Understanding your current business situation is the first step in business growth. To grow a business, it must understand what they do and why.
Businesses can use the Growth Mapping framework to understand their business better and identify opportunities that will allow them to reach their goals. This involves asking tough questions about all aspects of the organization, including interactions with prospects that could one day become customers.
This involves asking tough questions about all aspects of the organization, including interactions with prospects and customers.
Defining Your Sales Pipeline
Begin by taking a closer look at your sales process. What are the key interactions within your sales process? How can you tell if they are working? How can they be optimized? All these questions need to be answered.
These key interactions are first defined. Then, they need to be reviewed and optimized to increase revenue.
This exercise will allow you to trace the customer journey, from first contact to paying customers. Please start with the prospect’s first contact and follow their progress through your sales funnel until they become clients.
Key Exercise: Mapping and Measuring Your Sales Pipeline
Each stage of the pipeline requires you to qualify prospects before you can move on. The qualification call is the first. It’s where you find out if they are able to meet your needs. If so, then move on to the next interaction. Depending on the type of business, you could meet in person or give them an online demo.
We try to understand prospects’ needs at every stage.
Measure the Performance of Your Sales Funnel
This example shows how 5% website visitors convert to inquiries. Let’s say that your company receives 12,000 visitors per year. This converts to 600 leads.
After qualifying calls, 25% convert into site surveys or other interactions that give us an in-depth view of their needs.
From the 600 initial leads, 50 percent of those who completed site surveys wanted a quote. Of the 75 quotes that were issued, approximately half of them are closed as sales.
These interactions can provide data that will help you establish a baseline for your business and allow you to identify any potential weaknesses or opportunities in your sales pipeline.
Improving Your Sales Funnel’s Performance
It is possible to double your web traffic and increase leads. However, it takes time. It might be more cost-effective to maintain the same number visitors to your site while increasing conversion rates by 2% – 3%. This is because you don’t need additional marketing budget or resources.
This could be used to find ways to increase conversion rates after site surveys (e.g. by changing the content or message). Keep the close rate at 50% for your next interaction and you will see 37 customers grow to 52. By focusing on one part of your funnel, you can make dramatic improvements.
Enhancing or refining key sales interactions is one way to increase revenue. You can do much more than what the visitor sees online once you have converted them to your website.
This exercise will help you see that your website is not the only thing that matters. Once your customers have converted from browsing to purchasing, there are many other opportunities available for you.
