Are you using your funnel the wrong way?

Quality in. Quality out

If you want quality leads to enter your sales funnel, you must develop an Intent marketing strategy. An Intent marketing strategy is designed to help potential customers through the qualification process. Intent marketing relies on a content strategy that allows leads at every stage of the qualification process. Intent marketing content covers awareness, education, validation, and conversion phases. 

It starts with the assumption that some potential clients may need more understanding of a challenge or opportunity, so you provide them with non-sales-related info to help them move to the next stage in the sales process. It is only during the validation process that you start to push your specific product and service offers. Intent marketing also includes content for others who may need to be more knowledgeable on a subject but are integral to the decision-making process. (e.g., finance, board members). It supports all levels of understanding and multiple roles through the qualification process.

Call to action

There are opportunities to interact with your sales funnel to overcome the inertia that results in stalled or failed conversions. You can use the Freakonomics model to provide something of value to prospects in return for additional actionable information. An example is the project calculators Digital Storytelling Collective has developed for ERP and enterprise-level software providers that deliver individual business cases for companies to adopt new software. 

These report builders provide a resource for project leaders to demonstrate the overall cost of a solution, the immediate financial and time savings, and the risk mitigation. They also show how our client's software makes a business more robust and scalable. 

From a business development perspective, these reports provide software providers with granular information on prospect companies and allow BDM managers to focus on fulfilling prospects' identified needs.

Multiple touch points

In the B2B space, sales cycles can be long and unpredictable. Over time staff and circumstances of companies change, which can lead to hot sales going cold. To defend against this, you need a marketing strategy that allows you to constantly remind prospects why they were interested in your company's offer initially. 

If you expect your BDM team to do this, they will go from being viewed as a resource by a prospect to being an annoyance. 

To stay front-of-mind, you must create and maintain multiple touch points (e.g., content discoverable through organic searches, social media posts, and email) and create opportunities for leads to qualify themselves further.

Five is the magic number

Research indicates that it takes an average of five interactions for a prospect to contact a B2B provider. If you don't have an Intention based content strategy, then you have little chance of reaching that magic number.

Suppose you're inconsistent with your website updates, social media posts and emails. If this is the case, you need opportunities to qualify leads into your sales funnel and convert them to long-term clients. An inconsistent communication strategy also creates communication gaps that allow prospects in your sales funnel to migrate over time to competitors' funnels. 

If you're not providing the opportunities for your prospects to qualify themselves further, and you're not delivering your BDMs the opportunities they need to convert leads into sales. In that case, you're using your sale funnel the wrong way.