Strengthening your sales funnel can be a tricky endeavor for many sales teams. It’s not simply about collecting as many leads as possible and hoping that at least some of them stick—you need to take a strategic sales approach to strengthen your sales funnel in a meaningful way.

There are plenty of theories being tossed around for which practices are best at ensuring that your sales funnel is healthy and continuing to prosper. But which ones are most practical in a real-world sales environment? Here are three of the best practices that you can use to strengthen your sales funnel in a real, manageable, and practical way.

1. Assess Your Sticky Customers—And What It Took To Get Them There

The customers who come back to your business time and time again are the heart and soul of your company. Sure, it’s important to always be reaching out to new customers to add to your repertoire, but it’s the businesses that have stuck with you for years that are the reason you can consider your sales approach a success.

Take a step back and look at who your best customers are and what exactly it took to get them there. If you’ve got records of your first interactions with them, read through and record at which points they turned from being just prospects into customers. Study what language you used, which offers you made, what exactly they needed from you, and how you followed through. If you don’t have any paper records of this, approach your customer with a simple feedback survey. Depending on your relationship with them, you could garner a host of helpful tips for how you approach potential leads in the future.

In order to strengthen your sales funnel, you need to understand what your funnel is built on in the first place. Your sticky customers are the ones who can help you expand your bottom line, so always look at them as a resource for learning.

2. More Leads Isn’t Necessarily Better

Because sales is a numbers game, there’s a common misconception that more leads is always better. Expanding your reach is certainly a positive practice to get into, but if it’s costing you the interest of leads that you’ve already reached out to, it’s time to rethink your strategy. In order to strengthen your sales funnel, you need to nurture the leads that you’ve already established who have shown interest in what you do.

Studies show that a lead is nearly seven times more likely to turn into a sale if they are contacted within an hour of receiving their query—a statistic that is far too big to ignore. Responding fast and in a meaningful way to already established leads beats out trying to collect as many new leads as possible nearly every time.

3. Focus Less on Shortening Your Sales Cycle

Getting more done in a shorter amount of time is certainly the ideal in sales, particularly with the introduction of more helpful tools. However, shortening your sales cycle may not be the best practice if it costs you the important stages of strengthening the relationships with your clients. Not only will spending the time to nurture your client relationships result in better feedback and much more satisfied customers, you’ll also learn the right moment when a lead is ready to commit and you can sell higher-priced products after establishing trust. You will be able to strengthen your sales funnel while improving your overall sales practices just by dedicating a little more time to each lead.