To make your business successful, you must have customers willing to pay for your product or service. But, what do you think about finding these customers? You need leads that will then turn into prospects, which you can eventually turn into customers. Most organizations spend a lot of time perfecting their lead generation strategies to keep getting leads. But more importantly, you need to correct the lead funnel.
One of the essential parts of any business development strategy is establishing how the business will generate leads. Your marketing efforts need to be strategically targeted to ensure that the business grows and develops new customer sources.
A term often seen in sales and marketing training collateral is “lead generation funnel.” The term refers to a particular strategy to initiate lead generation efforts and take them into the business. It can be a valuable strategy for marketing managers and sales executives to develop their lead generation strategies.
Definition of A Lead
This may come as a little surprise, but each company, marketer, or seller usually has its own lead definition.
They are well aware of what lead generation is, but their understanding of terms such as lead, prospect, or lead quality usually differs.
Moreover, this is a definition that most would agree on:
A lead is someone who has shown interest in your offer and has shared their contact details with you to continue the conversation.
A lead can be someone who comes to you at an event, asks you about your product, and gives you their business card to schedule a product demo.
A lead may be someone who has downloaded one of your ebooks in return, for which they have to leave their email address.
In the first scenario, we have found someone who is clearly interested in your product and wants to learn more. In the second, unless we know the ebook’s subject, we certainly cannot say so. Here, we have to think about lead quality.
Marketing is the process of identifying and profitably satisfying the customer. Lead generation is the beginning of a process of interaction with potential customers. It’s all about identifying those who want to join your product or services.
If you want to increase sales, generating more leads for your business should be the main focus of your marketing strategy.
Unlike sales funnels, funnel leads are not intended to make sales (at least in the beginning). Lead funnels are also often referred to as lead generation funnels or acquisition funnels.
Lead generation funnels can range from simple to a bowl of spaghetti, depending on how complex your sales process is.
How Does the Lead Funnel Work?
Gaining a clear understanding of the process can help you optimize your campaigns to ensure that these leads emerge at the end of the funnel as customers. However, it is essential to note that each business has its own unique process and sales conditions. Their actual lead generation funnel may differ from what is discussed here. Still, the following describes, primarily, the most common steps involved in a lead funnel for general purposes and intents.
Level 1: Awareness
Depending on how efficient your inbound marketing is, the first step of the lead generation process will generate a massive amount of traffic to your site. The goal here is to create awareness through social media marketing, SEO, Paid advertising, and content marketing.
However, marketers need to be cautious at this level, especially when visitors have to sign up, fill out forms, or register in a first touchpoint. Doing this too early in the process can ruin the entire process. On the other hand, you can close your funnel, which will end up with premature ones and eventually fall down the funnel.
Level 2: All Names
The next step involves officially entering names into your database, although at this point, these names are not yet considered genuine leads. These are the names that your marketing efforts captured through various ways, obtaining their contact information as well as their permission to communicate with or pursue them for marketing.
Level 3: Let Engage
Getting contact information and names is your introductory window for potential leads, enticing them to move through the lead generation process by signing up to a newsletter, participating in a webinar, downloading an ebook, or capturing a lead in a landing page through completing the form, which is the next step in the funnel.
Your prospects must go through this stage before attempting to move them through the funnel. Through engagement, you have assured that your prospects know that you are offering them and are open to your future communication and engagement with them.
Level 4: Targeting Prospects
If contact is involved with your marketing, you can now continue this process and lead scoring to determine if a particular contact can act as a viable lead. You can do lead scoring in many ways, and this can be done both automatically and manually, depending on the business and prospects you are targeting.
Through lead scoring, you’ll know if a particular contact fits the profile of your ideal lead. Profile elements are relevant to your requirement, including job title, industry, company size, etc. Once you identify a lead through scoring, you can begin to lay down and nurture the funnel.
Level 5: Marketing Qualified Leads
When a contact or target fits your ideal profile and is identified as having a high lead score, you can qualify this particular lead for further marketing. First and foremost, this lead should show considerable interest in your products and services, which may be assumed worthy of further marketing efforts, and your sales team may be contacted directly; otherwise, your campaign will just flow down the drain.
Level 6: Recycled
Not all prospects can become certified leads immediately, but this does not mean that if they cannot become a lead for the first time, they will not become a viable lead in the future. Such prospects may have shown a certain level of interest in your products or services but were not particularly committed to a sale – at that time.
Such ‘almost dead’ leads can be placed in your recycled lead database and fed and nourished with continuous educational content. Keep doing this until they are ready to take the next step and become a qualified sales lead.
Level 7: Qualified Sales Lead
Once a lead has shown great interest in your products or services and has a good engagement with your sales and marketing team, an account executive must rework, engage directly with this saleable lead, and if the prospect is truly a sales lead, please evaluate carefully.
Level 8: Finding Opportunities
After an account executive identifies a prospect as a qualified sales lead, he can either identify the prospect as a sales opportunity and undergo further opportunity marketing. At this point, it will be essential to understand that engaging with leads will increase costs, including the costs of engagement, conversions, and opportunity marketing.
Level 9: Customer Retention
At this point, the lead you have done and nurtured with further marketing has finally transformed itself into a paying customer.
Again, it is essential to reiterate that every company or organization has unique qualities and target audience, so it would be best to identify which steps apply to your niche and make adjustments accordingly.
These were the stages of a lead funnel, and you can now build for your own business. But, before your start, brace yourself with an agency that will help you build a substantial lead funnel and help track your leads as they travel through it. Contact us now to get more secrets of a successful lead funnel. Call now!