9. The B-to-B Funnel Social Media Blog PR Display Paid Search Trade Shows Webinars Awareness Web Site Landing Pages Micro Site White Papers Interest Lead Lead Form Telemarketing Opportunity Sales Hand-off Close
14. Funnel Volume How many leads do you have to put into your funnel? Go back to your metrics! Example: Average Sale Price: $10,000 Revenue Goal: $500,000 Closed Deals: 50 Lead > Close Rate: 10% You need 500 leads! Use your CPA to set your marketing budget. If CPA is $20, you need a $10,000 marketing budget to meet your goals.
18. Funnel Sources Measure, measure, measure! Where are your leads coming from? Which leads cost the most? Which leads are closing the largest deals? The most deals? Constantly measure the performance of your lead sources. Then, focus on what’ working best and ditch what’s not working well.
19. Managing your funnel with Sales “We generate all these great leads and sales is to incompetent to close them.” “Our leads suck. I’d be crushing my quota of Marketing would give me better leads.”
21. Finally… Earn your seat at the table! Know your performance metrics. Sign up for measureable goals that are directly tied to revenue. Good marketing departments are a revenue center, not a cost center!
Editor's Notes
View in Slide Show ModeShow source of these and how they feed into one another. Awareness in ad or PR placeement, Interest is your landing page, Lead is your lead form, Oppty is in the sales process. State what each of these is:Lead: Anyone with a PeopleSoft ERP system Opportunity: Anyone with Project and Budget for your productClose: Either won or lost the deal (be sure to capture the reason for loss – competitor, etc.)
Key measurement pointsLead > Opportunity > CloseCost Per lead/Oppty/Close. The cost per lead drives your CPA. You have to know your CPA and then how much you have to spend on leads. If you can’t get enough leads > close at a profitable CPA, then you either need to market differently, or you have a flawed businessYou have to know how many sales you need in order to drive the top of your funnelFunnel Efficiency – get better efficiency and you have more options – Spend more on the prospects that matter, get more prospects, spend less on marketing and improve your margins
This is important. Remember those 500 leads you needed? If your sales cycle is 6 months long, you need those leads today in order to make your Q3 revenue goal. Also, a long funnel is challenging, because it take longer to collect enough data to know if your marketing is working. A long funnel also affects how fast your marketing becomes profitable. The shorter your funnel, the better. However, a lot of it is dependent on the type of product you’re selling. Some products just naturally have a longer sales cycle (ex: enterprise software)
Wide funnel for broad consumer brands like potato chips, narrow funnels for ERP testing software. Neither one is necessarily good or bad, but you have to know which one you are. And you should be constantly be working to narrow your funnel to only those people who are most likely to purchase your products. The narrower your funnel, the more you can 1) Spend more money on the prospects that matter 2) Spend less money on marketing overall 3) Improve your margins.
You have to constantly evaluate how many people drop out of your funnel. There are lots of places for people to fall out of your funnelLanding pageLead FormTelemarketing Follow-upSales hand-offNegotiationYou need to constantly be evaluating your funnel and watching for points of leakage. Every % you send further down the funnel is a lower cost per lead and higher close rate.
You have to know where your leads come from, where your closes come from. You may get a lot of leads from somewhere that doesn’t close. If you do, find out why and make a change or kill the program. If you want a seat at the table, know your funnel metricsCampaign PerformanceLanding page performanceLead sourcesLead > Oppty > Close rate by lead sourceCost per leadCost Per close
Criteria for moving through the funnel. You have to have clear criteria. Sales always says the leads suck. Marketing says sales can’t sell. If you manage your funnel criteria, there wont be an argument. Agree on your customer profile for lead, what’s a qualified opportunity, etc. Handoff points: What are the handoff points of your funnel. You need to have clearly delineated points in the process or things will fall through the cracks.
the most expensive part of your funnel is the top. Rather than spending money on it, let your customers do it for you. Repeat business, upsell, referrals, etc. Credit Duct Tape Marketing & Seth Godin