We love automation. It’s how we let our customers, and their sales department in particular, devote more time to activities that bring in revenue. We were wondering how else sales teams could leverage automation in the sales funnel to convert more leads after writing our recent post on Scheduling Automation.
Before we dive into the tips to increase conversions, it’s important to understand building an effective sales funnel requires patience, practice, and adjustments. Luckily, we’re here to share all of the tips, tricks, and secrets so you can achieve your business goals.
Table of contents
1. Enable app integrations
Tackle is an integral part of our sales process. It has allowed us to make sure that all of the revenue opportunities that we pursue don’t fall off and has increased our existing client engagement by 70%
– Zach Kubin, Adelaide Metrics Inc
Tagging data across your CRM and other software is tedious and yields zero return. Tackle helps you automate your tagging and tracking process by providing several cross-compatibility or integrations so that your team can spend more time on more impactful things.
2. Stay on Top of Key Tasks
If your business receives hundreds of leads everyday, your sales team may be inundated with emails and other daily tasks. As a result, your sales will suffer.
Task automation and reminders are a salesperson’s best friend, helping them stay on top of their most pressing responsibilities and new leads as they come in. Every member of the sales team can communicate with and follow up with qualified prospects more quickly and easily thanks to task automation.
When properly implemented, it speeds up your sales team’s work so that they can keep searching for lucrative new business prospects.
3. Don’t send in your sales team too early
When it comes to nurturing, marketing is responsible for the first two-thirds. Your funnel is now complete and should be referred to as a marketing AND sales funnel.
During this nurturing phase, both of your teams should coordinate their efforts to ensure that only qualified leads are being cycled. With better marketing and sales alignment, you can boost your conversion rate.
A natural break should be included. The role of your marketing staff is to educate potential customers so that they progress through your sales funnel and ultimately make a purchase. The qualified lead is now ready to be transferred to sales for finalization.
4. Use data collection
We believe that automating even the most fundamental aspects of the sales process, like data collection, is the best place to start. In particular, we provide tools that help customers estimate their monthly faxing costs based on their anticipated volume of outgoing and incoming faxes and the number of lines they desire. This gives prospective clients an instantaneous idea of how much it would cost to use our service. This kind of equipment helps improve the effectiveness of communication. Customers may instantly decide if the price and features of the plan are satisfactory, eliminating the need for back-and-forth correspondence. This helps maintain a constant stream of potential customers into our sales pipeline.
5. Don’t lose focus
In order to increase sales, many businesses put consumer demands second to internal objectives (solutions and results). However, under the inbound approach, the client is at the center, and their wants and needs should dictate your priorities.
When it comes to nurturing, it’s all about asking the right questions at the right time to the right people. Sales managers should prompt their teams with pertinent questions, and salespeople should feel at ease posing challenging inquiries to potential clients.
After a lead has been “qualified” in marketing and handed on to sales, they still require nurturing. The focus must remain on the consumer, not the sale, yet the proper questions can lead to the appropriate answer.
6. Segment sales funnels
Do not give customers who are just passing by too much of your valuable time. Develop mechanisms that will help you identify the “hot” customers in your sales funnel and devote 100% of real time to them alone. – Mogale Modisane,ToolsGaloreHQ
Automation should start at the top of the sales funnel. I am the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Executive Officer of a digital content company that I founded. Most of the time, I try to classify website visitors into three groups: cold, warm (interested), and hot (likely to buy). Over the course of a month, a series of emails does this. I only pay close attention to attractive folks. When determining who is “hot” and who isn’t, everyone else is sorted via a different chute. Over the course of a year, this strategy increased my conversion rate by as much as 80%. – Mogale said in an interview.
7. Leverage for cart abandonment
Automating the latter steps of the sales process inside the limits of email marketing is one of the most efficient uses of this strategy. To be more specific, there is more than one email sent when a customer adds an item to their cart but then abandons it. Rather, a sequence of three automated emails is sent out four hours after the abandoned cart, 24 hours after the abandoned cart, and 72 hours after the abandoned cart. In addition, a small, yet individualized discount code is sent at each stage of the automation to encourage purchasing behavior.