Updated on October 6, 2021
People receive between 300 and 3000 marketing messages a day, but can only retain a maximum of three. The old-school approach that we need to push our prospects and convince them to buy even when they don’t want to, does not apply to the sales process today. Instead, if you’re not serving personalized content at the most relevant and receptive moment for that consumer, you’re wasting your time and money. So the question is how can you build a worthwhile sales funnel to draw in prospects fast?
How to build your sales funnel fast
This is the part where your sales funnel strategy comes to the front of the line. But, what can you do to make sure you’re filling your pipeline with quality opportunities? Here are 5 powerful prospecting hacks that you can start using today:
1. Forget about cold calling
Cold calling is no longer an option! In the awareness stage, there are a lot of ways how to reach out to a prospect before you call them. You have a range of options like email, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook where you can learn more about your prospect and make the call more personal and warm.
But, before you start calling, make sure that your contact list is up-to-date. Ideally, you should use sales enablement platform at this stage to automate the data update process. The Sales.Rocks platform makes it easy to validate your contacts. For example, you can send 5000 contacts and our Sales Toolkit module will process them to see which are verified and which are not. After the action, the updated contacts will be integrated directly in your CRM. This can save you a lot of time and resources!
2. Use the power of email marketing
Email marketing campaigns are a powerful tool when it comes to your prospects becoming familiar with your brand before you call in. Marketing emails need to be personalized for the reader and filled with interesting graphics. You could even include a brochure or informational packet in the mail. Email campaigns that are designed for mobile devices are especially important. According to Hubspot, 67% of emails today are read on a smartphone or tablet.
One of the main challenges that companies face in this stage is the bounce email report. This happens when your message cannot be delivered to an email address. When you receive a “return to sender” message, there is no room for panic. Use the Email Verifier tool that is proven to reduce your bounces by up to 95% thus increasing the delivery rates.
Furthermore, if you only have a list of contacts or a URL, Email Finder is the tool that allows you to find all the relevant contacts in a matter of seconds. Your only need to send a list of contacts you want to find and let our software do the rest. Your time is valuable and you need to spend it on activities that make a direct impact.
3. Focus on Lead nurturing
It may be tempting to send a mass email to your entire target audience regardless of where they are in the buying process. But, using this approach, it will actually do you more harm than good. Your prospects want to feel special, so, before you make your next call or send your next email, keep in mind that you have to do some lead nurturing.
In the second stage of the pipeline, nurturing your leads can help them make the buying decision faster. Here, prospects are actively looking for solutions to their problems. After they showed interest in your service, this is the right time to provide something valuable to the recipient while gently guiding them through the sales process. Providing value means that you are sharing something (blog post, a current industry report, free e-book, webinar, etc.). Also, the people in the middle of the sales funnel will want more detailed information about how exactly they would use a product or service you are offering and how they can benefit from your solution to build up their business fast.
4. Contact the decision-maker
Contacting the right person might seem simple, but as many salespeople know – finding who is the decision-maker at a given company, it is not that easy. This is why Prospect Finder feature makes this part of the sales process much easier. For example, you select a company from your leads and we apply dozen of search criteria to find your right prospect in the targeted company and how to build a sales funnel fast.
Knowing who the decision-maker is before actually contacting them is essential because you need to prepare your pitch with the focus on the particular person. Targeted sales pitches are a very useful and extremely efficient sales funnel strategy to get to your next buyer. Don’t waste time blindly pitching your product to anyone who appears on your road to the decision-maker.
5. Don’t forget about Old Leads
Your CRM is a powerful resource for all your sales-related activities. Remind the leads who had said they would reach out to you in a few months, the ones who never responded to your follow-ups as well as the clients you already have to check for new requirements on their radar. You don’t always need to invest in new lists and in building relationships from scratch. Instead, send them a nurture email. Don’t be surprised when these leads immediately reach the middle or even the bottom of your funnel.
Before you contact your old leads or clients, do your homework. Check if their contact info is up-to-date by using an automated data validation module. You can verify their phone numbers, email addresses, and company information, saving plenty of time and resources. Furthermore, this tool can help you eliminate up to 80% of your manual data checking and cleaning.
Conclusion
The sales pipeline it’s actually rooted in dependable data. Actually, data is the main asset that helps salespeople to pinpoint the exact moment when a message is most relevant to a consumer. According to research by Invespcro, 54% of companies say that their biggest challenge to data-driven sales success is the lack of data quality and data completeness. After all, the success of a business stands on its sales funnel strategy combined with an updated contact database.
