Many sales people are familiar with the concept of the “sales funnel,” with the idea that every sale starts with a large pool of prospects. Then they are eventually narrowed down by the various steps of the sales process (qualification, presentations, proposals, etc.) leading to a much smaller number of customers who actually decide to buy and close the deal.

A big part of success in managing your sales leads is developing a better way to understand how you should be managing your sales funnel.

Below are a few of the biggest mistakes that small business leaders tend to make in managing their sales funnels – and ideas on how you can get better results.

Managing Your Sales Funnel Mistake #1:

No Balance Between Lead Generation / Lead Management

Many companies make the mistake of thinking that they can get better sales results just by constantly engaging in lead generation activities to “dump more leads into the funnel.” But lead generation alone is not enough.

You also need to focus on your lead management activities:

• Ranking
• Sorting
• Nurturing
• Following up on your existing sales leads

You can almost always improve your sales results by doing a better job of managing the sales leads you already have. Instead of constantly hunting for more and more sales leads.

Mistake #2:

Focusing on CRM Technology Instead of Your Sales Process

Many small businesses make the mistake of investing in expensive customer relationship management (CRM) software but without a clear understanding of how they want to use the CRM software to improve their sales process.

CRM technology can be a valuable tool, but it cannot replace a smart strategy for understanding and adjusting your sales activities to line up with your biggest priorities in your sales process.

For example, you as a small business leader, need to understand what is happening at every stage of your sales process. Are you failing to generate enough appointments during your initial contacts with new sales leads? Are your sales appointments failing to result in enough follow-up sales presentations? Where in the sales process are you having the most difficulty, and what can you do differently?

These are the questions that CRM tools can help you answer. But you can’t rely solely on technology to do the hard work of identifying and fixing the problems.

Mistake #3:

Not Getting Proper Sales Training

Sales training is not just for new hires. Small business owners need motivation, coaching and a clear idea of what they’re selling and how to adjust to customers’ changing needs and expectations..

Mistake #4:

Not Measuring Each Stage of Your Sales Funnel

Many organizations focus too much on their final deal closing ratios, and don’t pay enough attention to the conversion ratios that lead up to the final negotiations with the buyer.

Take a look at all stages of your sales process and measure your success rate at each stage. For example, out of 100 sales leads, how many will agree to an initial appointment? How many of those appointments lead to a more extensive sales presentation? Where in your sales process are the biggest successes and the biggest opportunities to improve?

Managing your sales funnel needs to be part of an ongoing effort to see what is happening within your sales process and adjusting along the way.

If you have a clear understanding of where your challenges are coming from, which parts of the process need to improve, and constantly coach your sales team to improve their efforts at each stage of your sales funnel, you will start to see a better result in the most important number of all – sales.

By Al Davidson
 

Sales Funnel Photo via Shutterstock

 

Only a couple of years ago, pundits were predicting an end to email. But instead of fading away, there’s been ever-increasing email volume and usage. Rather than being replaced by Facebook and Twitter streams, email is actually becoming a stream itself.

Mail systems are evolving to match the new volume of email, and users will increasingly see only algorithmically vetted emails. Some other emails may be shown below the vetted email, and the rest will flow away into temporal oblivion, just like uninteresting social posts from a few hours ago.

Implications for marketers are significant. The days of the average AOL or Yahoo! mail user scrolling through every email in their inbox are rapidly fading. Email has been especially important in e-commerce sales and customer re-engagement. For e-commerce in particular, email marketing exceeds the performance of social advertising. Large-volume email senders will need to make a greater effort to send emails that are both personalized and interesting to the recipient.

The email tsunami problem is pervasive. Several Silicon Valley folks have already committed the unfortunately termed “email suicide,” where they give up on reading unread email and start anew. Others are adding email auto-responders stating that they will not necessarily see email. New vendors such as SendGrid have helped bring on the deluge by dramatically lowering the price of sending volume email and democratizing access with simplified onboarding and easy developer APIs.

Google has added several features to Gmail in an attempt to add some order to the chaos of email. The changes will effect both email users and marketers. With Gmail features like Priority Inbox, Gmail Tabs, and Circles, users are increasingly engaging only with algorithmically vetted email from senders they know. Priority Inbox is only a satisfactory product and needs to evolve to automatically mark as “important” email from senders that a recipient repeatedly opens, especially if the recipient replies. Next-generation email clients like Inky go as far as sorting email by relevance rather than date.

For marketers, sending a ton of email without any user engagement will soon become counterproductive. For each type of volume sender, a new balance will have to be found between sending numerous emails and still achieving desired “open rates” and “clickthroughs” — mechanisms by which an email provider like Google can detect whether or not the email is of interest to a user. Much like how “edge rank” increases for Facebook posts when the people like, share or comment on it, “mail rank” will be an increasingly important benchmark for email marketers to measure their effectiveness.

At CBS Interactive, we send over 200 million emails a month, ranging from news summaries to personalized fantasy sports updates, to an audience of 270 million unique users. We have corporate standards and systems to ensure that recipients can easily unsubscribe from unwanted emails. However, given these upcoming changes, we will need to look at overall open rates from a particular property and begin to proactively prune users that have no interest in emails we send.

The shift to email as a stream will have personal implications as well. People may have to be introduced via a mutual party rather than sending a cold email, especially if the sender has sent numerous emails that have not entailed or received a response. Even personal emails from people you know may soon be treated like a Facebook or Twitter post, where a user either immediately responds, such as with a Facebook like or comment, or instead lets it flow into the ether. Much like social posts, senders will likely shift toward keeping email messages short and to the point.

Facebook and Twitter both have nascent but unique takes on messaging. Facebook messages that are not from one of your friends go into an “other” folder that is rarely read. Twitter direct messages can only be sent to people who follow the sender, although Twitter is experimenting with opening this up a bit.

Stream-oriented companies like Facebook and Twitter essentially charge brands to target their own customers by allowing brands to purchase promoted posts for their fans and followers. Email providers may soon sell “promoted emails” where a marketer can target a user in their priority inbox. Users may revolt, but in the end they are getting email for free, so it will be hard to complain. Email has become a stream, and as the adage goes, when you’re not paying, you’re the product.

 Peter Yared is the CTO/CIO at CBS Interactive. Follow him on Twitter @peteryared.

[Image: Shutterstock]

Drip marketing is a term to describe a series of autoresponder emails that are sent out in a specified time interval to customers who opt into your website.

This is a fairly common practice. The email may be to welcome you, to educate you about products, or to offer you discounts, but the goal is to convert prospects to customers and customers to repeat customers.

I’m writing this from Disney World. This is my first time coming here, and I was a bit taken aback that I have to walk my kids through a gift shop every time that they eat or take part in an event at the resort or at the parks.

Essentially this is the goal of your drip marketing campaign, since your opt-in customers visit their email regularly you are setting up a gift shop (of sorts) through your email.

Just as Disney has optimized their merchandising to make sure my daughter sees princesses and my son sees monsters each time they pass through, you must maximize the effectiveness of your drip marketing campaigns to better convert these customers.

In this post I’m going to showcase four case studies, showing how some businesses have optimized their drip marketing campaigns, how they decide on frequency, decide on content, and how one company creatively segmented their opt-ins to generate a lot of business.

1. Dynamic Search gets a double-digit increase in click-through

Search agency Dynamic Search implemented an eleven episode drip campaign over the course of the nine months after opt-in. Principal Asher Elram admits to not being a huge believer in email marketing prior to implementation, but by executing their drip campaign click-through has increased between 12 and 18%. Results like that will quickly restore your faith in email as a marketing tactic.

Eleven emails isn’t a random number. You can be sure that Dynamic Search A/B tested their frequency and timing quite thoroughly. However, before testing timing marketing expert Tommy Walker recommends A/B testing subjects lines. This makes intuitive sense: it’s important that Disney gets its princesses and monsters at a three-year old eye level before trying to decide the best times to do anything else.

The recommendation to A/B test should be extended to all content and its parameters. Email is ideal because you can isolate test groups and customer segments to get a good data about what works and what doesn’t.

2. Studentbeans mixes dynamic content with static to increase revenue 13%

UK website studentbeans.com offers deals and advice for college students. They get a lot of web traffic (to the tune of six million visits a year) but were having trouble converting that traffic into click-through and sales.

What they decided to do was to introduce dynamic content into their static drip campaign, for example augmenting their prescribed content with a current offer, discount or deal. The results were extraordinary: open rates increased 66% and revenue increased 13%.

3. Iron Tribe Fitness qualifies and converts 50% of online prospects

One key to drip campaigns is to create high-value content.

Iron Tribe Fitness achieved strong results

Iron Tribe Fitness is a high-end fitness gym. It’s not like the gym most people go to – users have to commit quite a bit of time and resource (an average user spends $2000 during their time with ITF). Before implementing a drip campaign to their marketing, most members were acquired offline.

ITF implemented a drip campaign which sent opt-in prospects eleven emails in eighteen days. These emails educated the prospects about ITF and qualified them as proper prospects for their niche (high-end) product.

The result? About half of opt-in prospects became members (to the tune of $2000 revenue each). Did I mention that Iron Tribe Fitness is a franchise?

Similarly, the Moz.com website uses an autoresponse campaign to teach new users how to use their tools. While this may sound somewhat mundane, these educational emails actually drove a million dollars in revenue in four months by retaining new users.

Smileycookie segments to increase sales 29%

Cookie selling website smileycookie.com noted a significant problem with cart abandonment. They implemented a drip campaign specific to users who abandoned their cart (note that they had to add some controls on their site to capture emails in advance of users leaving cookies in their virtual carts).

Their campaign had three parts: an immediate email, a second email twenty-three hours later offering a discount and a third email four days later offering an even larger discount. The results? The open rate of the first two emails is greater than 50% (usual open rate is 20%). CTR for email one is 28%, two is 16% and three is 6%, meaning that more than a quarter of people who abandoned their cart went back to the site afterwards.

Not a lot of businesses have the scale or customer-affinity that Disney has. Just as I’m going to walk through a dozen gift shops today with my kids picking up random items before being thwarted by my “no” (which is sometimes thwarted by my wife’s “yes”), your customers have given you the opportunity to educate them, to offer them discounts, and to convert them by giving you their email address.

Drip campaigns are a low-cost way to do this, provided you do it thoughtfully.

Jim Dougherty is an expert on social media and technology who blogs at Leaders West. For more marketing advice from Jim, click here.

There is an under appreciated difference between a story and an idea.

A story is captivating and memorable. It entertains and often stays with you for longer than you thought it would. An idea, in contrast, is a spark. It happens in a moment and then it’s gone. And if you missed it or if you never acted on it … then you lose it.

Recently I’ve been to several storytelling events. One gathered together a dozen innovators to share their stories on human behavior. Another curated every form of storytelling you could imagine – from stop motion Vine video creators to street opera singers. Each offered an amazing collection of stories that entertained and inspired. And I remember those stories.

Today I have been moderating an event filled with ideas instead of stories. The Corporate Social Media Summit in San Francisco (#CSMSF) is the second edition of a popular series from the Useful Social Media team that includes a flagship New York event, the West Coast edition today, and a European edition next month. In listening to more than a dozen brands sharing their experiences with social media – there were several ideas that emerged which got people talking. Here are just a few of those ideas:

1. Deflection Isn’t Engagement

As more brands turn to tools like Twitter for customer service – one of the increasingly common strategies is to “escalate” issues to the call center. What this actually means is that brands immediately engage with customers who share a question via Twitter by telling them to call the 1800 number to speak to a customer service person. As Adobe Director of Strategy and Business Development Jeff Feldman shared in the opening keynote session, this type of deflection isn’t optimal. Instead, brands that aspire to provide great service need to answer questions in the channel they are asked (unless you truly need to access their private information, of course).

2. B2B Is Better Than B2C For Social

Thanks to the visibility of efforts from leading brands like Coke and Oreo’s, it is easy to focus attention on the role that social media has taken in helping major consumer brands to create lots of buzz and some engagement. Instead, Dell’s Global Director of Social Media Richard Margetic pointed out that social media is actually better for B2B brands because they tend to be far more about relationships than B2C brands. As a proof point, he noted that more than 9,000 of Dell’s employees have gone through social media training and are allowed to represent the brand in their engagements online.

3. Social Gratitude Is Powerful

It is no secret that people passionately share stories and images of pets online. So when Kat Smith, PETCO Director of Social Media and Commerce took the stage to talk about how social media could engage pet owners – the opportunity was pretty obvious. Still, the big question was how a brand in the popular pet category could engage with these passionate pet owners in a way that wouldn’t just try to upsell them more supplies and materials. One great strategy Kat shared in her presentation was the power of offering validation to customers. Simply by having the brand like customer’s Instagram photos, for example, PETCO could offer tangible proof that it was listening and engaged in its community. And this one act caused intense consumer gratitude … which then led to engagement and conversation.

4. Solve Unique Problems

As often as we hear about social media offering yet another channel for brands to interact and solve customer challenges, there may be situations that social media or social customer care is uniquely positioned to solve. One example that Kimarie Matthews, Wells Fargo Vice President of Social Web shared was of a customer tweeting about there being trash outside of an ATM machine. This is exactly the sort of thing that no one would ever call into a 1800 number and wait on hold in order to report. Yet thanks to this tweet, the brand was able to respond both to the customer as well as respond by actually correcting the problem and cleaning up the trash!

5. Treat Everyone Like An Influencer

In a highly entertaining presentation about the state of the travel industry, disruption, handlebar moustaches (for Movember!) and being Canadian – Flight Centre Global Social Media Leader Gregg Tilston shared a powerful story about the nature of influence. Using the example of how you might be influenced differently to attend a food related event whether you hear about it from the newspaper versus a restaurant versus a chef versus your best friend … he noted that the most influential source among those is probably your best friend. That is also the source among those listed with the least ACTUAL influence when it comes to potential reach and size of their network. So who is truly influential? His ultimate conclusion: “Treat everyone as if they have a Klout score of 80.”

6. Social Can Force Convergence

Telling the story of how the Clorox brand thinks about social media, Helen Lee shared how increasing conversation online inspired far more convergence and collaboration among all of the more traditional silos of the marketing organization – from advertising to PR to in-store promotions. One interesting conclusion her presentation raised was to turn one of the most often cited challenges about social media into perhaps its greatest opportunity. As brands struggle to align efforts among multiple teams and divisions, the crossover potential of social media may become the driving force to actually help make it happen.

7. Focus On The Audience You Have

As audiences shift and the attention paid to social media platforms evolve, segmenting an audience is a consistent challenge. One of the downsides of this challenge, as Ammiel Kamon from Kontera noted, is that sometimes brands can get romanced or misled into focusing on creating content and messages for the audiences they want instead of the ones they have. The key is to remain connected to the audience you have today and grow that organically rather than dreaming of a nonexistent audience you wish you had instead.

8. Avoid OverEngagement

What if greater engagement wasn’t the ultimate goal that every brand should aim for? As Charles Schwab VP of Owned Media, Content & Client Marketing Helen Loh shared, “money is important, but sometimes people don’t want to engage with it day in and day out.” As great as the temptation may be for any brand to think that customers always want a brand interaction, the reality is that most of the time they probably don’t. Understanding customer journies and engaging customers at the right moments along that path is more important, according to Loh – and something that really allows the promise of content to connect with social media.

9. Don’t Measure Social Media, Measure Initiatives

In an interesting caution against taking data from a unique effort and overestimating its ability to define the entire value of social – Thomson Reuters Senior Director of Social Strategy Jen McClure shared that the real key to understanding the power of your efforts is to separate out what the results are truly telling you about what went right and wrong, and how to apply those learnings effectively.

10. Find Opportunities To Delight

Southwest Airlines has built a reputation around having a personality, and as Senior Communications Specialist Christi McNeill shared – this extends to creating opportunities for staff to build on the strong culture to delight customers with service. KLM Manager of Social Media Karlijn Vogel-Meijers also shared several new initiatives that KLM is pursuing which have the potential to truly drive the airline industry forwards. Already launched is a unique feature on Twitter that allows anyone to see the average response time for KLM to get back to you on a tweet you send directly (on average, it is 23 minutes). In addition, a soon to be launched idea she previewed at the conference was a new program called Wannagives which will allow consumers to pay for a surprise gift to be delivered to a friend or loved one in flight.

By Rohit Bhargava founder of the Influential Marketing Group

SUMMARY: Blocking and tackling.

It's not as sexy as scoring touchdowns or launching flashy new lead generation campaigns, but effective blocking and tackling often separates the champions from the also-rans.

In this week's chart, we'll take a look at the blocking and tackling of the B2B world – lead management
by Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content for MarketingSherpa

"Lack of resources, as economic times force too few people to focus on too much work."

That response is from a marketer discussing top obstacles to success from the MarketingSherpa 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report. No matter what the economic trends are, B2B marketers — along with accountants, primary care doctors, stay-at-home moms and everyone else living in the year 2013 — perennially feel challenged by a lack of time and resources.

So, to help understand how marketers prioritize their challenges, we asked them …

Q: Which of the following marketing challenges are currently most pertinent to your organization? Check all that apply.

Click here to see a printable version of this chart

• Strategic — Formal process, thorough guidelines, routine performance
• 
  
• Transition — Informal process, few guidelines, sporadic performance
• 
  
• Trial — No process or guidelines currently

Sales doesn't want leads

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