Fact: 90 days after you stop marketing, your sales pipeline dries up. We all know that in a business, time is precious. For most companies, capacity limits usually mean that a day without a sale is a day lost. A fully functioning funnel is the best way to ensure that no section in your sales process dries up.
How to Create an Effective Sales Funnel
Designing a funnel for your sales team involves creating offers that entice potential customers at different stages in the buyer's journey. These offers can be checklists, forms, white papers, e-books, or anything else you can dream up that your customer might want access to or might want to learn more about.
With each new offer, you can create forms that ask your leads for information about themselves and their purchasing interests, allowing you to better supply them with new information and eventually, opportunities to make a purchase that serves their specific needs. Now let's get into some inbound marketing solutions.
So let's start with ToFu, MoFu and BoFu. While the first sounds like a plant-based protein and the other two don't make much sense, these three acronyms are the bread and butter (tofu and soy sauce?) of your sales funnel.
ToFu - Top of the Funnel
ToFu offers should be things that don't take much buy-in, but are intriguing to potential customers encountering your brand for the first time and start to build trust and promote the value of your product. For example, if you're a SaaS company, a ToFu offer could be a pdf document containing case studies of other clients successfully using your product. ToFu offers need to be easy access and have low commitment. For example, a ToFu form could ask for a name, email and company name — but too much more than that and you might scare the potential customer away.
MoFu - Middle of the Funnel
MoFu offers continue to build trust and instills confidence in potential customers. A MoFu CTA might come at the end of a highly specific or technical blog post, or at the end of an email that has been sent out to leads that previously filled out a ToFu form. An example of a MoFu CTA could be a detailed e-book about a specific product or process that your customer wants to learn. MoFu forms can ask for a few more details (e.g., a persona-identifying question).
BoFu - Bottom of the Funnel
BoFu offers create greater value for the potential customer and instills ultimate confidence in your company and product. A BoFu offer usually involves one-on-one contact with a company rep (i.e., a meeting link or signing up for one on one coaching or programming with your company). Because these leads have likely already expressed interest in your products and services, the BoFu form can be much more detailed, and should be used to collect more information from the lead to better serve their needs.
A CRM like HubSpot is crucial in establishing (and tracking) leads throughout the funnel. HubSpot registers visitors to your website and their engagement with your different levels of content, and sorts new contacts into lists, allowing you to supply leads with relevant and useful information, and eventually, providing them with the information they need to make a purchase.
How Can a Sales Funnel Lead to Increased Success?
A sales funnel shows where buyers are on the sales journey. These are the 4 steps in the funnel:
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Get Traffic: By creating blog content that is search engine optimized and promoted in social media channels, you will begin to catch the attention of potential customers.
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Get Leads: Visitors will be driven to your landing pages through strategically placed calls to action. After visitors fill out the forms on one of the various landing pages, they will become leads.
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Get Customers: Once your visitors become leads, you will send them automated emails to further drive them along the buying cycle. Ensuring that your team has lead intelligence will allow them to make more effective sales calls.
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Analyze: Determine which areas of the sales process need further support, so that the sales process works at maximum efficiency.
How Can HubSpot Boost Your Sales Funnel?
You may already be doing all of these things, but HubSpot can improve your efficiency and your purpose while providing measurable data. A HubSpot Agency Partner, like Tangible Words, has comprehensive knowledge of HubSpot Sales Hub tools to help you create usable funnels that fit your business.
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Website: The first 90 days of a new website launch you will see increased traffic, but after that, traffic drops down if you don’t have a strategy. This lands you with a dry funnel — exactly when you need to already be selling the next day’s capacity. Your website is an asset but it won’t, by itself, increase traffic or attract best-fit customers that you can nurture, nor give you information about how people behave on your website. With HubSpot, Tangible Words can help transform your website into a powerful sales tool. -
Content: Content marketing is a long-term, minimum 12-month commitment. Quality content increases traffic, encourages engagement, and generates new prospects and potential customers. With HubSpot, Tangible Words can help you be more efficient so that you are spending your time on the right leads.
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Emails: Tangible Words can help you create email templates, personalized subject lines and content for each recipient. And the bonus with using HubSpot is that you can track your open rates and clickthroughs.
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Analytics: HubSpot can help you view your entire funnel; you can see which assets are working and how your marketing impacts the bottom line. HubSpot-generated data can show you the direction you should be moving in and which campaigns can be left behind.
How Inbound Marketing Specialists Can Improve Your Sales Funnel and Grow Your Business
Partnering with an inbound marketing specialist company, that is also a HubSpot Agency Partner, is the best way to beef up your sales funnel. Ultimately this will increase website traffic resulting in high-quality sales and customers.
