Anyone who has ever worked in sales understands the constant challenge to find solid leads. While there is no “magic” marketing technique that will guarantee leads, there is a way to combine marketing and sales efforts to get your prospects on the right path: a sales funnel. A sales funnel illustrates the journey that your prospects will go through on their way to becoming customers. While a sales funnel is a great strategy for closing more customers, it is imperative that there be plenty of prospects in your sales funnel in order to do so. Here’s why:
- Even if your company spends thousands of dollars on generating leads, it’s unlikely that most of these visitors will be ready to buy your product or service right away. While your marketing strategy might generate hundreds of leads, only a small percentage of those will actually contact you about information and only a fraction of those will actually become customers. For this reason, it is important to have plenty of prospects in your sales funnel. The more prospects you have the better your chances of actually closing a few deals.
- It is impossible to convert all of your prospects the first time around but that doesn’t mean that you should give up on them. You should consider retargeting those people again and adding them back into your sales funnel to provide another opportunity to draw them back in and entice them.
- Sales takes time, typically a few months before a client is ready to close the deal. This is another reason why it’s beneficial to have multiple points of contact in your sales funnel. You can continue nurturing those leads while also working on other prospects at the same time. Instead of sitting around and waiting for one deal to close, you can be working lots of other leads at the same time. Over time this will allow you to close more deals.
- Sales is about relationship building and the more people you have in your sales funnel, the more relationships you can begin to develop. When you have several contacts in your sales funnel, it allows you to build relationships with various leads who eventually become customers.
- As the saying goes “It’s wise not to put all your eggs in one basket.” This is especially true in sales. If you focus solely on a couple of strong leads and fail to add others to your sales funnel, you will be defeated if those leads don’t pan out. However, if you have plenty of other prospects in your funnel, you have increased your chances of closing a different deal.
