If you’ve read our blog, What is a Sales Funnel?, you’ve already learned that a sales funnel is a simple way to use your website to capture leads and turn them into customers. Surprisingly, many companies still haven’t taken advantage of implementing a lead generating system like this on their website.
Is your company wondering if this is an investment worth making? Here are the five signs that your company should invest in a sales funnel.
1. Your website isn’t bringing in leads.
This is a common problem, as most companies don’t have conversion opportunities on their website that have the potential to turn traffic into leads. How do you know your website doesn’t have a system for generating leads? Your website doesn’t have an opt-in that offers a premium piece of content in exchange for contact information, such an email. The opt-in qualifies your visitors, gets you their email, and allows you to start emailing them effectively about your product or service.
Pro-tip: Don’t expect a newsletter to rake in emails for you. Nobody reads those anymore. People want an e-book or video content that will help them win the day.
2. You don’t have an automated way to nurture your leads toward conversion.
Once you have a piece of premium content on your site that your audience would be willing to exchange for their email, you need to have a plan for emailing them effectively—nurturing them into becoming a customer. This is what we call a sales campaign. It’s a series of five emails that overcomes the objections your leads have regarding your product or service.
If you don’t have an email sequence attached to the opt-in on your site, you’re missing out on all the visitors that come to your site who need to be nurtured before they will be ready to buy.
3. You have contacts in your CRM, but you never email them.
We couldn’t tell you how many companies we’ve come across that have a 1,000+ contacts in their CRM, yet are worried where their next lead is going to come from. If you’re sitting on a pile of contacts and still struggling to convert leads to new business, you need a sales funnel. A sales funnel gives you the nurturing emails you need so every 10-14 days you can remind your entire audience of the problem your company solves.
It’s important to remember that companies who aren’t reminding their contacts that they exist are being forgotten. Companies that are nurturing their leads are staying in front of their contacts so that they’ll buy when they’re ready.
Pro tip: Imagine if you were sending truly valuable content to your list of contacts. After they download it, they’re enrolled into an email sales campaign that helps them overcome what keeps them from doing business with you.
4. Most of your leads end up losing interest in your offering.
You know your company needs a sales funnel when you notice your leads consistently lose interest in your offering. Chances are, this is because you aren’t guiding your prospects through the obstacles that keep them from making a purchase. Based on what we’ve learned from HubSpot and StoryBrand, your prospect needs to see the following from you before they’ll be ready to buy:
- How your offering is the solution to their problem
- How you’ve solved this problem for someone just like them
- What their life will look like once they get their problem solved
- How their biggest objection isn’t worth not getting the problem solved
If your leads hear each of these things for you in a sales campaign, they will be much more likely to do business with you. It’s simple to address each of these things in four separate emails. That’s what a sales funnel does. It builds a relationship with each of your leads so they can become customers when they’re ready.
5. You want a marketing strategy that will generate revenue.
Don’t take our word for the sales funnel. Read this case study to learn how the same sales funnel we implement at Greenstone helped a company grow their annual revenue $250k to $6 Million. If you’re a busy company that’s interested in a marketing strategy you can put on autopilot, the sales funnel is the right investment for you. When your leads get the nurturing they need to become customers, your marketing efforts will finally start to generate real revenue.
The Takeaway
Companies that have a great product or service need effective marketing to contextualize their offering in a way their customer understands. The sales funnel automates your marketing so you can turn more leads into customers. What if you had an e-book on your homepage that everyone wanted to read? And an email sales campaign that nurtured the people that signed up for your e-book? This is the easiest way to develop an automated relationship with all of the dormant contacts in your CRM. If your company wants to increase revenue but doesn’t want to spend a ton of money or effort to do so, the effective sales funnel is for you.
