How to Shorten Your Sales Cycle overgostudio.com n 888-405-7515 T he days of salesmen as the keepers of sales environment, your job as a business knowledge are over. Thanks to the power of owner is to make sure that this information is the internet, buyers are more informed than reaching the decision makers at the right time, ever. Increasingly, buyers seek out knowledge in the right format, on the right platforms. That’s before they buy. 61% of global Internet users where an automated sales funnel comes into play. 1 research products online . They look to blogs, forums, and social media to make an Every business owner wants their business to informed decision about a product grow, and the key to growth is a steady or service before parting with their influx of qualified sales leads. A qualified Stop wasting hard-earned dollars. The average sales sales lead is someone who is salesyour sales team’s cycle has increased 22% over the ready, or prepared to purchase your time and your past 5 years, thanks to the product or service. The problem arises increased knowledge buyers now when your sales team is essentially business dollars 2 possess . Now, companies are genwasting its time (and your business following up erating leads by attracting visitors dollars) following up with leads that are with unqualified with content. But the burden has fallunqualified, or otherwise unready to purleads! en on sales teams everywhere to deterchase. Gleanster Research shows that 50% mine if a lead is a potential buyer. Sales of leads are qualified but not yet ready to buy, teams must ask, “Is this lead just looking for and only 25% of all leads are legitimate and should information?” “Is this person a decision maker in advance to sales3. Fortunately, there are processes his or her household or business?” Because of the and methodologies that can help reduce the time increased visibility that content marketing provides, your sales team spends with unqualified prospects it’s becoming increasingly difficult to determine in the beginning of your sales cycle, thus reducing which leads are decision makers. In the digital the total length of your sales cycle. 1 Interconnected World: Shopping and Personal Finance, 2012. 2 Sirius Decisions. 3 Gleanster Research 888-405-7515 | OverGoStudio.com | [email protected] | How to Shorten Your Sales Cycle | Please share | 2 Sales Funnel Visitors Enter So how do you start? First, create a sales funnel for your website and map custom content to it. Sales funnels allow you to direct prospects through an automated sales process as they interact with your website. The key to a sales funnel are the stages of content your prospects come into contact with throughout. As leads move down through your sales funnel, they will be encouraged to engage with each piece of content. This flow of events acts as part of the sales process, because leads qualify themselves by showing interest in your content. Standard sales funnels contain top of the funnel offers, middle of the funnel offers and bottom of the funnel offers for prospects to engage with. Setting up your sales funnel with this sequence of offers is important. However some leads won’t progress through the funnel in this orderly fashion. Leads can enter the funnel at any stage. You should view your funnel as more of a content strategy; people will come to your site for three reasons: awareness, research or intent. Awareness is when the buyer is aware of a need for your product or service. Research is when the buyer engages in seeking information about your product or service. And intent is when they find the right option for a product or service and begin the decision making process. It’s very possible that a lead has come to your site from a competitor’s and is already aware and informed. Your funnel needs to be set up to provide information for each stage. Here is an example of a sales funnel. Blogging Content Information Qualified Leads This top section of the funnel establishes you as a thought leader in your industry. Marketing Qualified Leads During the middle section you provide leads with specific product and service information Sales Qualified Leads Sales Ready Lead Produced Automated Lead Nurturing Email Campaign Content Automated Lead Nurturing Email Campaign Consultation Offer 888-405-7515 | OverGoStudio.com | [email protected] | How to Shorten Your Sales Cycle | Please share | 3 Blogging B2B marketers who use blogs generate 67% more leads per month than those who do not4. You should have a blog on your website that speaks about your audience’s pain points, interests and questions. Your prospects enter their queries into search engines, like Google, and your blog articles with the answers to those queries appear in the search results. This is how you direct traffic to your website. Attracting visits with your blog is the first step. Once they are on your site, you’ll want to guide them to continued engagement on your website by presenting them with an opportunity to download a top of the funnel advanced content offer. LEAD CAPTURE ATTRACT The Sales Funnel Break Down Top of the funnel advanced content Advanced content offers something of value to your audience. This value comes in the form of new ideas, educational material, or solutions to problems. Ideally, advanced content pieces are valuable enough that visitors are willing to fill out a form with their contact information in order to gain access to it. Common forms advanced content may take are webinars, whitepapers and ebooks. Top of the funnel advanced content illustrates your industry expertise and addresses common pain points your prospects experience. 61% of consumers say they feel better about, and are more likely to buy from, a company that delivers custom content5. When a prospect signs up to access top of the funnel advanced content they officially become a lead. These leads are ‘information qualified’ leads because at this stage in the sales funnel they are only seeking educational material about your industry. 4 FactBrowser. 5 Custom Content Council. 888-405-7515 | OverGoStudio.com | [email protected] | How to Shorten Your Sales Cycle | Please share | 4 LEAD CAPTURE LEAD CAPTURE Prospects in the middle of the funnel have recognized they have a need for your service and are ready to search for specific solutions. Bottom of the funnel consult offer The bottom of the sales funnel offer is a free consultation or some sort of direct business offer. Prospects and Leads at this stage are ready to talk to a member of your sales team. Once your sales funnel is set up on your website you are well on your way to shortening your sales cycle. The next step is to put processes in place that automate your sales funnel, so at the end of the day your sales team receives only the most qualified leads from your website. Middle of the funnel advanced content 78% of consumers believe that organizations providing custom content are interested in building good relationships6. It’s key to place custom content at certain stages of your sales funnel. Middle of the funnel advanced content pieces should be centered on your products or services, rather than industry related content. When leads travel down your sales funnel or arrive at your site already educated and convert on middle of the funnel advanced content they become a marketing qualified lead. Marketing qualified leads have raised a virtual hand and expressed interest in the products or services you provide. 6 TMG Custom Media. 888-405-7515 | OverGoStudio.com | [email protected] | How to Shorten Your Sales Cycle | Please share | 5 Automating Your Sales Funnel Lead Nurturing Lead nurturing is an automated email process with the goal of moving leads through the various stages of content in your sales funnel. According to The Annuitas Group, businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads7. Lead nurturing campaigns should focus on building a relationship with your leads depending on where they find themselves in your sales funnel. Top of the funnel lead nurturing campaigns should speak to information qualified leads that have only shown an interest in your top of the funnel content. These leads are not ready to buy; they are just looking for industry related information. Your lead nurturing campaigns in this scenario should provide them with more educational industry information that helps answer questions and provides solutions to their problems. And of course you should position your business as the solution to their pain points by offering them access to a middle of the funnel piece of advanced content. Make marketing human and build rapport with leads through nurturing campaigns Middle of the funnel lead nurturing campaigns address common objectives you receive during your sales calls. Leads found in the middle of your sales funnel are considered marketing qualified leads and they are concerned with how your business can best serve them. The campaign should combat these doubts and concerns by proactively addressing common objections. This serves to funnel the leads down to the free consultation stage. Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads8. Lead nurturing helps your company stay top of mind through the lead’s decision making process this makes you more likely to be the company they go back and look at in depth when they are ready to make a decision. Nurtured leads also make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads9. Now that’s a business process we can definitely all get behind. 7 The Annuitas Group. 8 DemandGen Report. 9 The Annuitas Group. 888-405-7515 | OverGoStudio.com | [email protected] | How to Shorten Your Sales Cycle | Please share | 6 Lead Segmentation Lead nurturing is a great process to move leads down your sales funnel, but leads can get stuck at certain stages. That’s where segmentation comes into play. By segmenting your leads into contact lists, you can automate emails and send your leads the information they’re looking for at exactly the time they’re looking for it. Relevant emails drive 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails10. You can segment your leads into lists based on where they are in the sales funnel. Let’s say a group of leads downloaded an offer on how to sharpen knives, but then took no further action into other areas of your website. If you segment this group of leads into a contact list, you can send them more information on what they originally found interesting: sharpening knives. These kinds of targeted marketing efforts will be the nudge leads stuck at various stages need in order to continue down your sales funnel. According to the Lyris Annual Email Optimizer Report, 39% of marketers who segmented their email lists experienced higher open rates, 28% experienced lower unsubscribe rates, and 24% experienced better deliverability and greater revenue11. Segmenting leads will allow you to send out personal, relevant emails, which will take the place of your sales team spending their time trying to follow up with the leads in their unqualified state. 1 1 2 If you’re anything like me, Kel ly, you’ve probably been struggl ing with this thing called social media ( and how to apply it in your bus iness.) By apply it, I mean, how to use it effectively to grow your sales without taking up more of your time. In my efforts to reconcile my own personal struggle – betwe en social media being a valuable tool and social media being a waste of time – I’ve stumbled upon a way to use it that is enormously valuable for B2B sales, and requires little effort. This week, I’m going to show what I’ve been doing, and how you can apply this in your business. To make it even easier I’ve cre ated two different ways for you to absorb this information. You can read about it by clicking (read it) or you can watch the video by clicking (wa tch it). I would love to hear your feedba See you next week. 3 3 ck – so please feel free to res pond. Rick Kranz 1 Email Personalization 2 Targeted for Interest– Leads receiving this email previously showed engagement with social media content on our website 3 No Fancy Gimmicks– An email stripped of html with direct links to access relevant content of interest to the leads 10 Jupiter Research. 11 Lyris Annual Email Optimizer Report. 888-405-7515 | OverGoStudio.com | [email protected] | How to Shorten Your Sales Cycle | Please share | 7 Lead Grading According to MarketingSherpa, 61% of marketers send all leads directly to sales, however only 27% of those leads will be qualified12. That means sales wastes its time trying to qualify the other 73% of your leads instead of generating new business for your company. Lead grading stops this from happening. Lead grading is an internal process that will allow your sales team to know the exact position of a lead in the sales funnel and their level of qualification as a potential buyer. The criteria you use to determine what qualifies a lead as ready to buy will be unique to your business. Assign a score to any action a lead takes when engaging with your marketing efforts. Whether it be on your social media, your newsletter emails, or on your website. You want to set your grading system up by looking at how your current customers behaved with your marketing efforts when they were leads. For example, if most of your customers opened a specific email or downloaded a specific piece of advanced content, those actions would be taken into consideration when you set up your lead grading. Once the actions that define how a potential buyer behaves with your marketing efforts are established, you create a scoring system. Simply assign a point value to actions leads can take. Once leads reach the threshold determined by your grading system, you can notify your sales team that the leads are informed, ready for a decision, and qualified for a sales conversation. With lead grading in place your sales team is only speaking to prospects that have had meaningful engagement with your sales funnel. The result is quality sales calls with qualified buyers. Hypothetical Lead Grading Examples: Actions Leads Took, Their Funnel Position & Their Score Lead A Lead Grade: 22 Funnel Position: Top of the Funnel Opened June Newsletter– 2pts Downloaded Marketing Webinar Offer– 20pts Lead B Lead Grade: 10 Funnel Position: Top of the Funnel Subscribed to Blog– 10pts Lead C Lead Grade: 55 Funnel Position: Middle of the Funnel Marketing Qualified Lead Opened Lead Nurturing Emails– 5pts Downloaded Case Study Offer– 30pts Downloaded Marketing Webinar Offer– 20pts 12 MarketingSherpa. 888-405-7515 | OverGoStudio.com | [email protected] | How to Shorten Your Sales Cycle | Please share | 8 How to Do Lead Grading Conduct an audit of all your marketing efforts, advanced content blog posts, emails, website pages, forms and so on. Then, assign points to these actions. The points you assign are arbitrary and you should choose what suits you best. To setup lead grading in its simplest form take the following steps: Make top of the funnel engagements (e.g. blog posts, newsletters, top of the funnel pieces of advanced content) weighted lightly. Have middle of the funnel engagements (e.g. brochure downloads, lead nurturing emails, social media activity) weighted a bit more, and bottom of the funnel engagements (e.g. contact form, free consultation requests, demos, etc.) weighted heavily. Of course lead grading can be a lot more complex. Example of content audit Name of Content Type of Content How to Reduce Marketing Costs whitepaper Repeatable Business Processes to Grow Leads and Sales Webinar webinar Social Media Made Simple webinar Social Media Assessment assessment / test Topic Covered How implementing inbound marketing reduces overall marketing costs. Inbound marketing processes are highlighted as business processes that solve leads and sales painpoints Why CEOs should be active on social media, and the benefits of it. Use a Social CRM such a Nimble Grade Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and/or Pinterest. Give advice on actions taken. Example: There is prospect A and prospect B. If prospect A fills out your bottom of the funnel consultation offer but has had ZERO engagement with your marketing efforts prior, this does not necessarily mean he is a qualified buyer. Compare them to prospect B, who has downloaded multiple pieces of advanced content and read all of your emails. See the difference between the two? Prospect B’s point total should reflect the higher level of activity on your site. Buyer Persona Business Owner Business Owner Date Created Pain Point Addressed 9/23/2013 marketing budgets 7/15/2013 lack of leads, lack of sales Funnel Position Top http://marketing. overgovideo. com/how-toreduce-marketingcosts Top http://marketing. overgovideo. com/businessprocesses-forsales-growthwebinar Business Owner don't understand how to use 7/29/2013 social for B2B Top Business Owner 5/21/2013 social media not performing Middle 888-405-7515 | OverGoStudio.com | [email protected] | How to Shorten Your Sales Cycle | Please share Link http://marketing. overgovideo. com/social-mediafor-businessowners http://marketing. overgovideo. com/social-mediafor-businessownersassessment | 9 How To Do It All? Now that you know how to shorten your sales cycle, you’re probably wondering how to implement all of this. A content marketing platform such as HubSpot allows you to automate your sales process with simple, easy to use tools. In addition, HubSpot’s Content Optimization System (COS) allows you to host a blog and site pages that offer custom content to leads in each stage of the sales funnel. According to Forrester Research, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower costs13. With Hubspot, it’s easy to excel at lead nurturing. HubSpot allows you to set up customized email campaigns that are triggered automatically. You can build multiple emails, organize them into what HubSpot calls a “Workflow” and then trigger the workflow of lead nurturing emails to send once a prospect takes a certain action on your website, like downloading a specific whitepaper. HubSpot also has tools for segmenting your leads and contacts. When a visitor converts to a lead on your website, HubSpot tracks every engagement they have with your marketing efforts from that moment on. With the segmenting tool you can build segmented lists that populate criteria leads have or have not met. Lead grading is also made simple with HubSpot. The lead grading tool allows you to assign any score (positive or negative) to any action a lead takes on your site. With HubSpot, you can build a lead grading process much faster than if you were to do it manually. You can even send your sales team automated email alerts when leads reach a qualified score – right out of HubSpot. Could it be any easier? The answer is yes! HubSpot also integrates with CRM systems so sales team can see what stage each lead is at and what type of content they have consumed without having to leave the CRM system. Your sales team not only stops wasting their time qualifying leads, but now has a log of all the ways qualified leads have interacted with your company’s marketing efforts. Knowledge like this is a powerful tool on sales calls. 13 Forrester Research. 888-405-7515 | OverGoStudio.com | [email protected] | How to Shorten Your Sales Cycle | Please share | 10 Takeaway With an automated sales funnel, you can generate more qualified sales leads at a lower cost, and close more sales. All the while reducing the time your sales team is spending with unqualified leads. Now that you know how to setup a sales funnel, nurture leads through your sales funnel, segment your leads and setup up a lead grading system, there is no excuse for sales wasting time with unqualified leads. Author Bios Laura Hogan is an account manager for OverGo Studio and self proclaimed OverGo Cheerleader. She executes marketing strategies that grow leads and sales for her clients. You can follow her and her pitbull, Piglet on Twitter @lalalaurahogan. Kelly Kranz is a content manager for OverGo Studio. She manages the creation of content across multiple platforms-from blog articles to ebooks to infographics. When she isn’t buried in content she’s watching Arrested Development or Battlestar Galactica. Follow her on Twitter @kellykranz. About OverGo OverGo Studio is a full inbound marketing agency dedicated to being your inbound marketing team. We work closely with you to attract traffic to your website and use your website to capture leads. We track, nurture and grade your leads to make sure your sales team is calling qualified business prospects. Reach out for a free consultation today and we can discuss how our inbound marketing team can help shorten your sales cycle and grow your business. Click Here to Request a Free Inbound Marketing Consultation 888-405-7515 | OverGoStudio.com | [email protected] | How to Shorten Your Sales Cycle | Please share | 11
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