Let’s talk about marketing funnels and sales pipelines.
Your Website should be your Marketing Funnel
Your funnel should be fed by multiple sources of leads
Your CRM should communicate with your Website
Follow these three “Golden Rues” and you will be fine. Here’s some more detail to explain:
Your Website should be your marketing funnel
A small business has no business having a website if it doesn’t produce new business (sales). Yes, customers can go there to learn about you, but that is not the primary objective of a website. The primary objective is to sell. Design your website so that it is made up of “landing pages”, then, link those landing pages to take your customer on a journey down your funnel.
A Landing page is a webpage that has a defined action the user can take. The user is given no other choices. For example: “Click Here to book”. Webpages that let viewers click around and read are useless nowadays. Landing pages that are linked, ask customers questions and take information and feed them back to you are useful. This is called a “Marketing funnel”.
Your Funnel should be fed by multiple sources of leads
A small business must not rely on the crack-cocaine-like lead sources from the likes of Trust-a-trader, Bark or Check-a-trade. These companies are pernicious in the long run. Rather, a small business should have two to four of their own channels that will produce leads. Leads THEY OWN. Typical low-cost channels for lead creation are: Facebook groups, email lists, local, targeted, social media advertising, Google, word-of-mouth and SEO. Each of these lead sources should aim to take the prospect as quickly as possible through the funnel, out the other end, with an order in hand. The way this is best achieved is automation. You should not even need to see leads that are not ready to buy. Your funnel should do all that for you. This is done by linking a quality CRM to your funnel.
Your CRM should be an integral part of your funnel / Website
Nowadays it is easy to set up funnels that take leads from any source and automatically “treat” them. In this example, different sources of leads need to be treated in different ways. For example: A Word-of-mouth enquiry may not need to see additional details before being asked to “book in a free estimate visit” or whatever other actions you want them to take. Whereas an enquiry from a Facebook ad may need to see several pieces of information and go through a few funnel pages before they are ready to buy or book.
Your CRM will handle all your quotes, orders, stock purchasing and invoicing later. But right now, it MUST be part of these funnels. Gathering information and following the journey from suspect, to prospect, to client for you.
Zway CRM does all of the above. You can buy it for as little as £69 for a once-off perpetual license.
