Part I: Avoid Clogging of Sales Funnel with CRM
When you are running a business, there are number of things that you must consider, but your priority should be – Sales. Irrespective of the fact how good is your product or service quality, how streamlined your operational processes are or how well your marketing campaigns are doing – These all remain pointless unless your business is not making good revenue and sales.
A sales funnel is a pictorial representation of the stages involved in selling a service or a product. It gives you a complete overview of Leads, prospects, customers, service and deals in the form of a funnel. A sales funnel reveals the number of leads comprised at each stage of your sales cycle. This helps you identify patterns, bottlenecks, and opportunities in the funnel. It also provides you a clue about which stage of the sales funnel needs more attention in order to crack the deal.
Sales funnel is a great way of analysing lead’s progress, but, what if the funnel commences to occlude?
The knack to keep your funnel working flawlessly is to eliminate the unnecessary steps while retaining the needful. Don’t run behind the prospects that have already made an exit. Customers either should turn into a successful deal or should move out from sides of the funnel so that the right prospects could move in. The funnel represents active flow from lead to closure, however, there might be many leads that if not dead, are warm and need to be nurtured. These leads can be moved from the sales funnel to marketing so that they can be nurtured to hot leads again.
Remove needless elements in the pipe
At a certain point in the funnel, a stage arrives where things get complicated. You can’t afford your prospects to move backwards. However, there can be number of reasons say it may be customer concerns or other obstructions like price, faulty demo, duration of closure, etc. You need to eradicate the obstructions that could slow down funnel functionality. A smart CRM software gives the sales person the option to attach and record all forms of communication that they are having with the client along with the time and effort put behind each case. The sales head can look into all these details while the process is still on and can interfere when he thinks that his help is required to close the deal faster or win the customer over competitive pricings.
Do NOT Cut Corners, Cut Steps
Cutting corner means incomplete steps or missing steps and incomplete steps can quickly lead to the funnel system collapse. This is due to the inability among prospects to smoothly transit to next level in the funnel. Hence, try to remove those steps that don’t serve any purpose.
Say, for example, if the sales model requires the customer to sign-up for a paid membership account before making a purchase, then you are adding an unnecessary step for which a customer may hesitate and can retreat. You must be looking for security aspects but should not try to achieve customer information on the risk of losing business.
Make sure you handover only qualified leads to sales
It is common for most of executives to handover all leads to the sales team without sorting it. The facts show that around 61% of marketers send all the leads directly to sales team, out of which only 27% of leads are viable. This forces sales team to waste time and resources on dubious prospects. By having only qualified leads in your bucket, sales funnel functionality will be quicker resulting in increased profitability. This can be achieved by setting up another team like inside sales to first call the customer and establish if he is genuinely interested or no.
Let CRM manage your funnel
Consider CRM system to track your customer data. This will speed up the process by helping you organise your data with less amount of time. CRM helps you automate certain processes; just ensure things don’t get complex instead of getting simpler. If in case you encounter a complicated situation, take a step back to make sure you are not clogging the funnel.
Success is not about finding leads and prospects; it is about converting those prospects into customers and closing deals. For doing so, you need to review your sales funnel and separate poor leads out of the funnel. Because if you do not do so, you will end up clogging the funnel thereby having negative impact on your business.
To know more about how Sage CRM software can help you optimise your sales, SMS SAGE to 56767 or write to Sage Software Solutions Pvt Ltd at sales@sagesoftware.co.in for a free consultation.
