A full sales funnel can help you generate regular income. Businesses also want to avoid the difficulties associated with an empty funnel. However, keeping your funnel full is no easy feat.
You can keep your sales funnel full by setting goals, avoiding cold calling, hosting private events, creating evergreen webinars, networking, and offering a great customer experience. It’s a good idea to pick a few of these strategies and work on them consistently to achieve the desired results.
In this post, we will learn how to successfully keep a sales funnel full. There are a lot of ways to do this, so let’s get started!
Factors Influencing The Number Of Leads In Your Sales Funnel
Before learning how to fill your sales funnel, you must understand what causes the number of leads in your funnel to fluctuate.
If you can pinpoint the root of the problem, it will be easier to solve it.
1. Number Of Potential Clients At The Top Of The Sales Funnel
The top of your sales funnel is the entry point for leads. The number of leads you will have at this point depends on the efficacy of your marketing efforts.
The more leads you get to join your funnel, the fuller your funnel will be.
Generally, you will have the largest number of leads at this stage because it is the broad entryway to your funnel.
Your goal is to keep as many of these incoming leads as possible.
2. Number Of Customers At The Bottom Of Your Sales Funnel
The leads who entered your funnel will often exit after making their purchase.
At this stage, customer satisfaction is key to ensuring the customers keep coming back.
Therefore, when more customers leave the funnel, they create room for more prospects to progress down the funnel.
However, if your team is unable to process an increased number of sales at a given time, the process of converting additional leads will be hindered.
3. Sales Funnel Leakages
Those leads who enter the sales funnel but fail to exit at the bottom are said to have leaked.
Leaks in your funnel reduce your number of leads. Although funnel leakages are inevitable, making constant improvements can help lower the leakage rates.
Avoiding some sales funnel mistakes can also help you reduce leakages. For instance, targeting the wrong audience will attract a lot of poor-quality leads.
After some time, these leads will have no choice but to drop out of your sales funnel.
10 Effective Tips For Keeping Your Sales Funnel Full
Marketing your brand is an ongoing process that is essential for generating leads. These leads will then enter your sales funnel and keep it full.
Below are tips to help you fill your funnel and keep it full over time.
1. Set Goals And Check Your Scores
Setting goals is an effective way to stay on track with your marketing activities.
Unfortunately, very few salespeople set goals, and yet the ones who do outdo those who don’t set goals.
By setting sales funnel goals, you will have a plan that will help you focus your energy and stay committed.
Although distractions that steer you away from the sales process are inevitable, you would benefit from a plan that outlines your sales efforts.
The plan will then help you pinpoint what you need to do to achieve your goals.
Once your goals are set, it is essential to track the number of sales bids made versus the number of bids won.
You can track these metrics through different parameters such as project type and geographical area.
Use these metrics to set goals and identify improvement opportunities so you can fill your funnel.
A plan is a great place to start, but feel free to change it as new trends or opportunities emerge.
2. Avoid Cold Calling
Although cold calling can win you a lead here and there, it cannot keep your sales funnel full.
The main caveat of cold calling is that it has low chances of converting a random person into a lead.
In general, a typical cold prospect doesn’t know you, could be busy, and/or they might not care about your offer.
Therefore, cold calling a random stranger out of the blue is often a waste of time and other resources.
Instead of cold calling, consider running prospective campaigns. This involves allocating assets to build relationships with leads.
Then, once some level of trust has been established, you can call them later on.
To run prospective campaigns, start by sending emails to your leads offering them high-value offers. These offers could be things like ebooks or guides.
Additionally, you need to ensure your emails are well crafted, so your prospects are convinced to view the offers.
After a period of reading informative emails, your prospects will know you. At this point, it is safe to call them, and this time, it will be a warm call.
Warm calls are much more likely to lead to success.
3. Keep Nurturing More Leads
The average lead does not convert right away, but that does not mean they never will.
Sometimes, a lead who may not be ready to buy initially will be ready at a later date.
The best way to handle such leads is by adding them to your nurture campaign, where you will keep contacting them until they are ready.
On the other hand, you may generate some high-quality leads who are quickly ready to convert.
However, you will still need to nurture them a bit to build a relationship and avoid the hard sell.
Most sales reps make the mistake of sending sales pitches once leads land in their funnels.
Such a strategy may scare away leads, thus creating leakage in your funnel. As such, it is prudent to take time and build trust by sharing high-quality content.
This will not only build your credibility but will also make it easier to retain and convert your leads.
4. Target The Right Audience To Generate Quality Leads
Using broad, untargeted strategies to attract more leads can result in the generation of poor-quality leads.
For example, if you use a lot of paid ads, you might see a lot of people enter your funnel, which creates the impression that it’s full.
In reality, these poor-quality leads will drop out as they progress down the funnel.
This is because they are not actually interested in your product; they were just lured in by your paid ads.
Consequently, this tactic wastes your time and money and creates a leaky funnel.
So instead of worrying about selling to everyone who enters your funnel, focus on attracting high-quality leads.
This will save you resources and ensure your funnel is full throughout every stage.
Scoring your leads can help you weed out the bad leads.
Any lead who doesn’t show interest or interaction with your brand and doesn’t want to be contacted is a poor-quality lead.
Once you identify the good leads, you can focus your attention on them.
5. Create Evergreen Webinars
Another way to fill your funnel is by conducting evergreen webinar campaigns.
An evergreen webinar contains content that remains fresh and relevant even after a long period of time.
Unlike live webinars, you can automate evergreen webinars and show them repeatedly.
Evergreen webinars are perfect for making product presentations and launching products.
You can also use them to sell products whose demand remains steady throughout the year. Additionally, they should support products that do not go out of date.
Best Practices For Creating A Converting Evergreen Funnel
Conduct in-depth research to discover the most demanded topics so you can offer what people want.
A good starting point is looking at what other competitors running similar webinars are doing.
Study how they structure theirs, what works and what doesn’t, and then apply these lessons.
Include videos in your webinars to make the content more engaging and keep the attendees interested throughout the presentation.
After creating a valuable webinar, you need to promote it so people can become aware of it.
You can do the promotions via email blasts and add them to your landing page. You can also use social media to promote the webinar and repurpose its content.
Finally, ensure your presentation is clear, interactive, professional, and in line with your brand message.
6. Host Private Events
Hosting private events can help you convince more leads to join your sales funnel.
Start by inviting high-potential prospects along with your existing customers. Ensure your prospects and leads share a common room in an exclusive environment.
This could be in-person or online, but in-person events tend to lead to more conversions.
As the event host, address your attendees and provide valuable information. At this point, there’s no need to talk about the business that much.
Allow your guests to interact and have fun.
However, you can always mention your business and let them know that you are available if anyone needs your services.
By letting people join your private event, you get an opportunity to get your business in front of many people.
And the best part is that you get to nurture your leads and build relationships at the same time.
Moreover, since the venue is exclusive, your event is more likely to attract quality leads to fill your funnel.
7. Network In Specific Areas
Networking is an effective and cost-friendly lead generation tactic that can help you fill your funnel.
Although networking works, you need to know how to do it properly if you want to generate high-quality leads.
Moreover, when it comes to filling your funnel, networking in a few critical areas will bring more results compared to networking in multiple areas.
To get started with networking, first pick a key area where you wish to network.
Choose an area where a lot of your prospects and your current customers hang out.
After settling on an area, network deeply by focusing on a single group or two. As a group member, aim to be actively involved in group matters.
For instance, you could become a board or committee member and then start building relationships.
With time, you will start seeing more significant results from your involvement. Open networking can also work, but it’s much less effective.
The problem with open networking is that it is similar to cold calling. It causes you to sell face-to-face to someone you have no relationship with.
8. Personally Meet With Your Best Prospects
With the availability of online meeting tools, face-to-face meetings are becoming rare.
Most people avoid face-to-face meetings because they are time-consuming, inconvenient, and involved.
But, if you want to fill your funnel with quality leads, then you should give these meetings a try.
Face-to-face meetings can help you boost your win ratio, especially when you are trying to sell to big enterprises.
In such cases, in-person meetings get to draw the line between winning by 50% and by 20%.
So if you want to close more deals, it’s time to hop on that flight or drive to meet that high-potential prospect.
When you are dealing with lower-value opportunities, an online meeting is okay. But for high-value prospects, try the in-person route.
9. Offer The Best Customer Experience Possible
Customer satisfaction is vital to the success of any business. When a customer has a good experience with your business, they are more likely to buy from you again.
Subsequently, a satisfied customer will not leave your funnel and will help keep your funnel full.
Therefore, you should continually strive to improve the customer experience offered by your business.
To identify areas of improvement, you could ask your clients for reviews. Bear in mind that there will always be a mix of positive and negative reviews.
The negative reviews will pinpoint the areas of customer experience that need improvement, so you need to embrace them.
Additionally, you can respond to the negative reviews and let your clients know that you will do better next time.
By responding, your clients will see that you care about them.
Ultimately, having more satisfied clients will help you generate a continuous supply of leads and prospects.
You will not only retain them, but they may also refer you to others.
Better yet, retaining clients will save you resources you would have spent trying to acquire new ones.
10. Improve Your Marketing Activities And Sales Processes Continually
Every aspect of your business benefits from constant improvement, including your sales and marketing strategies.
Perform regular tests and track your metrics. By looking at the results of your marketing efforts, you can assess what works and what doesn’t.
Keep using the strategies that work and improve on those that do not. Next, analyze your sales processes and find opportunities for improvement.
For instance, if your payment process is long and complicated, leads will abandon their carts and exit your funnel.
As such, performing tests can help you find areas causing friction and streamline them.
Some tests like A/B split tests allow you to create variants of a given area and then choose one that works best.
Subsequently, with an optimized sales process and improved marketing strategies, you can keep your funnel full.
Final Thoughts
Although keeping a funnel full throughout the year is challenging, it is possible to do with the implementation of the right strategies.
Fortunately, now you know ten effective tips that can help you keep your sales funnel full. You don’t have to try all of them because it can get overwhelming.
Instead, pick a few that you are comfortable with and discuss them with your team. You may also brainstorm other ideas.
After making your selections, create an implementation plan to help you stay on track.