Marketing and sales are both aimed at increasing revenue generation. They are so closely connected that people often don’t realise the difference between the two. A sales funnel depicts how your target audience changes from visitors to loyal customers.

Problems occur when a disproportionate number of your leads drop off the sales/marketing pipeline midway, and fail to progress to the next stage.

Here’s how you can address the problem at each step.

From ‘awareness’ to ‘leads’ Are you getting a lot of website visits, but hardly any free trial sign-ups? Is your blog buzzing with traffic, and yet you barely have any subscribers? Are your Google and Facebook ads getting views and clicks, but not persuading visitors to submit their contact details?

To fix this issue, use a lead capture automation platform. Using such software, you will be able to automate lead capture from all sources, thereby eliminating human inefficiencies which are bound to occur if you choose to manually capture leads.

Second, make sure the offers that you are using to convert visitors into leads are relevant to the medium they are placed on, and carry high value.

For instance, here’s how it can be approached:

Website: Chat pop-up + Free trial sign-up

Blog: Downloadables within each blog post + E-books on the sidebars + Webinars on the top bars + Newsletter subscriptions at the bottom.

Google & Facebook Ads: Free trial sign-up

It is only because each of these offers is relevant and valuable to the visitors on that medium that they are willing to share their contact details (and thus be captured as leads), in exchange for accessing what the offer promises.

From ‘leads’ to ‘prospects’ If you have 2,000 subscribers to your newsletter, but only 18 of them show interest in your product by signing up for a free trial, it means that your sales tactic needs fixation (that is, a disproportionately large number of your leads are failing to convert into prospects).

To address this, first, make sure you’re attracting the right kind of audience to your content or ads. Are you attracting sales executives to your blog, when the decision-maker for your product is the sales manager? This means you need to shift focus and create content on topics that are for more experienced people.

Second, make sure you are pitching your product to your leads correctly in terms of timing, personalisation, copy, and call to action.

Are you sending out a pitch too soon, without the lead being sufficiently nurtured and confident about your brand? Does your pitch have copy that is too complicated for your lead to understand?

Are you sending across generic, impersonal-sounding emails to leads from all the industries that you cater to? These are all ingredients to cook a problem in the sales funnel.

From ‘Prospects’ to ‘Customers’ This issue arises when your prospects show affirmative interest in your product, but fail to purchase it.

To deal with this, make sure you are attracting prospects who have the financial ability to purchase your product.

For instance, you may be marking leads who sign-up for a free trial of your product as ‘prospects’, but if they cannot afford to pay the price of your product, they will obviously not advance further down the sales cycle.

Hence, you need to ensure that you are attracting only the people who can afford your product. This can be achieved by changing the nature of your content or the targeting of your ads.

Also, make sure you’re connecting with the right people at the right time. What if you’ve marked the leads with the least interest in purchasing your product as ‘prospects’, while the ones that do have interest are lying neglected in your system?

You can avoid this by using a marketing automation platform which helps you prioritise your leads on the basis of quality and engagement scores.

Keep monitoring the conversion ratios at each stage of your funnel and fixing the leakages you have identified. Your lead volume and sales are bound to shoot up.

(Nilesh Patel is founder and CEO of LeadSquared)

Related Topics