5 Ways Marketing Can Help Clean Up The Sales Funnel

Let’s face it. It is easy for marketing and sales teams to get caught up and excited about generating leads. Unfortunately, over time these leads build up, and we can neglect to clean out the sales funnel.  

The truth is - cleaning out your sales funnel ultimately results in higher ROI by focusing your resources on those leads that will move through your sales cycle quickly and ultimately become the loyal customers you love.  Not only will cleaning out your sales funnel do this, but you will also find holes in your conversion paths and identify opportunities to improve your sales funnel. Because many inbound marketers are already utilizing the technology and strategies necessary, they can be extremely helpful in cleaning out your sales funnel and adding to the bottom-line.

5 Ways Marketing Can Help Clean Up The Sales Funnel

1. Attract the Right Prospects: One of the best ways to clean up your sales funnel is to be proactive and attract the right prospects to your sales funnel. First, inbound marketers have spent time developing marketing personas to use in creating targeted content. This ensures that the traffic coming through your door aren’t bogging down your sales funnel.

2. Closed-Loop Reporting: Many companies have began to adopt marketing analytics tools and CRMs that allow them to have more technologically advanced reporting, but many have failed to integrate the two to get the metrics that really matter. With a closed-loop reporting tool like HubSpot, marketers are able to identify the channels, conversion paths, touch points, and timing that leads to ROI, which allows you to clear up your sales funnel.

3. Lead Segmentation/Qualifying: Marketers who understand the importance of targeted campaigns are already segmenting their lead database by needs, demographics and behavior.  This information easily allows you to easily qualify any leads who don’t fall into your target market.

4. Email Marketing: One of the quickest ways to clean out a sales funnel is to rid of those who simply don’t engage with your company anymore.  Marketers send out email campaigns, track the performance and can then use this data to remove any leads from your sales funnel who gone cold.  

5. Creating Loyal Customers: Did you know that loyal customers generate an average of 80% of total company revenue?   While leadership, sales and other people or aspects of your company contribute to loyal customers, marketing has a pivotal role in keeping customers engaged. Since your sales funnel can be filled with new prospects and existing customers, it is important to keep both audiences engaged.  Marketing can help to create content that serves the needs of customers, which are usually different than the needs of prospects or leads in your sales funnel. This will ultimately keep your sales funnel full of loyal customers who bring you more revenue.

When is the last time you cleaned your sales funnel? Is it time to do a detox, but you don’t think you have the internal marketing resources to do the job?I Use the team at SmartBug as an extension of your team. Request a marketing assessment today!