How To Clean The Sludge Clogging Your Sales Funnel?

Have you ever wondered what determines the success of a B2B business? It is not the number of investors or the glamor of their websites; it is the optimization of the sales funnel. Every business has a very basic workflow – to attract prospective customers by posting offers and products and to convert as many customers as possible into paying customers.

You may have already noticed how easy it is to attract the attention of people on the internet. However, not many of them stick around until the end to buy your products or services. This winnowing effect can be compared to a funnel. This structure becomes narrower as the process proceeds.

Visualizing the process as a funnels helps you understand exactly where you may be losing out on customers. You may have thousands of visitors each day flocking on your landing page, but hardly 10 of them make it to the inner pages of your website or your products. This is a problem that most B2B businesses face. This lowers the sales and the ROI. In such a situation, you can start by identifying the blockages in your sales funnel before the situation gets any worse.

What’s Stopping You From Achieving Your Ideal Conversion Rate?

You may have been asking this to yourself for a while and you may have come up with the following “reasons”:

1. There is not enough growth after the first sale
2. Not enough people are signing up for paid services after trial period
3. Not enough people are registering on your website
4. The top of the funnel is not populated enough

Well, all these seem very legit at first glance, but we have seen that there is only one true reason for conversion rates to falter.

You are misjudging your customer’s interests and not foreseeing their preferred actions.

We get it. There are no such things are psychics, but what we are talking about here is pure science. You can judge the behavior of your customer, their interests and buying habits by simply analyzing their past purchases and social media sharing habits. Post 2010, many firms have perfected customer “stalking” tools that coalesce all collectable customer data. This is a huge part of big data and database management system, which you need to both understand and undertake in order to drive your B2B Company to success. If you are tight on money for getting these new amenities, you can apply for consolidation loans before time runs out!

You need to get inside your customer’s head to understand his likes, dislikes and demands before he makes a move. Success is determined by the correct implementation of resources and minimum wastage of the same. This is only possible when you can predict how your customer is going to behave once he reaches your landing page.

How To Untie The Knots?

Once you have understood your customer’s needs, you are one-step closer to financial success. The easiest way to do this is to understand why your customer is standing you up. Here are the most common concerns that B2B customers face over time:

1. Product is repetitive
2. Your product and services is no high up enough on his priority list
3. He is scared of being bombed by spam emails
4. Added data integration trouble
5. Already comfortable with a software, too reluctant to switch

These are a few of the concerns that need to be addressed before these customers come back on your website. Having these concerns in a written form will help you analyze the glitches and formulate solutions for better motivation of your customers.

Hire Faux-Customers:

The easiest way to read customer sentiment and understand their concerns is to assign a team to play your customer. This is a trial-round where your team can come up with all the reasons a customer may have to NOT purchase from you. Once you can put yourself in the shoes of your customers, unblocking the funnel will become a walk in the park.

Do Not Forget Metrics:

Just having a functioning sales funnel is not enough to measure success. You need to calibrate your funnel and make sure you can measure your sales, growth and conversion rates in real time. Your sales funnel needs set parameters to judge the growth and success of your business. These parameters are – campaigns for attracting traffic, visitors, trials, and closed deals. The ratios between the visitors and trials, and trials and closed deals give you two-step conversion percentages. These percentages will help you understand the efficacy of your process and will tell you how far you are from optimizing the sales funnel.

It is possible that the shape of the funnel will vary depending upon the lead source. This automatically means, for ideal analysis you should track the funnel parameters discretely for each lead source.

What Happens When You Cannot Smoothen Out The Blocks Yourself?

We live in a world of DIY tools and platforms. However, what happens when you fail to find the solution to your conversion rate problem by yourself? Can you hire an expert you can guide you smoothly through the sales funnel with a higher return?
Well, this is very much possible. However, we’d like to point out that this is a very exclusive service that is often provided by sales analyst firms and marketing agencies who charge a bomb for their services. Since you are already facing slow sales and low conversion rates you may want to turn to online consolidating companies before you go any further.

These debt consolidation companies help you coalesce all your due credit card bills, loan payments and debt interests into one. You can take out a large loan at a lower interest rate that you can pay over a couple of years easily. Since these are mostly unsecured and personal, you can use the amount for almost all business related expenses including hiring experts to analyze your sales, marketing and finances.

B2B was never an easy world, but the degrading financial stature of the country has made it worse for newbies. Most new B2B companies are declaring bankruptcy in less than 2 years. The only ones who are managing to break even in the long run are not shy to ask for help!