important to create accurate customer profiles by determining a few things.

Why do you think your potential customers will want to buy your product and how will they use your services? Do they have any particular inspiration or drive to purchase your product?

Planning a lead generation strategy

Once you understand your target market and what drives their decisions, it’s time to start spreading the word about your business and your products. There are so many ways to generate leads and we have blogged about this before.

For some quick inspiration, you may want to research further:

• Pay per click advertising
• Content marketing
• Social media
• Search engine optimisation
• Email outreach

Engaging and nurturing your leads

Another essential step of your sales funnel involves nurturing your leads and encouraging them to stick around longer to engage with your brand.

There are a number of really great ways you can achieve this:

• Creating quality blog posts and circulating this content on your social media platforms. Write about your industry, provide insight into your services and cover your frequently asked questions.
• Develop a newsletter and signup process that puts your brand regularly in front of your potential clients
• Regularly update and expand your website content

Converting leads into paying customers

Once you understand how exactly you are going to reach out to your potential prospects the next step is to work on how you can convert as many visitors as possible.

To encourage individuals to get in touch or place an order, there are a number of things you can be doing:

• Enable live chat or other functionality that removes barriers for customers to contact you
• Remove unnecessary form fields from contact forms and use single field, one click signup forms opposed to anything more complex
• Change your website copy to ensure you are not just describing what you do but communicating the value of your services to your target audience
• Simplify any checkout processes and ensure any buying experiences are pleasant and easy to use

Final thoughts

Creating an effective sales funnel is essential for any business and the above steps will prove really useful in developing one. If you’re seeking an effective software solution to manage your new influx of leads, we recommend the use of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Conveniently we are specialists in creating custom built Dynamics solution and would love to discuss your specific needs. Get in touch!