Salesforce is the most compact platform that helps in building long-lasting customer relationships and sales funnel helps in evaluating the best path to be a customer-friendly company. In this particular guide, we will have a look at all the aspects starting from the very beginning i.e. learning the basic terminology and then, understanding how recent trends have brought a change in the sales funnel and how it can be managed.
- What is a sales funnel?
Sales funnel is a process of representation of an ideal path that companies build and hope that the buyers in the market become their customers. The funnel concept is also known as the purchase funnel or conversion funnel and is generally used by the companies to track prospects in sales stages and assists in aligning marketing, sales targets and activities.
The sales funnel is used by every organization in sales and marketing and is a very basic concept where the top of funnel presents the goal of a company that is to generate a possible number of leads while the narrow bottom represents that how many leads are converted to customers during the sales process.
A traditional model follows phases such as awareness, interest, desire, and action.
- How is Sales Funnel changing?
As marketing is dynamic it’s important for sales funnel to continuously adopt new things.
According to Bosworth earlier sales used to be convincing, persuading, overcoming resistance, handling objections and closing sales but now selling is helping. It aims at helping the customer to achieve a goal and solve their problem for the satisfaction of a need.
Nowadays organizations contact with their customers through Email, social media, and another digital medium, unlike the traditional systems. Whereas the trend of phone calls and in-person visits has vanished.
Concepts such as video conferencing have opened a wide area where one can talk to the prospect according to their suitable time and place. According to that data published in the third edition of Salesforce global “state of sales” sixty percent of representatives believe that they spend 60 % more time on virtually selling while about 52% spend the same time as earlier.
- How to manage your Sales Funnel?
To manage the sales funnel the two most important needs are that you need to assess your funnel strategy at regular intervals and update is necessary to reflect the changes that have taken place in sales funnel. You need to optimize your sales funnel from time to time to make sure that sales journeys should not be too long or rushed. An efficient sales and marketing team would contribute to optimum use of resources.
Data insights are required for funnel optimization. The popular sales tools that follow analytics and sales reporting are account and contact management, sales forecasting tools and customer relationship management.
It is crucial to know about all the aspects of maintaining customer relations for a longer duration. Not only does it build the trust of a customer but also pave way to higher sales.
