In today’s day and age there are plenty of things you can do to streamline and manage your sales funnel. Here’s how to move customers through the sales funnel more easily.

Define Your Sales Funnel

Before you get started, let’s cover a few of the basics. In business, it’s always important to look for ways to improve efficiency. In order to increase productivity and profits, we must move away from time-consuming and costly practices, instead adopting efficient and effective methods.

The sales funnel is the ideal process you intend your customers to go through as they move from prospect to lead to customer to repeat buyer. An effective sales funnel will generate more and better prospects than other methods. You want to avoid clogging your sales funnel with people who aren’t going to buy from you. Instead of trying to capture as many people as possible, target high-potential buyers.

It’s critical that you have a clear understanding of your sales funnel. A clearly defined sales funnel will make things easier for your prospects and your sales team. Before you can expect someone to buy your product, you first need to get a prospect’s attention, then you must pique his interest.

Embrace Inbound Marketing

Rather than relying on ancient outbound marketing strategies that are no longer effective, shift your approach to suit the modern consumer. Inbound marketing involves narrowing your focus, attracting relevant traffic, generating leads, and shortening the sales funnel.

How does inbound marketing shorten the sales cycle? With outbound marketing, companies would pay for print ads and spend valuable time making cold calls, hoping to secure a sale. Sales reps used to have to find people to contact, reach out, explain who they are, what the company is, what the products or services are, and why they should purchase them. Inbound marketing is much more efficient as it eliminates a lot of this legwork.

With a stellar website and effective social media and email marketing campaigns, interested prospects will come to you. When you provide useful information, prospects will educate themselves. When prospects want to receive additional information, they will provide their contact information. When your sales reps reach out to these contacts, the prospects are already aware, informed, and interested. The role of the salesperson changes. Now all they need to do is nurture and close. Inbound marketing is a far superior approach.

Provide Useful Information

Nowadays, consumers want to do their own research and find out everything they can about a company and its goods or services before making a purchasing decision. Make this process easier and provide the information they’re looking for. Create a company blog so you can create and publish new, original content regularly. Create all of your content with your target customer in mind. Answer the questions they likely have. By providing useful information, you will move interested prospects through the sales funnel more easily.

Increase Visibility

Once you have a solid content marketing strategy, you need to do everything you can to increase visibility. You need to get your target audience to discover your great content. Use social media to share your new content to expand your reach, drive traffic, and attract the right people. Implement an effective SEO strategy to improve your search engine ranking so people can find your website when they search related keywords. Include calls to action on your website so interested visitors can get their hands on additional content in exchange for their contact information. Use the data you collect to create an email marketing campaign and stay connected.

Remember, all of these inbound efforts are replacing the traditional outbound work so your reps can focus on nurturing and closing. These inbound marketing tactics are meant to make it easier for customers to move through the sales funnel.