Sales Pipeline
purpose
If you haven’t noticed by now, every element we are learning about go hand in hand to achieve the bigger picture of generating leads and converting them into ongoing clients. Here are the overarching concepts for creating a sales pipeline:
STEP 1 > PLAN
Develop a strategic digital marketing plan with measurable impact. Story alignment is key to deliverying on your customers wants and needs. Establish a content value chain across all of your digitral challens to fuel a vested interest in your brand.
STEP 2 > ATTRACT
Produce, publish and promote valuable content across strategic channels, drawing customers in to your content hub and ultimately your database
- Buyer Stage: Exploration and Education
- Key metircs: Views, Vistors, Inbound Links, Followers, Opt-ins, Downloads
- Platforms & Tools: Website, Social Pages, Mobile, SEO, Blogs, Videos, Podcasts
STEP 3 > NURTURE
Be worthy of keeping a customers attention by offering them additional assistance, research or help and provide real VALUE to their life.
- Buyer Stage: Decision Making
- Key metrics: Quality conversations, Engagement (Shares/Likes/Comments), Time on Website, Conversation Rate
- Platforms & Tools: Landing Pages, Webinars, Call To Actions (CTAs), Email
STEP 4 > CONVERT
Website must drive conversions with custom landing / sales pages and CTAs. To ensure quality and consistency, consider additional staff or outsourcing tasks to avoid being spread too thin.
- Buyer Stage: Customer / Purchase
- Key metrics: Sales (offline and online), Click to Purchase Rate, Revenue / Profit
- Platforms & Tools: Google Analytics, CRM, eCommerce, Marketing / Sales Automation
STEP 5 > ENGAGE
It’s ciritcal to ensure your new clients turn into a social advocate of your brand, your value and your products / services. Re-marketing beings at this stage to drive referral sources, high reviews. social support and repeat sales.
- Buyer Stage: Client / Retention
- Key metrics: Reviews, Comments, Social Support, Referrals, Survey Responses
- Platforms & Tools: Social Pages, Retargetting, Reviews, Testimonials, Surveys, Contents, Referrals, Reputation
Keep in mind that this is a guide only. Each business will have different requirements so it is important to define your own stages relative to your products, services and needs.
How Your Sales Pipeline Grows Your Revenue
OBJECTIVE
Let’s go over the essential stages of the Sales Pipeline which will help you to better understand the different tasks that fall underneath them, and how they connect to your funnels:
Lead Generation / Prospecting > Marketing and sharing your knowldge through tips and tricks. Building relationships through networking, being a guest expert and cold outreach to people you think may be a good fit.
Lead Nurturing / Qualification > Maintaining a channel of communication between you and the lead and providing passive support. Gathering information and market research to make sure the prospects you’ve discovered are really a good fit for your business. Follow the BANT method to determine if the prospect has:
– a big enough budget
– the authority to make decisions
– needs that are filled with your product
– the right timeline to purchaseContact / Proposal > Now that you’ve narrowed down your prospects to the most highly qualified opportunities, you’re left with the people who are interested and may actually buy your product. This will often require contact, whether that’s a phone call, a physical meeting, a product demo, or an email or text message. The intention being to provide infortmation and suggestions for success + sales pages.
Negotiation and Close > At this point, be ready to face your prospects’ objections and answer all their questions. Offer deals or complimentary add ons to sweeten the deal if needed. You also want to get a contract signed during this stage to make sure that expectaions are clear for both parties.
Retention > Closing a sale should not be the end of the pipeline. Continue to foster the customer relationship by engaging, adding value and following up with them to make sure they stay positively engaged with your brand. This builds loyalty and turns your best customers into advocates and encourages repeat or upgraded buisiness with them. It also provides opportunities for feedback and potential collaboration.
Remember that every stage of the pipeline is important. Don’t mistake prioritising closing over prospecting as this is when you leads will run dry. Keep your pipeline full of leads by:
- Proactively contacting potential customers through emails or sales calls.
- Asking for referrals from existing customers.
- Leveraging your business’ brand advocates to reach more people.
- Automate as many parts of the sales process as possible.
- Upsell and cross-sell.
Process
Let’s go over the types of platforms you will be using for various stage of the Sales Pipeline:
- Facebook – Perfect for helping businesses build brand awareness, grow an online following, gather leads, and sell more products or services through many business driven features.
- Instagram – Increwase brand awareness and deepen your brand’s impact by inspiring global trends and driving product discovery. Experiment with storytelling tools to design content that speaks to customers to reach new audiences and turn communities into customers.
- LinkedIn – The Facebook for professionals essentially. Helps you establish a reputation with your customers as a trusted expert. LinkedIn is one of the most effective online platforms to learn more about your prospects, customers, and industry. It is great for networking and building relationships. Find potential customers in rlevant groups where you can sharing and engage with useful content to help increase your reach.
- Pinterest – A visual search engine, Pinterest can be used for showcasing products and services and driving traffic to your website.
- YouTube – A video platform that helps you to reach your audience, both by creating videos and advertising on other people’s videos. YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine and the 3rd most visited website worldwide, behind only Google and Facebook respectively.
- CRM – stands for customer relationship management and is a software that that allows you to capture infromation about a prospect through a lead form. One main objective of CRMs is to automate the repetitive tasks in the sales process, freeing up time to focus on closing deals rather than manual data entry. Most CRM platforms help you to store information to track the status of your leads and clients, as well as providing workflows and ways for you to automatically complete tasks to nuture the relationships and provide quick and easy ways for the client to follow automated steps to complete a purchase.
- Website – Multipurpose. Informative in explaining more about your brand, products and services to website visitors who may not be familiar with you. Persuasive, by encouraging them to head to certain sales pages that connect on a deeper level and convince them to make a purchase. Functional in that it houses your CRM and payment gateway to facilitate transactions without manual handling.
CRM Explained