How to optimize your marketing and sales funnel
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
1 like•285 views
Building an efficient strategy for attracting leads and converting them into sales is a critical part of scaling your business. In this session, you’ll learn best practices on how to structure and optimize your sales funnel for maximum conversions.
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (20)
Similar to How to optimize your marketing and sales funnel
Similar to How to optimize your marketing and sales funnel (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
How to optimize your marketing and sales funnel
- 1. How to Optimize the Marketing and Sales Funnels Leslie Lau
- 2. A little about me.
- 4. What do these funnels have to do with Sales and Marketing?
- 6. What affects the shape of the funnel, and the speed at which people go through the funnel? • The business you’re in, which drives your… • Business model: freemium, free trial (with credit card), free trial (without credit card), sales-drive model, etc. • And, the readiness of the person purchasing.
- 7. Spotify’s freemium model converts to paid at 45%. That’s really high! Source: https://press.spotify.com/us/about/ on 4/22/2018. https://hbr.org/2014/05/making-freemium-work HBR article recommends more modest conversion rate. Most companies range from 2% to 5%, coupled with a high volume of traffic.
- 8. Dropbox converts at an estimated 2-11% rate Back of the napkin calculations: $1.1B in revenue 2017 $20 - $100 per subscription = 11M-55M paying users 500 M+ registered users 2% - 11% conversion rate Source:Source: https://investors.dropbox.com/
- 9. Free trials to paid subscription conversion 2% 10%Visitor to free trial signup conversion 50% 15%Free trial to paid subscription conversion 60% 80%Retain paid after 90 days 0.6% 1.2%Conversion end-to-end Source: http://www.totango.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/2012-SaaS-Conversions-Benchmark2.pdf
- 11. Awareness
- 12. 2.70% 0.89% Search https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/03/15/google-adwords-average-conversion-rates-by-industry-study/ Display Average Conversion Rate (CTR) Best practice: Measure beyond the click: sales accepted lead, to sales qualified lead. To sign-up. To actual sales!
- 17. Interest
- 19. Consideration
- 22. Preference
- 24. Fix the leaks
- 25. With the right solutions
- 29. What are the marketing trends? Teams are investing in: • Social Selling • Account-Based Marketing (ABM) • Customer Marketing • Persona-Based Marketing
- 30. Summary • Structure of the marketing and sales funnels • Average conversion rates • Optimize your funnel • Trends / Methodologies
- 31. Thank you!
Editor's Notes
- Leslie Lau is a digital marketing leader who brings together an enterprise marketing and technology background with the skills and experience of operating at a fast-paced, SaaS company. During the last four years of her career, she has focused on optimizing freemium and trial experiences at scale. More recently, she has been focused on optimizing the end-to-end customer journey, which includes the onboarding experience of customers. Leslie holds bachelor degrees in microbiology and economics.
- I enjoy cooking. And I have a lot of cooking tools. I even bought a book on cooking tools. A tool has probably invested for every kitchen task. So I have three different funnels in my kitchen. Each funnel has different characteristics, Which makes them useful for different tasks. So depending on what I’m trying to achieve, I choose a different funnel.
- Like cooking, in marketing and sales, you have a lot of tools available to you. And the Marketing and Sales Funnel is one of those tools? Have you heard about the Marketing/Sales funnel?
- I’m going to start with the Marketing funnel. The funnel is a marketing model which illustrates the theoretical customer journey towards the purchase of a product of service. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_funnel Similar to how there are many variations of funnels for cooking, there are many variations of the marketing funnel. What you use depends on your business. But, like all models, it’s a useful tool to understand and optimize your business. The model can help you think about: Your messaging and positioning. Your demand generation activities. Your website content. Your lead capture mechanisms. Analytics and optimization. Awareness – people can become aware of your brand, even if they have no purchase intent. For example, my friend became aware of Cisco because of the Cisco match-play event. You might see a bus stop ad or a billboard. There are many levels of “awareness.” Interest – this is the moment the person starts thinking about purchasing. It could be triggered by a need. For example, if a company is opening up a new office, they might need to think about reconfiguring their network. Consideration – this is where the person is deciding which option to go with. They might look at customer reviews or attend a demo. Preference – this is where the person has chosen which option they would like to pursue. At this time, the person will make the final decision.
- Calculating total addressable market: http://www.viola-group.com/violanotes/practical-guide-to-crunching-the-numbers-on-total-addressable-market-tam/ The readiness of the person to purchase: Unaware: People who are not necessarily in need at this point Pain Aware: Visitors are aware of their problem but not of any solutions Solution Aware: Visitors know solutions exist for their pain but don’t know about yours Product Aware: Visitors know you offer solutions they may need but they have yet to choose your product Most Aware: Visitors know and trust your brand Source: http://unbounce.com/docs/The-Conversion-Marketers-Guide-To-LandingPage-Copywriting.pdf
- Spotify website: Subscribers: 71m (as at Dec 31 2017) Active users: 157m (as at Dec 31 2017) https://www.process.st/freemium-conversion-rate/ Benefit of freemium is to generate traffic. Better to convert 5% of 2 million monthly visitors than 50% of 100,000 visitors.
- Source: http://www.totango.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/2012-SaaS-Conversions-Benchmark2.pdf https://www.chargebee.com/blog/saas-free-trial-credit-card-verdict/
- What are you using to fill your funnel? Content marketing SEM Display – digital banners, physical billboards, bus stop advertisement, etc
- https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/03/15/google-adwords-average-conversion-rates-by-industry-study/ https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/02/29/google-adwords-industry-benchmarks Because display has a lower conversion rate (CTR), does this mean you shouldn’t invest in it? Should you pour all your money into search? No. It depends on what you’re trying to achieve with your campaign. If your campaign is focused on brand awareness, Display advertisement is as relevant a channel as Search. And, it also depends on your end of funnel conversion metrics. What is your cost per acquisition? But, sometimes, it’s nearly impossible to get to that granularity.
- This is a branded search keyword. You would expect this keyword to convert high, because there is high brand awareness. And, the visitor is specifically looking for this brand. A person who searches on a branded keyword is may already be further down the funnel. They’ve expressed an interest, and they might already be considering the company.
- While a person who searches for this keyword term, is looking for a specific item, but they may not yet have a brand or company in mind. This keyword, because it is more generic, will have a different conversion rate than the branded keyword. But, it doesn’t make it less valuable. Again, it’s about the cost per acquisition. And, each keyword phrase has a different cost per click.
- When you start typing a search query in Google, Google recommends related search terms. Have you optimized for these terms as well?
- And, once you have the SEM ad, Does the landing page payoff the ad? I don’t think so. And, likely the visitor won’t either. And, this will likely result in a lower conversion rate.
- The person learns more about the company, its products, and any helpful information.
- The person with interest may click on different items on the website to learn more.
- The person learns more about the company, its products, and any helpful information.
- A visitor in the consideration phase may start reaching out to the company.
- And, they even may add a product to the cart. Depending on your business, you decide on the stages of your funnel. And, you measure how many people have reached that stage. And, then you develop ideas on how to improve that stage of the funnel through tests. Always measuring.
- When a prospect has a preference for you, they are looking to purchase. What is your purchase process? Is this a high touch or low touch sales? Have you removed all the friction from the purchase process?
- If you analyze all elements of your process, You will find leaks in your funnel. By tracking the right metrics. On one team I was on, we saw that the chat abandonment was quite high – around 15%. This meant that visitors who were requesting a chat with our team, were leaving before speaking with anyone. We identified a metric closer to the activity – ACD timeout – automated call distribution. And, we started measuring it for each Sales rep. And, we were able to identify which Sales rep were missing chats.
- And, we realized one of the reasons sales reps were missing chats, Was that they missed them because they didn’t know about it. They stepped away from their desk, and didn’t realize that a chat was assigned to them. So, we identified a few solutions: We trained sales reps to always log off when they stepped away from their desk. We installed computer speakers and had the sales rep turn up the volume so that they could hear when a chat was assigned to them. We trained each new sales rep on the process. We followed up with the sales manager whenever we saw higher ACD timeouts of individual sales reps.
- I’ve been talking about the funnel more from a marketing perspective and an online experience perspective. I want to introduce some terms that links the marketing with the sales aspect of the funnel. MEL – Marketing Engaged Lead MQL – Marketing Qualified Lead SAL – Sales Accepted Lead SQL – Sales Qualified Lead When a person expresses interest, perhaps by filling out a top-of the funnel form, but they’re not quite ready for a sales outreach, These leads are considered MEL. Only when the visitor completes activities, or a key activity, is the lead then “qualified” by marketing. Meaning marketing thinks the lead quality is high enough to warrant sales’ attention. But, Sales is still the deciding the facter. They are the ones who decides if the lead is of high enough quality to be “accepted” by them. Sales evaluates the lead to determine if the person is indeed likely to buy. Only then is the lead marked ”qualified.” Again, this model is useful, because it gives us a framework to evaluate the status of each lead. And you can measure the volume and velocity as leads go through each stage. And, you can connect the stages a lead goes through back to the original source of the lead.
- Excel/Google spreadsheet is a very useful tool. As is a CRM tool, such as Salesforce.com. With the data and a way to analyze the data, I look at the trends to identify breaks in the process. The teams I have worked on look at this data across all channels and sources on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. We look at trends across years to understand seasonality. And, we break down the data by channel (what drove the visitor to the website). And we look at the data by source (how did they express their interest)?
- These are not exactly new, but they are capabilities that teams are still improving. Social selling is when salespeople use social media to interact directly with their prospects. Account-Based Marketing: A focused approach to B2B marketing in which marketing and sales teams work together to target best-fit accounts and turn them into customers. Customer Marketing: focused on upselling/cross-selling to customers. Persona-Based Marketing: content should speak to customer pain points and challenges throughout the buyer's journey. None of these are new. However, teams are still working on investing in them. The core of what I’ve talked about today are the basics of what marketing teams focus on. However, even these “new” marketing teams are important for teams. We can’t do everything at once. Typically, I’ve prioritized the foundational items, and then add new capabilities with each quarter.
- So, we’ve gone through a lot so far. We talked about the structure of the purchase funnel from Awareness to Purchase. We’ve reviewed average conversion rates for different business models such as freemium, free trial with credit card, and free trial without credit card. 2-5% for premium, though there are examples of really high conversion rates from Spotify. 50% or so for free trial (with credit card to paid) We’ve looked at ways to optimize your own funnels, starting from awareness. Understand your audience and where they are in their buying journey – SEM keywords. Remove the friction from the buying journey. Measure the right things. Analyze your data. Fix your funnel leaks.