Optimise the sales funnel with Salesforce
The sales funnel aims to provide a tool for visualising where prospects are in the process of making a buying decision, from the first interaction with your business, to when a sales conversion is achieved.
The goal of the sales funnel is to nurture prospects through each stage, removing people who do not fit, or do not need your product or service at that time. Through this process, the window of opportunity narrows, but results in sales teams being provided with qualified leads that are more likely to convert into customers.
This helps to align sales and marketing teams, enabling them to optimise each stage of customer engagement from awareness to purchase.
But how can Salesforce help sales and marketing teams to optimise the sales funnel?
Provide a 360-degree view of customer interactions for sales and marketing teams
Marketing teams tend to play a greater role at the beginning of the cycle around awareness and consideration; whereas sales have a role to play in the decision and conversion stages.
Salesforce provides a CRM platform where all customer interactions between sales and marketing teams along the journey are integrated into one place. This helps to aid collaboration between teams and provide a better, more informed service to customers.
For example, sales representatives can see which marketing campaigns prospects have received and interacted with, while marketing teams can see what products individuals have purchased in the past, which may make them primmed to be made aware of the latest product in the portfolio.
Ensure sales teams benefit from accurately qualified leads
Salesforce can automatically score leads as they make their way through the sales journey in order to indicate how interested they are in your product or service and ensure sales teams are provided with accurately qualified leads.
For example, by allocating the prospect points if they clicked on a link, downloaded a whitepaper or requested a demonstration.
Through this, Salesforce enables you to be more strategic in your approach to sales and marketing, by tracking engagement at each stage of the sales funnel. The data collected can then be used to inform future campaign development so that you can close more deals and increase win rates by refining your processes over time and enhancing how you engage with customers at each stage of their journey.
Use data to make strategic business decisions
The wide range of tools available on Salesforce, from Marketing Cloud email automation to Mobile Studio, also enables you to capture data across marketing channels so that you can see which channels work best for your audiences at different stages of the journey.
Data is easy to visualise and view at a glance, with hints and tips provided to support teams to make optimum business decisions that will enable them to optimise the funnel in the future
Gently nurture leads along the sales funnel to maximise outcomes
Due to the capture of data, Salesforce can also automatically notify teams and individuals if someone has been stuck at a stage in the journey for a prolonged period of time, which may prompt a sales team member to get in contact.
Alternatively, they may be passed back to marketing and entered into a “re-engagement programme” which gently nurtures prospects from earlier in the sales journey. This minimises the chance of prospects hitting unsubscribe or unfollowing an organisation
Build a customer journey that is unique to your organisation
It is important to remember that the sales funnel, or customer journey will be unique to each organisation and will vary between B2B and B2C organisations.
Sometimes also referred to as a customer journey, the sales funnel can change depending on the needs of your business and the audience that you are looking to engage, such as whether they are a B2B or B2C customer.
It is for this reason that it is important to spend time building a profile of your typical customer, analysing their touchpoints and analysing the best approaches to achieve engagement at every stage of the sales funnel from awareness to interest, decision and conversion.
The bespoke funnel can then be built within Salesforce, which is optimised to convert prospects at each stage of the sales funnel.
Contact Cloud Orca today to find out how we can help!
