5 Steps to Keep the Sales Funnel Flowing

The Sales Funnel is a classic motif in the B2B world. It’s often written about; seldom used in real life. Most folks haven’t thought through what it takes, step-by-step, to convert a stranger into a customer. THAT, however, is a post for another day.

IF you did have a sales funnel, and if you’ve been tracking progress over time, you’ve probably noticed that prospects are

• engaging with real live sales people toward the transaction end of the funnel (the bottom, as it were), and
• turning to online sources as a first step in the buying cycle.

It’s going to get worse, not better. As social media moves beyond the early adopters, pioneers, and tinkerers, it will morph into an efficient and pervasive peer-to-peer intelligence gathering, archiving, and sharing platform. That means prospects will increasingly engage with sales people only after they’ve already made all their decisions and when they’re ready to place the order.

The good news is, it’s incredibly simple to meet the evolving B2B buyer where he or she is and will be. Here are five steps you can take to be in position to move prospects through your *sales funnel:

1. Produce solid educational content to help prospects move through each phrase of the process.
2. Make the content freely available in every format and every platform possible. For instance, when you produce a white paper, record an audio version of it, too. Make them both available freely on your digital real estate. Freely means: place no barriers to access whatsoever. If a prospect clicks on the resource, it downloads or starts playing right then. The old school (antiquated, obsolete, etc.) trick of requiring something from your readers before you’ll give them a white paper hurts you. You already HAVE something from the prospects: their attention right then. Make it count. Don’t irritate them and shoot yourself in the head by requiring them to complete “required information.”
3. Read Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing. (Yep, it was published a long time ago, even before any of us thought of MySpace or Facebook.) Then, make it easy for prospects to give you permission to help them. When you offer that white paper (as a PDF and MP3) by way of a button or link that says, “download now” or “listen now,” include a second button offering to send them a note when you publish another white paper, or conduct a webinar, or enlist beta users. Make it obvious the educational piece is freely available with no strings attached. Also make it obvious that you’re letting them determine the next step and making it easy for them to get the information or attention they seek.
4. Follow up according to the permission you’ve been given.
5. Have real-live people readily available to talk whenever your prospect wants to talk. Maybe the third button is a “chat now” option and the fourth is “talk to someone now” option.

These five steps enable you to meet your buyer wherever he or she is and help them navigate through the sales funnel. By making your content and yourself available to your prospects when they want you, you’re giving them the content and access they need to travel through YOUR sales funnel, and not your competitors.

*The concept of a sales funnel is helpful, but it’s probably outdated. Given the multiple access points to a sales cycle, multiple influencers, peer-to-peer platforms, a non-linear model would more fully comport with the evolving reality of the marketplace.

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About The B2Bblogger: Trey Pennington (@treypennington) uses technology, marketing, and stories to connect businesses with the people they seek to serve. With an educational background in marketing, including an undergraduate degree in marketing management and an MBA, combined with a masters in education, Trey understands the need for businesses to discover and develop their core story and to engage their marketplace in making the story their own.

His book, Spitball Marketing: Using What You’ve Got to Get More of What You Want is due out in early 2010. You can read more from Trey now at his blog www.treypennington.com.

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