A properly constructed B2B sales and marketing funnel improves sales and marketing alignment. In addition, it guarantees that initiatives are optimized across both teams to accelerate the sales cycle.
Aligning sales and marketing teams for enhanced business operations and customer retention is a multi-step process. It entails establishing standards, expectations, goals, and procedures that guarantee leads moving through the buying process quickly and smoothly.
This article will discuss building a b2b funnel to achieve sales and marketing collaboration for a faster buying process.
How to build a b2b sales and marketing funnel
Your B2B sales and marketing funnel will be tailored to your business and its unique positioning. As a result, even your most direct rivals will not have the same resources, tools, and models as you.
So how do you achieve a strong sales funnel without a template?
1. Identify your objectives and goals
Your pipeline goals and objectives will define everything. So look at them before looking at any business processes.
You might decide to concentrate on:
- Total sales
- Rate of conversion
- Average sale value
- Retention Rate
- Customer satisfaction metrics
It’s crucial to keep in mind that you don’t need just one funnel. The customer journey will alter depending on your aims and the audience you’re trying to reach.
Establish specific KPIs to measure your b2b sales and marketing funnel progress.
2. Understanding your market
Consider taking the time to determine precisely before moving forward with any marketing strategy. To do that, you must create a profile of your ideal client and decide how to gauge a target account’s readiness to buy.
Developing your Ideal Customer Persona
The characteristics that sales and marketing agree upon and use to determine whether a lead is qualified or not make up an ideal customer persona.
The first step in creating your ideal customer persona is as easy as describing your ideal customer. These people will benefit most from your product or service and can provide you with something in exchange (referrals, long customer lifetime value, evangelism, etc.).
Interview some of your best clients; enquire about the factors that made your service beneficial to them, and note the traits.
Finally, you should answer these six critical questions:
- What sector do they work in?
- What’s the size the company?
- What’s their budget?
- Who is the decision maker in the company? What is their general process to start engaging with a solution like yours?
- What are their pain points?
- What are their goals and objectives?
3. Align the sales and marketing teams
You’ll need to utilize various skills and expertise to be as productive as possible.
Making sure that sales and marketing alignment is smooth is crucial for your success. Your funnel becomes significantly less effective when communication between those two teams breaks down, and silos form.
If you’ve never used a B2B sales and marketing funnel before, this may be a significant change for you. Gain your team’s support by demonstrating the new funnel’s value to improve everyone’s lives (and ROI!).
4. Produce material for the entire sales and marketing funnel
You will want to provide your potential consumers with valuable content at every stage of the buyer’s journey. For example, your marketing team might spend a lot of time creating SEO blogs but not enough time developing compelling case studies if there isn’t clear communication.
You could miss out on chances to create fresh content by working with your sales team and developing content that covers the complete customer lifecycle.
Don’t forget the sales materials, either! You cannot attract a lead with highly compelling online content and then attempt to convert them using an old sales PowerPoint.
Use sales and marketing collaboration to produce effective sales materials that may be utilized to convert leads into opportunities and closed deals.
Continuously optimize your b2b sales and marketing funnel
Your B2B sales and marketing funnel shouldn’t look the same in two years. This change will be enabled when you regularly check your results and adjust your optimization.
Creating the funnel and then unwinding is not the goal. After building a solid foundation, you can now focus on the small touches that will elevate it. Finally, have a procedure to help you monitor results so you can keep improving.
