What Is B2B Sales Funnel And Strategies To Avoid Leakages

When you are engaging in B2B transactions and working hard to generate leads for your business, it can be painful to watch as your leads go away. However, it is a reality of B2B marketing that from lead generation to final purchase, a steady reduction is necessarily going to take place. This reality is described as the B2B sales funnel.

What Is The B2B Sales Funnel?

The B2B sales funnel describes the progress of events from the generation of leads to the final transaction. In every step of the B2B sales funnel, leads will go away due to one reason or another, and the whole challenge of the process is to stem this leakage of leads to the greatest extent possible.

Steps In The B2B Sales Funnel

The B2B sales funnel can be divided into the following broad steps -

Awareness

The Awareness stage is businesses looking for answers to their issues. In general, they will end up finding you, but you must be visible enough for them to be able to. This can be done through active social media campaigns, a well-developed website that ranks high in SEO, and physical marketing. The number of leads at this stage of the process will be the highest. Whether or not the leads move on to the next stage of the B2B sales funnel depends on the amount of information that you provide them, and how you make them believe that their goals align with the services that you are offering.

Interest

If the buyers show interest during the process, they will now move on to conducting some basic research about it. This could include browsing your website for brochures, DFUs, and product information. It could also include using third part websites for comparison or reading online reviews of your product. If all of this information builds a positive perception of your product for the buyer, the buyer will move along to the next stage.

Evaluation

During this stage of the B2B sales funnel, the lead is of moderate quality and is probably interacting with your marketing team to know more about your product. It is important for you to understand exactly what problems they are facing, so you may advise them on using your product for them. It is also important to be honest at this stage, and if you believe your product might not be appropriate for their issues, you must inform them duly since this can lead to problems down the line.

Engagement

If your leads reach this stage, they are in regular communication with the sales team of your company. This might include price negotiations, product pitches, and demos to build trust with your prospective client. If there are ways that you can customize a product according to the needs of your client, you can do so at this stage. Copping out at this stage of the B2B sales funnel can lead to losses for the prospective client as well you.

Purchase

This is the final stage of the conventional B2B sales funnel. At this stage, the price has been decided and purchase orders are being written. Leakage at this stage should be minimal, and you should ensure that this stage is short and smooth for the client.

Leakages In The B2B Sales Funnel

Leakages in the B2B sales funnel are a fact of life. It is near impossible to convert each one of the leads you capture in the initial stage of the B2B sales funnel. However, that doesn't mean that you resign yourself to the current amount of leakage that you have. Always strive to reduce leakage and improve your lead generation percentage. Here are a few strategies to aid you in doing so.

Identify Prospective Leakage Points

You already know what a B2B sales funnel is. You also know the different stages of the sales funnel for your specific business. It is now time to ask yourself a few questions, starting with - where are leads leaking? Try to make a list of factors that govern the decision of a lead at every stage. If any of these factors has got anything to do with you, try to optimize it. Do you need to provide more information at the consideration stage? Is marketing passing on leads to the sales team too soon? These questions can go a long way in helping you map issues.

Use Google Analytics

Google Analytics helps you in identifying parts of your website that are creating inefficiencies in your B2B sales funnel. Pages of your website that have high exit numbers or bounce rates or ones, that are pulling in the traffic but not leading to conversions, are easy to identify using the tools that Google Analytics provides.

Invest In Behavioural Analytics

After webpage analytics, behavioural analytics will provide you with the greatest amount of information regarding the B2B sales funnel inefficiencies on your webpages. You can use tools such as heatmaps to recognize what part of your page is getting the most amount of interest, and scroll tracking or mouse tracking helps you understand the details of much of the same. Using these behavioural analytics tools alongside webpage analytics tools can help you optimize your website.

Try Out Long-Tail Keywords

The SEO trend started with using general keywords that can generate the most amount of traffic for the initial stage of your B2B sales funnel. But gradually, businesses started realizing that these general keywords are not helping in getting high-quality leads and that a significant majority of these leads might not have anything to do with the product and hence might leak out sooner than later. Hence, they started using long-tail keywords. These keywords are basically specific phrases that leads who have a real interest in your product will search for. Optimizing the length of your keyword can help in getting a large volume of high-quality leads.

Conclusion

The B2B sales funnel concept is very useful in mapping out your lead procurement and conversion strategy. However, it is also important to optimize your sales funnel and to reduce the steady leakage of leads.