Every business wants to improve its sales, and the best way to do that is by continuously working on your sales pipeline. If your sales are stagnating, you’ll love our actionable tricks that will help you transform your sales approach and increase your revenue.
Don’t underestimate the importance of brand awareness
A lot of marketers think that brand awareness is only important in the launching stage of your company. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Brand awareness should be continuously worked on because it not only brings in new customers but also secures repeat business.
The best way to lead people to the first stage of your sales pipeline is to provide them with engaging content that explains your products and services. People are not going to stumble upon your website, you need to find the best way to get them to click on it and a video or blog that explains how you can make their lives easier is our go-to.
Segment your leads
Once you get a great number of leads in your funnel, it’s time to segment them into prospects, leads, and dead leads. That way, you can focus on the people who are more likely to go through with a purchase.
When you qualify your leads, you’ll see who is ready to buy, who needs more nurturing, and who will most likely never buy anything from you. You need to know when to stop pursuing a lead and reallocate your resources towards converting other leads.
You don’t want to waste money on Google and social media ads targeting people who aren’t interested in your brand.
Focus on the prospects
It may seem like all your prospects take the same amount of time to convert because it’s simply not a good metric to qualify your leads. Instead, divide your prospects according to quality.
Make sure to track clients that could potentially bring you the most revenue and focus on making their purchase experience pleasurable. Also, analyze which channel is bringing you the leads that make you the most revenue.
Once you know that, you can shape your marketing strategy and work towards bringing in more clients.
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Remember to push content
Whether you lean more on creating blogs, infographics, or videos, don’t forget the importance of content marketing. It’s a great way to gather more leads into your sales pipeline, as well as a great way to nurture prospects and answer any questions they may have without getting your customer service team involved.
Content marketing gives you a great opportunity to make informative and engaging pieces of content for each stage of your pipeline. Start by making brand awareness videos using a good video editor, then move on to tutorials, and finish off by creating in-depth case studies. If you’re creating blog content regularly, it’s a good idea to repurpose your blogs into LinkedIn posts. This will help you to maximize the value of your content, and it will provide a steady stream of posts for your audience on LinkedIn.
Never stop working on your pipeline
It’s very important to keep working on your funnel, updating it with your new leads, and updating the different stages of your pipeline. Your sales team should be self-motivated and make it a habit to continually work on the sales pipeline.
If they don’t update the pipeline, you’ll lose out on potential sales. That is why it’s so important to pick the right set of tools to make sure your funnel is organized and automatically updated.
Automate your sales process
The best way to make your life easier in sales is to automate your process. Just think of all the repetitive tasks you do daily. If you struggle with the last part of your sales cycle, we recommend trying proposal software.
Better Proposals offer more than 200 proposal templates which you can easily customize to your liking. The best part about this software is that it comes with a payment option as well as a digital signature which makes your proposal a legally binding document.
It is not a bad idea to take your time and check how you can use Paypal, Square, and their alternatives to achieve easier payment for your customers. Also, remember that customers love to see more options for paying.
Shorten your sales cycle
With 27% of sales representatives saying that a long sales cycle is one of the biggest barriers to finishing a sales deal, it comes as no surprise that sales teams are looking for a way to get quick wins.
Find ways to give more information about your product or service upfront and limit the number of times you contact leads to ensure you’re staying focused on the prospects as supposed to dead ends.
Remember to follow up
You need to nurture your leads because if you don’t, your competition will. Seeing how customers have more options than ever, they’ll spend extra time to figure out which brand has the best deal.
Keep your follow-up emails and calls short, informative and engaging. Make sure that every time you contact your leads you have a new piece of information or content. Analyze your unsuccessful follow-ups to figure out what could have been done differently.
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Social media provides amazing opportunities for finding new leads as well as remarketing. Once you gather a fair amount of leads, you can provide them with the type of content that could help them down your pipeline.
Even if your potential clients are not following you on social media, they will most likely find you there to see reviews, find answers to any questions they may have, contact customer support, and more.
The better your online presence is, the more authority you’ll have with your audience. If you create valuable content there, you’ll alleviate the pressure from your salespeople, since people will be able to find information on their own.
Create a smarketing team
As you can deduct from the name, smarketing is a department that combines the marketing and sales team to create a more efficient revenue stream.
Seeing how there is some overlap between the two teams, it makes sense that they would work together. Research suggests that 60% of the buying cycle is over before a sales representative even comes in contact with the buyer.
This means that all the marketing efforts are luring people to your brand and down your sales pipeline. If one of your teams has a library of actionable content, it makes sense to share it with the other as well as any analysis that shows where the best leads come from or what type of person is most likely to buy.
Now that you know all of our tricks to manage your pipeline, the ball is in your court. If you use any of our tips, let us know in the comments.
Petra Odak is a Chief Marketing Officer at Better Proposals, simple yet incredibly powerful proposal software tool that helps you send high-converting, web-based business proposals in minutes. She’s a solution-oriented marketing enthusiast with more than 5 years of experience in various fields of marketing and project management.
