What’s the Best Sales Funnel Strategy?

Is there such a thing as a perfect sales funnel strategy? It’s a question we hear almost every day. Even experts with decades of experience in sales can’t help but to wonder:

“Is there a strategy we can successfully apply to every case?”

In this post, we’re going to take a look at some of the key factors that make up a great sales funnel strategy to answer the question once and for all.

The Recipe for the Best Sales Funnel Strategy
Unfortunately, as much as we’d like to believe there is a secret formula, there is no one true sales funnel strategy that would be universally applicable.

However, there are a few aspects that make up a good strategy:

• Knowledge of leads and customers
• Polished sales funnel stages
• Continuous optimization
• Great teams

The best sales funnel strategy ultimately serves customers and in order to be able to do that, you must understand the people you are ultimately trying to please.

The sales funnel itself shouldn’t be too drawn out or too rushed. It has to find the perfect balance that the majority of leads-turned-customers respond well to.

Since your customers constantly change, your sales funnel cannot remain the same as time passes. Instead, you must continuously optimize it to reflect changes in customer sentiment.

Finally, we may have plenty of tools in this day and age, but the success of our sales funnel strategies relies on our sales teams.

When they’re ready to buy, customers want to hear from a real person who is motivated enough to understand their specific situation.

So how can you put this knowledge into practice?

How to Create a Great Sales Funnel Strategy

When creating your sales funnel strategy, you should keep the previously discussed factors in mind.

1. Understand Your Leads and Customers

Before you create your strategy, you should spend time recording and analyzing customer sentiment, as well as customer behavior. Their behavior and (subconscious) responses are what will ultimately shape your sales funnel.

You should collect information from:

• Sales interactions
• Opt-in forms
• Surveys
• Website heat maps
• Usage patterns

And any other data source you have.

When you collect all of that information, it will give you a complete view of the people who appreciate your products or services, and which content they respond to best.

Once you have shaped your customer personas, you will have the answers to:

• Which steps do we need in our sales funnel? Which steps can we remove?
• What should each sales funnel stage contain?
• What messaging do customers respond to best?
• What do our customers value, fear, appreciate, and want?

2. Polished Sales Funnel Stages

Every action and part of each stage of your sales funnel should be singularly oriented on converting your lead or advancing them towards the stage at which they will be converted.

Now, some sales managers believe that there is only one formula for creating perfectly optimized sales funnel stages.

In reality, the look and feel of your stages will depend on your customers, and only your customers.

Avoid relying on gut instinct or generalized expert advice. No two companies are the same.

Instead, focus on the data you have about your customers, and let their responses guide you towards creating the best sales funnel strategy.

For example, a B2C company may find that their leads do not respond well to newsletters, contrary to expectations. They prefer blogs with narrowly-targeted articles that speak to a highly-specific need.

3. Continuous Sales Funnel Optimization

The best way to understand what your customers truly respond well to (they can be subjective in their feedback responses) is through testing.

Keep in mind that you shouldn’t test multiple things at once. If you change two sales funnel stages at the same time, you won’t be completely sure which change caused certain effects.

Instead, it’s much better to first create a sales funnel from the information you have readily available, and then test different parts of it.

You can test:

• Stages
• Advancing actions in each stage
• Channels, content, messaging, communication

For example, you may be using SEO and long-tail, highly-specific keywords to attract new leads to your company. This may eliminate the need to educate leads through typical top of the funnel practices.

Additionally, take a look at the channels you are using and the quality of leads you are getting.

Not every channel is made for every company; don’t be afraid to use what works for your customers, and your customers only.

4. Great Sales Teams Are the Key to Implementing a Great Sales Funnel Strategy

Finally, people trust people. Consumers trust online recommendations from strangers more than they trust brands.

Consequently, they will trust you and your company more when it is represented by enthusiastic sales representatives.

However, working in sales gets busy. It’s easy to lose motivation, which is exactly why the turnover rates are so high.

Spinify is the perfect solution. As a sales dashboard that motivates and celebrates your sales teams, Spinify helps you use gamification to make sure your teams are not only hitting the target every quarter – but also having fun while they’re doing it.

The best sales funnel strategy may not exist, but great sales teams do.

And they drive entire companies forward.