4 Great Big Dirty Holes In Your Sales Funnel

What’s a sales funnel? A sales funnel is a basic term to help identify the sales process. Like a funnel, it is wide at the top, with all sorts of leads, including unqualified prospects. These are people who could benefit from your product or service, who you have never talked to. From there, the process filters down the funnel to end at those who have received your product or service and actually paid you for it. However, many sales funnels have gaps and holes. Let’s address a few common mistakes.

1. Bad Lead Generation Forms

Image via Flickr by Mace Ojala

One way you’re probably losing out on sales is simply because of a bad lead generation form. Take a close look at your form. Make sure that you’re not asking for too much information. No one wants to sit and fill out a form for ten minutes. In addition, it’s important that you’re not asking sensitive or information. If you wouldn’t want to give out the information asked on the form, don’t expect others to.

2. Awkward Conversation

Image via Flickr by ytang3

After filling out a lead generation form, do you have a sales person actually call the potential customer? If so, you need to make sure that the conversations flow well. Awkward or dull conversations will put people off, and will end in a lack of sale. However, you also don’t want the sales person to seem too sales-y. This is also off-putting for many people. It’s a delicate balance, and requires training for most.

3. No Offer With Email Capture

Image via Flickr by Beth Granter

When people come to your website, they’re looking at your products, but they may not be ready to buy quite yet. You need to be able to follow-up with them later, but the only way you can do this is by getting their information. If you’re not offering some sort of deal with your email capture form, you’re losing out on more leads than you need to. You can offer an ebook, a white paper, a webinar, and more. No matter what you offer, make sure you follow-up. Otherwise you look bad and will not end up getting the sale no matter how much you follow-up.

4. Lack of Follow Up

Image via Flickr by [Duncan]

If you’re offering a service, the most important thing you can do is follow-up with potential clients. However, too many people forget to follow-up, lose information, or just don’t feel that every customer is important. Imaging you’re trying to get a construction project done around the house. You find a contractor online, call them, and they come out to do some measurements. However, after they leave you never hear back. This is lack of follow-up. That contractor has lost a sale. Unfortunately, many sales funnels have this gap, whether it’s a lack of communication between departments or just plain laziness.

Stopping up the gaps in your sales funnel is important. It will help increase your sales and ensure that your company does well in the long-term. Before you can stop up the holes, however, you need to identify the problems in your company.

By Jon Correll