Sales are what makes or breaks any business and the ability to increase sales is your business’s security. Whether you’re just starting your business, or you want to expand on existing sales, there’s no way around: you need to continue to grow.
To focus your energy on your growth, you need to eliminate all the unnecessary obstacles that prevent you from performing better.
If you want to strengthen your marketing strategy, you should consider choosing an automated sales funnel.
Automated Sales Funnel
The sales funnel works similarly to a regular funnel you might use for pouring something into a bottle. In order to fill the bottle, the substance you use must go through the narrowest point.
As stated by VipeCloud, in the sales world, the bottle represents your business, and your goal is to fill your business with loyal customers. Prospects start at the top of the funnel and flow down before they become customers.
An automated sales funnel works as a regular sales funnel but uses automation to help keep things moving smoothly. It automatically matches users to content that answers their questions throughout the funnel’s various stages.
There are two types of automated sales funnel: time-based or behaviour-based. A time-based funnel sends messages at set intervals through the entire sales process. A behaviour-based funnel, as the name suggests, takes into account specific behaviours — if someone clicks through on a message, they move to a different series of messages than those who didn’t click through. Behaviour-based funnels are generally known to drive better results as they rely on a user’s interests at a given moment.
Four Sales Funnel Stages
To fully understand an automated sales funnel, it’s essential to understand its four stages.
Stage 1: Awareness
This is just the beginning! Before making the decision to take interest in your products or services, your potential customer needs to get to know your company. During the awareness stage, potential client introduces themself to your business: they learn what your company is about and what are your advantages. They perform an initial evaluation based on the first impression.
If you want to attract their attention for longer, you must go above and beyond to create an image of a trustworthy and professional company. Your presence online, as well as word of mouth, can work to your advantage or completely ruin your chances.
Stage 2: Interest & Evaluation
Once you have passed the initial credibility test, potential customers will take a closer look at your company to find out whether you can solve their problems. Don’t take their interest for granted: even the most polished image won’t be enough if you can’t provide them with valuable products or services and your offer is not attractive enough.
In this stage, potential customers check whether your company fits their desired profile and most importantly, is able to provide solutions for their problems. If you fail to impress them, they won’t bother with sticking around.
Stage 3: Decision
Now it’s time to dig deeper! In this stage, the prospect carefully evaluates the specifics of your product or service. They go through everything: they check all the features and details, as well as your pricing structure, and the overall potential value you can provide.
Having all the important information about your company, your potential client will make the decision whether they should trust your company with their problems.
Stage 4: Action
Well, congratulations, you’ve made it. You have officially convinced the prospect to seal the deal with you! You can be proud; it means that your marketing strategy works well and the content you publish not only drives the attention but also creates an image of trustworthiness and professionalism.
Benefits of Automated Sales Funnel
Here are just a few of the benefits of an automated sales funnel.
Less time spent on repetitive tasks
There’s no doubt that you surround yourself with specialised and professional salespeople. Why to bother them and waste their potential on performing mundane, repetitive tasks such as writing emails or updating your customer database?
By investing in automation tools, you relieve your specialists from time-consuming tasks, allowing them to focus on their most important responsibilities: building worthwhile relationships with clients and closing deals. By creating a process that can operate independently, with minimal involvement by the operator, you free up time to drive efficiency.
Lower labour costs
As I already mentioned, marketing automation can save your team some valuable time. Consequently, by relieving them from these mundane tasks, you also save the costs of paying them to perform these repetitive responsibilities. They can use this time to do some more important work and contribute to increased profits.
Not sure about that? To dispel your doubts, recent research found that automation can help companies reduce marketing overheads by 12.2%.
Robust customer data
As you probably know, the true power lays in data. As the holy grail of marketing, data can provide you with invaluable insights and information about your clients’ behaviour, needs and expectations. All you need to do is to collect it and draw conclusions.
Automating your sales funnel allows you to capture more customer behaviour data and keep it in a centralized database to access whenever you need it.
Better leads, conversions, and ROI
If you want to maximise ROI, you must improve the quality of your leads, as well as sales funnel conversion rate.
If you know exactly what your prospects want, marketing automation can improve your lead quality, conversion rate and ROI according to a Liana Technologies survey.
Automate Your Marketing Strategy
As I mentioned before, an automated sales funnel is a powerful lead generator and marketing booster. It not only helps you save up money and time but also drives valuable leads and attract potentially promising clients.
Choosing the right automated sales funnel software can make a huge difference for your sales and marketing campaign. Before making your decision, make sure to do your research and not compromise on quality.
