It would be great if every interested customer instantly made purchases from your company. Unfortunately, as any business owner will tell you, it’s rarely that easy. Instead, most customers go on what’s known as a purchasing journey. And, the best thing a company can do to convert customers going through this journey is to have a sales funnel.
As you’re about to find out, sales funnels are incredibly beneficial for electronics companies of all sizes. Whether you’re starting a small business or working for a large corporation, having a properly set up sales funnel is a key aspect of making more sales. And, making more sales means more money for your business!
After you finish this article, you’ll learn:
What sales funnels are
A closer look at each stage of a typical sales funnel
How MQLs and SQLs affect your sales funnels
How to create a sales funnel that converts leads
Sales funnel mistakes to avoid at all costs
What is a Sales Funnel?
Source: Cleverism
A sales funnel is a way for your company to understand every aspect of a potential customer’s purchasing journey. Typically, this type of funnel begins at the awareness stage. If everything goes well, this funnel ends with a sale.
But, before your business is able to make a sale, it needs to successfully get a potential customer through each stage of the sales funnel.
Why is Having a Sales Funnel So Important?
Source: Clodura
It’s understandable to ask yourself: is having a sales funnel that important for my business? The answer to this question is a definite yes! But, what makes having a sales funnel in place so beneficial? Here’s a closer look at the main benefits of having a sales funnel.
Making It Easier To Market Your Company
Wouldn’t it be great if marketing your business felt easier than it normally does? Fortunately, with a sales funnel in place, it’s much easier to market your business. With this type of funnel, you should have accurate data about how many leads enter your company’s funnel. You’ll also understand what efforts are converting these leads.
This data also makes it easy to understand how many leads your company will need to meet its targets and goals. By having that information, it becomes easier to wisely invest your company’s marketing funds.
Working With Accurate Sales Numbers
Funnels are also incredibly helpful for companies that need more accurate sales forecasts. Creating forecasts is a great way for a company to know what to expect in the coming weeks, months, or years. If you’re not preparing accurate sales forecasts, it’s like trying to conduct business in the dark.
Since sales funnels can help give your company extremely accurate data, you won’t have to take wild guesses at how much inventory your company expects to sell. Instead, you can use your funnel-related data to prepare accurate forecasts.
Understanding Where Your Profits Come From
One of the best business tips is to take what works well for your company and continue to take these same steps. But, it’s almost impossible to know what to replicate if your company isn’t using sales funnels.
Sales funnels allow your company to realize where its profits are coming from. If your business wants to make money, a sales funnel enables you to understand what’s making your company the most money. With that information, you can easily duplicate what’s already bringing in sales for your electronics distribution company.
The Main Stages in a Sales Funnel
At this point, you have a deeper understanding of what makes sales funnels so beneficial. It’s now time to start obtaining these benefits by creating a sales funnel. Here’s more information about a sales funnel’s five main stages.
Awareness - Stage 1
In the first stage of a typical sales funnel, a potential customer has recently become aware of a product or service your company offers. There are many ways that a customer can hear about something new. They might have seen your company appear in an online ad or in their social media feed. Or maybe they signed up to receive emails from your phone flipping business and want to know more.
This stage also ties in with a customer realizing they have a problem. To solve this problem, a customer will need to find either a product or service that can help them. At this point, you want this person to move further down the funnel. If this happens depends on your company’s ability to move leads into the next stage.
Interest - Stage 2
During the second stage of a sales funnel, your company will have customers that show an interest in what it offers. At this point, these people haven’t decided what product or service they’re going to choose. Instead, they’ll conduct research to find out what solution is best.
The research that a potential customer needs to conduct will vary based on what they’re buying and the cost of this purchase. For example, imagine that you needed to buy new dish sponges. Considering the low cost of these items, you probably wouldn’t invest too much time finding the right product. Now, imagine that you needed to buy a new house. Chances are, this purchase is a lot more important. Because of that, you’re likely to do lots of research buying a house.
Research from Pardot shows that the average person will use a search engine at least two or three times while researching a product or service. These searches might involve comparing products, services, or businesses. When your company’s potential leads start conducting research, following SEO strategies for wholesalers can help ensure that your business shows up everywhere.
Decision - Stage 3
By the third stage of the sales funnel, a customer is performing deeper research about what solution they’re going to choose. Most likely, a customer has a few solutions in mind. Now, they need to create comparisons to determine the best solution.
During this stage, people might reach out to companies that interest them with some questions. This is one reason why we always stress the importance of being responsive. If your company gives a quick response to a potential customer’s questions, you could win them over and sell more electronics.
Action - Stage 4
If your business makes it to stage 4 of the sales funnel, it’s about to gain a new customer. By now, a customer has realized they have a problem. They also have a deeper understanding of what product or service will help them. Now, this customer will take action and make their final purchase.
Your company’s job in this stage of the sales funnel is to confirm they’ve made the right choice by choosing your company’s products or services. During this stage, it’s great to have information that supports your customer’s decision. A few examples of this kind of information are customer testimonials, case studies, and anything else that confirms it’s wise for a customer to do business with you.
What Happens After a Sale - Stage 5
To take things to the next level, it’s also important to keep customers in your sales funnel after they make a purchase from your business. More often than not, companies will neglect the importance of this step. This is because these companies have already made their sales.
However, you can gain an advantage over your competition by keeping current customers in the last stage of your company’s sales funnel. By doing this, you’re not treating every customer as just a sale. It’s a great growth strategy for your company.
There are many ways to focus on keeping customers happy after they buy something from your business. You can have an onboarding process for new customers to check out after they make an account on your company’s website. Another great marketing strategy is to send them a quick email post-purchase to ask how they feel about their recent purchases.
Even if you don’t get a response from every customer, most of them will appreciate that your business thought about them.
MQLs and SQLs: How To Have an Easy Time Qualifying Leads
When talking about sales funnels, it’s also important to discuss MQLs and SQLs. MQLs are marketing qualified leads. SQLs are sales-qualified leads. While these terms can sound a little confusing, these terms can help your company understand where leads come from.
What Are Marketing Qualified Leads?
Marketing Qualified Leads or MQLs are leads that come from your company’s marketing efforts. Determining how strong of an MQL you have usually gets determined by your company’s marketing team.
For instance, someone on your marketing team might assume that every lead who sends in a question to your company is an MQL. On the other hand, you might have stricter requirements from marketing qualified leads.
What Are Sales Qualified Leads?
Your company can also receive leads from its sales department, which are known as sales qualified leads. As it is with marketing qualified leads, your salespeople will determine the difference between weak or strong SQLs.
To qualify an SQL, salespeople typically determine a lead’s interest in and fit for your business.
Low interest and low fit: The first group of leads we’ll talk about are those who are a low fit and show a low level of interest in your company’s products or services. An example of this type of lead would be someone who’s working on behalf of a company to find refurbished electronics. Instead of needing to make a final decision, they’re searching for a solution based on boredom.
High interest and low fit: The next group of people would be those who have a lot of interest in your product or service. However, they’re a low fit for what your company offers. An example of this type of customer would be someone who’s interested in buying electronics from you. However, they only want electronics from Google, and you sell items from Apple and Samsung.
Low interest and high fit: As we begin discussing high fit individuals, we’re also talking about your company’s target customers. People who fit into the low interest and high fit category are those that use your company’s products but don’t need them right now. With these types of people, it’s usually best to continue marketing to them. When they’re ready for electronics, your business will stay fresh in their minds.
High interest and high fit: When it comes to potential customers, it doesn’t get any better than high interest and high fit individuals. People in these groups both need and want what your company offers. If your company’s sales and marketing teams are properly qualifying leads, it should be easy to close customers in this last stage.
How to Create a Sales Funnel That Converts
It’s now time to start learning tips to help you create amazing sales funnels. By following the tips you’re about to read, you’ll have a strong funnel that engages customers every step of the way. Here is how to create a sales funnel that converts and leads into customers.
Analyze Your Company’s Target Audience
A great way to prepare for setting up a sales funnel is to research your target audience. A target audience consists of any person or business that would be a great fit for what you offer. It’s important to remember that you’re not trying to market your business to every person in the world.
Instead, you want to focus your time, money, and energy on interested people that want what you sell. One great way to achieve this goal is by looking at user behavior data. Most companies access this data from Google Analytics.
Once you have this information, you can learn where your users are clicking, how long they’re staying on your website, and much more. This information can also help you improve your company’s website.
Create Buyer Personas
Something you’ll learn while creating sales funnels is that every customer has different needs. Some customers might be interested in having the latest and greatest smartphones. On the other hand, other customers might only need a tablet that’s functional and doesn’t come with lots of extra features.
Each customer you work with can have different reasons for buying electronics from your company. It’s also worth noting that customers can make buying decisions in many different ways. By creating buying personas, your company and its staff can prepare for anyone they’ll encounter.
To begin creating buyer personas, you’ll need to research the people who show interest in your business. Next, learn what these people like and dislike. You can gain this type of information in many ways. Some companies like to send out surveys to learn how customers feel about a wide range of business-related topics.
Once you have all the information you need, it’s time to start creating buyer personas.
Set Up Landing Pages
One of the most powerful tools in any company’s marketing funnel is the landing page. This is where customers will “land” after moving through your sales funnel. The type of landing page you’re using depends on the goal you’re trying to achieve.
If you were offering a sale on flipped phones, the landing page you’ll send leads to would likely mention details about this upcoming promotion. However, this is far from the only type of landing page your company might use. Many businesses that want to build authority might have landing pages to encourage people to sign up for webinars.
Regardless of what type of landing page you’re creating, here are a few helpful tips you can follow.
Always ensure your landing pages are mobile-friendly.
Create an encouraging call to action (CTA).
Use ad copy that evokes the reader’s emotions.
Give To Get
An essential step in many sales funnels is to make an attempt to gather the email addresses of any interested leads. However, not everyone is understandably willing to give out their email addresses. One reason for this is that most people don’t want their email accounts bombarded by a lot of marketing-related emails.
To solve this problem, and start building an incredibly valuable email list, you’ll need to give something of value to your customers. Most companies achieve this goal by offering an ebook, series of videos, or something similar to their leads. Another surefire way to watch your email subscriber base grow is by offering them a discount after they sign up for your newsletter.
If you’re unsure of what to offer your leads, consider trying a mixture of different ideas. During this time, check out the results of the email marketing provider you’re working with. When you see opt-ins and email open rates increase, you’ve found the right thing to offer.
Set Up an Excellent Email Drip Campaign
Most of your company’s leads won’t spend every single day visiting your website. Because of that, they might unintentionally miss out on what’s happening with your business. Fortunately, you can keep these people in the know with an email drip campaign.
An email drip campaign allows your business to send out occasional emails to any subscriber in its list. You can also set up multiple email drip campaigns, with each one targeted to groups in your company’s sales funnel.
You could send people at the top of your sales funnel introductory emails. These emails are great ways to introduce your business to any interested email newsletter subscribers. People who are in or close to the middle of your sales funnel might enjoy emails that detail advantages your electronics distribution company has over its competitors.
As a reader nears the end of your email drip campaign, include an enticing CTA that encourages them to make a purchase from your business.
A/B Test Your Marketing Materials
Over time, it’s likely that you’ll start building up many types of landing pages and marketing messages. With that in mind, how can you determine what message brings your company the best results? You can do this by harnessing the power of split testing.
Split testing is the process of showing your base of customers multiple landing pages, emails, and similar content. By doing this, you can analyze data about what marketing efforts give your company the best results.
An example of A/B or split testing would be to create three different landing pages. Next, you would rotate the links your leads visit. Let’s say that you split these three pages among your 75 daily leads. In this case, you’d have three groups of leads.
After testing your pages, you find out that the third landing page received the most click-throughs. You could then keep this third page and try it out for all of your future leads.
Harness the Power of Upselling and Cross-Selling
As your leads get closer to the bottom of your funnel, it’s a good idea to consider cross-selling and upselling. By this point, most leads developed a sense of trust with your business. Before they hit the Buy Now button on your company’s marketplace, make sure they can see similar products you offer. This simple strategy can turn into more sales and revenue for your company.
Utilize Multichannel Marketing
Most companies quickly learn that someone can enter their sales funnels in many ways. As your company’s leads go through their respective buying journeys, it’s wise to ensure your business is there every step of the way. One great way to do this is through multichannel marketing, which is a term for advertising through many channels.
As an example, imagine that you and another company are competing for a new customer. This customer researches electronics they’re interested in by using search engines, social media, and reading reviews.
When this person begins using a search engine, your company’s website appears once. Unfortunately, your company doesn’t have any reviews or social media accounts. However, the company you’re competing against has a complete online profile that includes social media pages and lots of online reviews.
In this situation, where two companies have the same products, the customer will most likely buy their products from the business that is appearing in more places and has customer reviews.
Learn Where You’re Losing the Most Leads
It would be great if every person who was interested in your wholesale electronics business would become a customer for life. However, we both know that’s rarely the case. Unfortunately, certain individuals will inevitably drop off of your company’s sales funnel. Fortunately, you can help stop this problem by learning what funnel stage is causing the most people to walk away.
After taking a long look at your company’s sales funnel data, you should quickly learn what stage isn’t going well. With this information, begin revising what happens during this funnel stage. Over time, you should soon start noticing improvements and fewer lost leads.
Sales Funnel Mistakes To Avoid At All Costs
It’s often easy for mistakes to get made with sales funnels. If you let them go unfixed, it could make it difficult for your company to make lots of sales. Fortunately, we’re here to help you learn more about the most common mistakes to avoid with sales funnels.
Giving Up Too Quickly on a Lead
As anyone in the world of sales can tell you, this profession often gets met with the word “no” quite often. Over time, it’s easy for many sales teams and their managers to start getting rid of leads that say no too early.
Hearing someone object to what seems like a perfect sales pitch is disheartening. However, it’s a good idea to think twice before you pass on these leads. One great way to do this is by creating automated follow-up emails based on the objections you’re receiving. You might also consider creating content around the objections your business receives.
If you give your leads (even the ones that don’t want your product) time to learn more about your business, it could lead to many more leads moving through the later stages of your sales funnel.
Following Up Too Late
Another common mistake related to sales funnels is not following up with customers in time. As you likely know, most customers expect answers in a short amount of time.
A recent study found that the average lead is 21 times less likely to become a customer if they have to wait over 30 minutes for a response. Considering this shocking statistic, following up quickly with people should always be at the top of your company’s to-do list.
You might be wondering, “Does this mean I have to constantly sit by my computer and phone, always being ready to respond to every person that sends a message to my wholesale electronics business? Fortunately, the answer to this question is no, unless you want to.
An easier way to always be responsive to your customers is by using a CRM or sales funnel automation program. Either of the previously mentioned types of software can send out automated responses to your customers.
With the way that these programs have improved in the past several years, it’s almost impossible for a customer to differentiate between a hand-typed or automated response.
Not Following Up At All
You’ve learned that following up late isn’t a good idea. With that in mind, neither is neglecting to follow up at all with your customers. It’s understandable to find yourself pressed for time, especially as the owner of a new business. However, responding to interested leads is a must.
The amount of times it can take to convert an interested lead into a new customer varies. In some cases, you might find yourself chatting with leads for much longer than you might think. One recent study found that 80% of leads get closed between the fifth and 12th contact. If you’re walking away from interested leads too early, it could be costing your company sales.
No company wants to send interested leads away. To stop this problem, always make sure that you or a staff member is responding to leads. If you don’t have the time to do this yourself, consider outsourcing this work to a customer service professional. By checking out websites like Upwork, you can find the help you’re seeking without having to pay a salaried employee.
Delivering the Wrong Message at the Wrong Funnel Stage
Another common mistake that can happen with sales funnels has to do with delivering messages. With a properly set up sales funnel, your company should be communicating with leads at various stages in their buying processes.
Unfortunately, trouble can happen quickly when you’re sending the wrong messages to your leads. But, how does this happen? To help you out, here’s a quick example of sending the wrong message at the wrong time.
Let’s say you’re trying to sell electronics to an interested lead. However, they give you two objections. These objections are that your electronics cost too much and they don’t have time to speak with a new supplier. Instead of focusing on their objections, you send them a piece of content that details the electronics you’re selling.
The result of this strategy is that you’re sending over promotional material to a client without overcoming their objections. Instead of sending out information about an upcoming sale, you could have sent this lead testimonials from your company’s previous customers.
You can start finding out where the weak spots are in your funnel by researching what stage costs your business the most customers. Chances are, changing up your messages or style in these problematic stages can lead to more sales.
To wrap things up, having a properly set up sales funnel is one of the best things your business can have. Before you start making a sales funnel, make sure to thoroughly research your company’s target audience. With this information, you can set up each stage of your sales funnel. Once everything’s in place, your sales funnel can take your business to the next level.
Did you enjoy this article? If so, there are plenty more for you to enjoy at the Trade-In Tech blog. Each week, our team of experts posts helpful content about all aspects of the electronics industry. If you’d like to learn more about our wholesale electronics platform, make sure to visit tradeintech.com.