The journey from customer awareness to customer action in a linear fashion is a sales funnel.
Sometimes the sales funnel is regarded as a ‘grinder’, and it initiates with the idea of attracting a large number of prospective customers and end with a smaller number of actual buyers.
Sales funnel are complicated creations, defined by the complexity of the product and intended consumer action.
Are sales funnel really necessary? The Mintel report states that an average of 69% consumers search online before deciding and the average increases to a whopping 81% for the 18 to 34 age group. It’s a known fact that people search online before buying and the above stats, among others, confirms this.
Do you use a sales funnel? If yes, how well are they working? If no, check out this beginner’s guide to set one up. In this article, I will share some tips to help boost your sales funnel’s performance. I won’t cover how to create a funnel; these are hacks to maximize sales.
3 Implement Worthy Funnel Hacks for Your Business
Here they are:
#1 Strip Away Technology
Seems weird? How can removing technology from our sales analytics help in increasing response? Let me show you.
Since marketing is always about bringing and converting the traffic, there are specific data analytics tools and resources employed by successful sales funnel business users. What are they?
Often, we build sales funnels by reverse engineering our competitor websites. Spying on their attractive headlines, use of colors, copy-writing, image placements and others gives you an idea of what to focus on, right? But, this is just 30% of what you see, the remaining 70% is more important.
How to unveil this 70%?
You need two tools: Ghostery and BuiltWith Technology Provider – both are Google Chrome add-ons.
Install Ghostery and check out any of the competitors’ sales funnels. It will show you a list of pixels, web bugs, trackers, web page beacons, and other tools used by many companies to track and gather data from visitors to the sales page. This is a totally free method to learn about the programs used by rival businesses.
Next, with the BuiltWith add-on, you can see what a website is built with and if you’re clever enough, reverse engineering the same for your own business won’t be tough.
With both these tools, you’ll be able to come across the competitors’ hidden arsenal of tools and strategies – are they using re-marketing, what plugins are used, which platforms (Facebook, Instagram etc.) are they on, what conversion tracking software do they use…and so on!
Based on these detailed data points, go back to your own sales funnel and analyse the strong and weak points. Strengthen the weak points – it should be your top priority.
#2 Buy Your Competitor Products
Seems stupid? It’s not. The best way to understand a working sales funnel is to go through it. Purchase competitor products and understand their funnel. Screenshot everything in the process.
This is crucial to understanding the complete anatomy of what’s going on behind closed doors! Buy everything – the up sells, down sells, cross sells….and anything in between.
The competitor isn’t foolish to spend thousands of dollars into buying traffic and social media promotions. The competitor is sure that their sales funnel will convert, and you need this intel.
#3 Improve Lead Response Time
The volume of sales increase with a fast lead response time. Generating a lead from the sales funnel isn’t enough. Communicating with the prospect with a less time interval is essential. Inside Sales report states that 35% to 50% of the sales go to the vendor that responds first, and the average lead response time is over 5 minutes, which decreases the potential to turn the lead into a paying customer.
Obviously, your team can’t remain in working mode 24 hours a day. Therefore, use these hacks.
Setup an Automated Email Response
Once the lead is generated, an automated response should be immediately sent thanking for the inquiry and an update on when a team member will revert to the lead requests.
Share Demo Link
If your product / service offers a demo, ensure that in the first communication with the lead, the demo link is shared. It’s better if a team member solicits an appointment with the prospect to explain the product through the demo.
In-Product Support Chain
If the purpose is to make people sign up on the website to be a qualified lead, use software like Intercom and Capterra to communicate with the prospect instantly. If no staff is available for a specific time zone, schedule few automated messages for the prospect. Share links to the Knowledgebase or FAQ to review till someone can get in touch.
All these activities will ensure the prospect remains interested in the product / service.
Conclusion
There are more but try these sales hacks and see the funnel performance improving.