In 30 years of my selling career, I have come across many sales people who would be celebrating their sales victories for three months and appear to be desperate and shaky in the next few months. The consistency seems to be missing, and why is that?
It is the result of not giving attention to their sales funnel and not keeping their pipeline full. Sold, unsold, lost to competition, not ready to buy until the next quarter, referrals, leads, enquiries, second sales, and many more of such suspects and prospects must always be added up to keep filling your pipeline.
A sales funnel is the visual representation of the customer’s journey, depicting the sales process from awareness to action.
This funnel illustrates the idea that every sale begins with a large number of potential customers, and ends with a much smaller number of people who actually make a purchase.
Sales funnel stages vary from industry to industry and company to company, but they are generally divided into 5 stages from initial contact to closing.
Creating a sales funnel is one of the most important things you need to do as a sales person. Here’s how to go about creating a sales funnel to drive sales:
Identify your prospects
The goal is to drive interested prospects into the wide end of your sales funnel so that they can be qualified as good or potential prospects by identifying their needs and concerns.
Qualify your prospects
Qualifying prospects is not difficult. You can take surveys, start conversations and get people talking so that they reveal their actual needs and desires.
Apply sales funnel fundamentals
Your sales funnel consists of the means you use to drive prospects and potential customers to your business and close the sale.
Establish your sales funnel
Once you have identified and qualified your prospects and have applied the funnel fundamentals, now you would want to know where you are going in order to get there. Before you start building your funnel, you need to know what the final objective is. Where do you want the prospect to end up at the conclusion of the sales funnel and what action do you want them to take?
So, start at the end.
The goal of your sales funnel should have the following outcomes:
- Build a deeper relationship with your consumer
- Convert the consumer to some sort of call to action.
Your ability to build and manage a smart and healthy sales funnel is the key to closing more and more sales. A healthy funnel should have a good mix of suspects and prospects at different levels of the funnel. It is not the quantity, but the quality that matters. If you want to achieve a healthy funnel, you must dedicate a few hours of your day to building your funnel and growing it. Your sales funnel will take care of you if you take care of it.
