Tag Archive for: Sales Funnel

Lead Liaison

How Economy Changes Affect Your Sales Funnel

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How Economy Changes Affect Your Sales FunnelAs a small business owner, being able to define and understand your own sales funnel is key to a streamlined sales process. That isn’t all – your sales funnel can change fairly drastically over time, so it’s important to anticipate changes and be ready for them.

One of the best examples is a recession. Let’s look at PPC in particular. When our general market is good and people are able to buy and spend as needed, there’s far less pressure on sales to perform. Higher ticket items tend to go a little faster and without hesitation. For instance, a $1000-1500 ticket item might go out the door within minutes when the economy is doing well.

Recession Changes Everything

As we’ve seen in the last few years, nothing good necessarily lasts forever. The last US recession left the seller’s market vulnerable. Whereas a high-ticket item might move quickly in 2006, 2008 was a totally different story. $1000+ items might require a much deeper sales funnel on the part of the seller to guarantee an actual purchase.

The recession sent many sellers out of business who weren’t ready for a deeper sales funnel. Some business owners just weren’t prepared for:

  • The need to establish quicker lead response times
  • Implementing a social media or email marketing strategy to ‘convince’ people to buy
  • Changing or optimizing web pages for deeper visits
  • The need to better track the progress of leads through a deeper sales funnel

Business owners who were willing to gather their resources and think about good lead intelligence and new sales funnel strategies had a better chance of surviving the recession.

Sales Funnel Strategy via Marketing Automation

Being prepared for what may come as a business owner is all about developing your funnel – and these days, automating it. Marketing automation allows business owners a better system for tracking leads that works hand-in-hand with a well-defined funnel. The result is a process you can understand, data you can read and a strategy you can execute on.

When you use marketing automation, you’ll find that each step of your sales funnel becomes easy to execute. The specific information you’re able to retain from each customer becomes useful in terms of how the lead approaches your next step, or how he or she will be sold in the future.

If you haven’t tried out marketing automation tools for use with your sales funnel, now is a better time than ever. Talk to one of us here at Lead Liaison about how marketing automation can fill out your funnel and do the hard work for you.

Lead Liaison

Marketing Analytics: Turning Your Sales Funnels Into Data

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Marketing Analytics Sales FunnelRegardless of the size of your business, you probably have an idea of what your sales funnel looks like. Just in case you’re green on all this, your sales funnel refers to the process a customer goes through before buying from you. This process spans the time at which they become a lead through their (sometimes long) decision-making process, right up until the moment the sale happens. In most cases, a sale doesn’t mean the buyer is out of your funnel. Once customers buy there’s always the chance they can become repeat customers – thus, once in your funnel, customers are almost always in there. Sound marketing analytics can give you some idea of what stages of your funnel a typical customer is in and for how long.

Many business owners give the side-eye to the thought of truly sitting down to look at their marketing analytics. There are a variety of reasons for this – one could be lack of ability to interpret the data. Another could be the lack of easy tools one can use to track and interpret the data, as well as integrate it into the rest of your marketing plan.

Marketing Analytics Help You Make Decisions

The truth is, if you’re not digging into your marketing analytics to help you inform future directions for your business, you’re missing a hotbed of potential for new decisions and creativity in your business. Here are some examples:

Setting up Goals: Google Analytics allows you to set up Goals in your Analytics install. Goals can be used to track the actions users take on your site. For instance, if you want to see how often users who come to a certain page will click through a sequence of pages before filling out a form, Goals can track that. If you’d like to see how many users from Facebook are taking a certain action on your site, Goals can help you. Goals are a great way to set up and take full advantage of marketing analytics based on your funnel.

  1. You can learn more about setting up Goals at: http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=1032415 or watching some helpful videos such as
  2. Melinda Samson’s Setting Up and Using Analytics Goals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDNkXdOuhBc
  3. John Duffy’s Advanced Use of Analytics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijniFqC3PaM

Refining Your Funnel: Your sales data might actually show you that your funnel needs work. Are you overestimating the amount of time it takes for a client to decide they should use your services? Data will corroborate these kinds of hunches.

Marketing Analytics: Putting it all in the Cloud

Every organization should be watching to see how Marketing Analytics shows customers behaving on and using their site. You should be including data from your Marketing Analytics tools in your lead management system to give you detailed info about your leads. What is your typical lead conversion time? Where do the most highly converted leads come from? Are you truly getting the best ROI out of your marketing?

Lead Liaison is a system that can integrate marketing analytics and lead data to show you if your marketing decisions are helping you make the most out of your leads. It’s time to take a tour and ensure marketing analytics informs your business decisions today.