If this is your first time encountering the term sales funnel, worry not because you will soon be enlightened. In basic terms, a sales funnel describes how customers are generated. It can be summarized into three parts: qualified leads, prospects, and customers.
Turning Leads to Customers
Qualified leads are basically people who need your product or service, whether or not they are aware of it. Prospects are people who know about your product/service and are currently interested. Customers are the people who have already made a purchase from your company and may or may not be a repeat buyer.
Sounds technical? Here’s an example. If you’re running a car dealership, your qualified leads are the people who have no car or are looking for a new one, and have X amount of money (X being the average price of your cars). It’s important to separate the qualified leads from the rest of the traffic, because only they will have the capacity to transact with you.
Next is to transform these leads into prospects by getting their contact information and giving them tempting offers or convincing sales talks. The last phase is to finally have customers, the ones you end up selling a car to.
Lead Magnets
The whole process itself sounds easy, but the biggest challenge is in transforming your qualified leads to prospects. The best way to do this nowadays is through “lead magnets”. These are offers that you give for free in exchange for someone’s contact details.
Sounds like a loss? Think of it this way: You are asking for your qualified lead’s business card, in exchange for a slightly more detailed brochure. Lead magnets are like those free samples in the mall; only, you receive prospecitve client information. This information is highly important because you can use it to send more offers later on, thus maximizing possible profit.
Lead magnets can come in many different ways. It can be in the form of tips, a quiz, a limited trial, and others. The purpose of a lead magnet is to give your prospects a glimpse of what you can offer them. When done effectively, this could easily convince your qualified leads or prospects to make a transaction with you.
Like all samples, lead magnets are small but tasty. Give them information they can immediately use, and attach a call-to-action (CTA). You may need to seek help from digital marketing companies like 5 Star Brand to create attention–catching magnets. Being part of an overall marketing sales funnel, lead magnets should be creative and interesting, and should give the leads a sense of urgency to try them out.
Sources:
(What is a Sales Funnel?,blog.udemy)
(Customer Value Optimization: How to Build an Unstoppable Business, digitalmarketer)
(Marketing sales Funnel, 5 Star Brand)
