Stretching the Sales Funnel: A Better Sales Funnel Approach for Sales Enablement

As marketing and sales professionals, we are familiar with the “funnel” model  that represents the purchase cycle, marketing cycle or the sales cycle of the buyer.

What if you could stretch that funnel to create more qualified leads and close them faster than ever before? 

Today's post explains how to stretch the current sales funnel model in order to accommodate a better revenue generating model for your company while enabling your sales reps.

What is a sales funnel?

The sales funnel is a model frequently used by marketers and sales persons to describe the purchase cycle. The basic concept can be broken down into three parts:

ToFu: Top of the funnel or ToFu is the stage when you “attract” the prospects to your product or service. You do this primarily through content marketing and advertising. From a search engine perspective, content is the best method to attract prospects to your brand. Content writers are engaged to create meaningful and purpose oriented content for the target audience. This content is search engine optimized (or advertised or both) to pull traffic to your website or blog. A well-established platform for content optimization is Social Media. Talking about the written content and sharing it with your social media contacts is a very effective (not to mention, Google universally accepted) method to up your search engine ranking. Undertaking these activities will help you gather enough fodder (read prospects) for the top of your sales funnel.

MoFu: The middle of the funnel (MoFu) is a selective club. Not all who made it to the top can find their way down here. As you see the shape of a funnel narrows downwards, this means that the number of prospects is reduced at every stage.  In this stage, the marketers have to identify the ones who are really interested in what you have to offer. You can do this by tracking the activity of the prospects, whenever they engage in a conversation with you. For instance, say you run a real estate website and of the visitors who regularly visit your blog, there is this visitor who frequents the commercial lease property pages and checks out more links in this section than any other section. Through a real time 360-degree tracking of the prospect, you will know what interests your prospect.

This data is used in this stage to:-

1. Nurture a  deeper relationship with the prospects (henceforth to be known as leads)
2. Cross sell or up sell a product to an existing customer

BoFu: The bottom of the sales funnel is where your sales team takes over from marketing. This is more like an exclusive club, by invitation only. The leads have been identified, their interests recorded and the sales team has suited up. Now, the biggest challenge here to make sure there’s been a smooth change of hands without upsetting the lead one bit. This is possible, only if you have a system that focuses on effective and seamless sales-marketing alignment. In such an arrangement, the sales team is equipped with every possible detail about the lead right from the ToFu days. The sales rep is well acquainted with the activities of the lead, specific interest and knows exactly what and how would be the ideal way to pitch to the lead. Another important challenge in this stage is providing only high quality leads to sales, so that their time and energy isn’t wasted pitching to the wrong guy. Remember, no matter what you do- You don’t mess with Sales Guys!

A relatively newer approach to the sales funnel is stretching the BoFu. Stretching the BoFu is remodeling the traditional funnel as we know it. Instead of a highly streamlined, narrowed down bottom  portion of the funnel, you stretch it to let more leads out of it. This means that we are aiming at higher and more challenging conversion rates.

How to stretch the sales funnel? (And better your lead quality and quantity)

Stretching your sales funnel depends on how you want it to affect your business. There are two different ways to do it:

1. Push high-revenue generating leads through the funnel: If your team aims for deals that are average income generating businesses, enable them to go for higher revenue generating deals. Such an approach requires your sales team to be persuasive and persistent with their pitching. You need to constantly motivate them to aim higher than their comfort zone and move forward with this approach in mind. The one thing that can go wrong here is that over time the team will want to give up on the stretching process. Keep them motivated through morale boosting or incentivizing, whatever works for you or them. Remember, the idea is to keep the funnel stretching bit by bit.

2. Keep a constant flow of leads through the funnel: We’ve all experienced the slump era, the dry spot when we hardly see an influx of new leads. Well, this is an inevitable part of the funnel and cannot be avoided. But you can always overcome this phase with a sales team that keeps up with old follow-ups aided by a sales drip campaign. The sales drip campaign is a sales version of the marketing drip campaigns. It is a tool offered by  some sales enablement platforms like Mindmatrix where the sales rep can create a drip campaign to nudge the prospects that are stuck between the middle and bottom of the funnel. A smart sales prospecting coupled with the sales drip campaign is a powerful tool that will surely stretch the funnel in your company’s favor.  

If you are interested on enabling your sales team, there’s no better way to do it than to challenge them to put their best foot forward. However, you have to be sure that the technology you are using to empower them is the one that focuses on the same things that you do.

To learn more about Sales Enablement visit Mindmatrix.