How to grow your sales funnel tenfold in less than 6 months
In a previous article, we reviewed demand creation and inbound marketing. In my opinion, inbound marketing is one of the most powerful and cost-efficient tools a company can use to build demand and grow its business. However, it is not a silver bullet for any organisation and sometimes it is neither efficient nor easily implementable. For example, many B2B or B2B2C businesses could rely primarily on outbound marketing for their lead generation with yet tremendously positive results.
The truth is that when most people think of marketing, outbound marketing is what they would have in mind — [Outbound] Marketing is the act of “buying” a prospect’s attention by seeking them out directly or indirectly via the media outlets. Whilst inbound marketing relies heavily on content marketing and SEO, the success of outbound marketing is hinging on the effectiveness of lead generation.
In this article, we will review the fundamental mechanics of outbound marketing and sales with a focus on lead generation and top-of-funnel marketing.
What is lead generation?
Lead generation is the process of collecting names and contact information about qualified prospects which will be contacted by the salespeople for generating orders. It also includes the qualification of such leads from a marketing standpoint before handing them over to a sales team. This handover can sometimes be as late in the process as the initiation of prospects’ expression of interest into the products or services of a business.
Leads can be generated from various sources or activities, for example, digitally via the Internet, through personal referrals, through telephone calls, through advertisements, or events. According to a recent study most companies use email as a channel for generating leads. Although direct email has a very low rate of success for selling to decision makers, it is still the go-to solution for most companies, mainly because of its cost-efficiency.
According to the same study above, the most popular channels used for lead generation are as follow:
- Email marketing
- Content marketing
- SEO
- Trade shows
- Paid search
- PR
- Paid social media
- Outbound calls
- Retargeting
- Partner marketing
- Display advertising
- Mass media (TV, Radio and print)
- Video advertising
Reversely, when sales people were asked what is the most effective leads’ origin accounting for successful deals closure in B2B were trade shows, PR, social media and direct mail.
Another study based on Salesforce CRM customers data found that direct traffic, search engines, and web referrals were the three most popular online channels for lead generation, if we combine first and last touch attribution. These three channels alone were accounting for 93% of leads.
These contradicting figures confirm that lead generation is a one-size-fit-all process. It varies a lot from company to company and between the different industries.
The key to lead generation success: marketing and sales teams alignment
The best case scenario for your organisation is one that starts by generating a lead and finishes by closing a deal. However, from a lead to a deal there is a long road where many things can go wrong. There are several steps that must happen sequentially and be performed flawlessly. The most important one of those steps though, could be the handover of a lead from marketing to sales. If your organisation has a certain size, you have most probably assign the responsibility of generating new leads to marketing, while your salespeeople are expected to convert those leads into closed deals and revenue. But, like passing the baton in a race, handing over a lead from your marketing team to your sales team must be as frictionless and smooth as possible. However, its seldom is. Most often, this is where a lot of organisations struggle leading to a lot of inefficiencies, leading to toxic team dynamics that could easily be avoided if they had taken the time to better align both teams.
First of all, marketing and sales teams must agree on the end-to-end process of how a lead becomes a customer. Once both teams have the same vision of what is the lead-to-deal process, there must be a clear and common understanding of how the marketing team is going to source leads, how they are going to nurture said leads and finally how those leads become sales-ready or a so-called marketing qualified lead. A marketing qualified lead is a lead that has been qualified from a marketing perspective. It has all the attributes required from a lead from a marketing perspective. Once a lead fits the definition of a marketing qualified lead it can then transition from marketing to sales ownership. In order for this to be successful, both marketing and sales must be on the same page when it comes to what attributes are necessary to label a marketing qualified lead.
This alignment between the marketing and sales teams is critical to your sales growth success. In all highly-efficient sales organisations, the sales team engage only with prospects that have a high probability of buying the product or service. This is also where most of your nurturing marketing budget should go. Hence, this is the first stepping stone to a successful sales funnel growth.
What is a lead?
But before agreeing on what is a marketing qualified lead, do your teams know what a lead is?
A lot of the confusion and friction between marketing and sales comes from the fact that both teams use common terminology but with slightly different meaning. A lead for your marketing manager can be completely different from what your sales manager considers to be a lead. While this divergence is often known to organisations, still most companies do not have a clear definition of what is a lead.
More than 20% of companies have no clear definition of what is a lead.
For marketing, a lead might be anyone that comes through the door or that fits a target segment. Sales, however, would have a more restrictive definition of a lead. For example, a lead for your sales team would score differently depending on how many boxes of the following she would check:
- She will demonstrate interest in your product or service
- She would have responded to a marketing campaign
- She would have budget to buy the product
- She would fit an ideal customer profile
- She has budget authority
Depending on the industry you are in and your deal closing rates, a sales lead could be anyone checking at least one of the boxes, or rather someone checking all the boxes above.
The art of simmering your leads. From cold to hot lead.
A sales team needs to be focusing on selling. Most of their efforts should go into closing hot leads. However, from a marketing standpoint, there is no such distinction as anyone fitting your target segment and interacting with your marketing is a lead. To distinguish between the different leads you have in your database, it would be useful to score them properly.
As seen above, the marketing team interacts with a large spectrum of prospects. The job of the marketing team is not only to source those leads, but also to qualify them as much as possible. Their main output is marketing qualified leads. A marketing qualified lead is a lead for which we would have a minimum set of information. This minimal set of attributes must have been agreed between marketing and sales, as defined in the previous section about lead definition.
From there on, any marketing qualified lead meeting the requirements for your ideal customer profile and fitting your audience or persona has the potential to be converted into a sales qualified lead. Once converted, the sales team can start chasing a meaningful engagement with that lead. At this stage, your sales lead would still be cold out of the marketing icebox. To warm it up, you’d need to run it through the lead-to-deal recipe. Leads should go through this lead-to-deal process as fast as possible in order to maximise your time investment and increase your sales ROI.
A lukewarm lead would show a genuine interest in your product or service. Alternatively, you would have identified that your product fits a specific need or alleviate a specific pain for the lead. Usually these leads are in the awareness phase. Therefore, your language should be built around them, their pains and the symptoms of these pains.
A warm lead, on the other hand, has not only a specific need for your product but is actually in the process of defining the requirements for your product or service. They are more mature and are considered to be in the consideration phase. Therefore, your language should be around your value proposition and how you are solving their pains.
Finally, a hot lead, the holy-grail of any sales professional is a lead that in addition to the above is in the process of actively purchasing. They are ideally the decision maker, or his proxy, they have authority over the budget and they already have a timeline for finalising the purchase. Leads in this stage are considered to be in the decision phase and your language should be around your unique value proposition, your differentiators and negotiation.
If you are using the assembly line organisation in your sales team, your best closers should work most of their time with this type of leads.
Scaling growth by building a lead generation machine to feed your top funnel.
According to a survey conducted by Forrester research, companies close a deal with an average of 0.25% of all the inquiries they would get. With that in mind, you can naturally deduct that the more inquiries you get, the higher your chances to close more deals. It is basically a volume game.
To rapidly grow your sales tenfold, you need to make sure that you grow your inquiries at least ten times. You have to ensure that you have the largest top of the funnel possible. Of course, before working on growing your top of the funnel, you must have made sure that your leads are trickling down your sales funnel as fast and as efficiently as possible. Otherwise, your teams would just choke on too many leads. This is why we ensure the practices in the previous sections are in place before investing time and resources in the lead generation scale-up.
Building your top funnel is commonly the marketing team’s responsibility. Once you have clarity on what segments your organisation is targeting and also on how a prospect will be converted to a marketing qualified lead, you can use both inbound and outbound techniques to attract and capture as many leads as possible.
The marketing team would use a mix of different marketing channels where you can reach a large number of your ideal customers. If it would be politically correct to use a farming analogy, we would say that lead generation strategy is like herding thousands of people to your lead walls or landing pages, where they will be captured and marked through calls to action.
To capture these prospects you are reaching, your marketing team will have to use honeypots and lead baits.
In B2B, prospective leads can usually be very efficiently captured using offers. It’s a transactional approach, that works well with professionals, where the prospect would interact with your marketing and provide information you can use to qualify them. But in return, you have to provide them with something that is of value to them. That artefact is what we call an offer.
When it comes to offers, there are two main types — soft offers and hard offers. The former is called soft because it does not require a lot of investment from your prospect. Therefore, it is mainly used to get quantity. The latter, on the other hand, requires some investment from the prospect, hence the name hard offer. It is mainly used when your focus is on the quality of leads more than their quantity. Depending on your strategy, you can use one or the other, or a combination of both depending on your priorities.
Some examples of offers:
Soft offers to get quantity
- Free guide
- White paper
- Sweepstakes
- Article reprint
- Book
- Newsletter
- Game
- Curiosity quiz
- Survey result
- Premium
- …
Hard offers to get quality
- Product demo
- Sales call
- Trial
- Needs analysis
- Catalog
- Informational site
- Product sample
- Case history
- Seminar
- Pricing Discount
- …
Putting it all together
To summarise, growing your sales funnel requires focused targeting, aligned marketing and sales teams, a streamlined lead-to-deal flow and an efficient lead generation machine. One must look at their sales organisation as an engineer would look at a machine. Each part plays a critical role and must perform at its best at all times. Otherwise, you end up with a suboptimal and underutilised machine that will cost more to maintain than what it is producing.
- Know who you are selling to
- Make sure sales and marketing are aligned and lead handover is clear
- Make sure sales and marketing are clear about the definition of a lead
- Verify that your leads transit smoothly from lead to deal
- Create and publish enough offers to constantly feed the top of your funnel with leads
- Attract as many leads as possible to your landing pages or lead walls
Of course, this article is not a silver bullet and does not guarantee results. The same way as following a recipe won’t make of you a Michelin starred chef overnight. However, structuring your revenue generation process will give you a powerful tool to identify where your process has issues and fix them.
Finally, if your sales process is optimal but you still do not see the results you’d like, maybe it is time to pivot. Look outside the sales process and ask yourself: Are we selling the right product? Are we selling to the right market?
