Salespeople consistently rate their highest priority at work as closing more deals. Closing a deal means, of course, winning a contract, generating an order, or perhaps, onboarding customers into a subscription. To close more deals the sales funnel needs to become more efficient and that’s where BuddyCRM and the team here can help.
Typically, the sales funnel follows these steps:
with the funnel shape narrowing from top to bottom. This reflects the population sample as more people are aware of your product or service but fewer numbers actually purchase. You may call these steps different names in your organisation or you may not currently use a sales funnel approach at all (in which case we can help you with that). You may also remove some steps, combine some, or even continue your sales funnel into post-purchase steps like renewals and re-targeting.
Some companies like to give the steps of the funnel names to describe the journey in a manner from enquiries, to leads, prospects, eventually customers, and maybe further into retained clients.
At each stage of the funnel, you’ll be using specific approaches including marketing at shows and events, website posts and information, through to emails, calls, meetings, proposals and negotiation. Marketing is likely to have more input at the top while further down the sales team takes over and looks to secure the deal. In the below graphic, we have added the types of activity that you’ll be doing through the stages of the sales funnel. We’ve called these pipeline stages and could reflect your specific approach to sales and marketing depending on what your company produces and to who it sells.
Whatever you use it’s important to track this journey for both budgeting and target purposes. Knowing where you are with an individual contact or company along the sales funnel will determine your approach and what steps you’ll need to accomplish to turn an opportunity into a closed deal or sale. A CRM is ideal for reproducing the sales funnel digitally and indicating the activity that you do in the pipeline.
Below, an opportunity is shown in BuddyCRM where a series of questions have been set by the sales team and a percentage value assigned to each. As each task in this list is accomplished, the opportunity progresses through the sales funnel, effectively getting closer to a completed deal.
Our ‘two widget cases’ opportunity with this company is currently at 50% or halfway through the sales funnel.
Combining all your opportunities gives an overview for the sales director to set budgets and targets. In BuddyCRM we have a pipeline view available (see below) which gives an immediate view of all opportunities as they progress through the pipeline with a combined prediction for likely sales.
Now with this detailed view of active opportunities, the salesperson or sales team manager can determine the likelihood of a closed deal and act accordingly. Over time, you’ll build up a history of opportunities that will enable an analysis of reasons for winning or losing them. If, for instance, opportunities are more often lost at the 70% stage in a pipeline, then that could suggest a requirement to change the approach at that stage.
Opportunity management and pipeline views in BuddyCRM provide quick overviews but also enormous amounts of detail if required to assist your sales team. If you’d like help with working out your sales funnel and the steps needed to close more deals, then get in touch with the team at BuddyCRM. We’re motivated, tech-savvy sales professionals that know how to boost sales and create winning sales teams. We’re looking for like-minded sales teams that want to take full advantage of the latest technology to ensure their success.
Making the next step to success is as simple as giving us a ring on 0121 288 0808.