Do you have enough qualified leads? Are you completely set for the rest of your business’s life?

If you’re not, you might have some problems with your marketing funnel.

Have you completely mapped it out?

If not, take a look at these tips (thanks to Fergal Glynn for finding many of these):

1. Minimize the Number of Steps in Your Sales Funnel

The Brian Carter Group found you lose more than 50% of your prospects at every sales step. That’s true for digital marketing, anyway.

He uses an example where 10,000 people see your Facebook post:

  • About 2% click – 200 people (9,800 people lost)
  • 10% add your product to their cart – 20 people (180 lost)
  • 50% check out – 10 people (10 lost)
  • 50% pay – 5 people (5 lost)

Out of the initial number of people that saw your Facebook post, just 5 (.05%!) buy. You lost 9,995 sales.

What to learn: Analyze your entire sales funnel, and remove any unnecessary steps.

2. Forgetting to Make Payment Easy

Meagan Rhodes, the Digital Marketing Lead of @Pay, said “not adding a simple payments technology to their websites and e-mails” is one of the biggest sales funnel mistakes she sees.

Her interesting stat:

39% of e-mail recipients read e-mails on their smartphones and click to your website. Just 13% of them buy – dropping out at the final step of the purchase.

What to learn: Use Paypal or GoogleWallet to accept payments. This takes the sales process down a couple clicks and removes long billing and shipping forms.

3. Don’t Get Sales Involved Too Early!

You’ve heard many times before sales and marketing need to work together. Barney Cohen, CEO of Business 360 Northwest, took a past company (Valley Media) to $900 million in sales.

He learned it’s not sales’ responsibility to take the customer from awareness to purchase. He says the first 2/3 of the sales process falls under marketing’s responsibility.

Marketing handles everything – until the prospect shows they’re ready to buy. Sales shouldn’t do any prospecting. They should only present your products and services and take orders.

What to learn: Assign the right responsibilities to sales and marketing. Make sure they work together – not against – each other.

4. Don’t Let Your Salespeople Manage Their Own Funnel

This isn’t a knock against salespeople. Asking them to identify a repeatable sales process that works is too much for any one person – even sales superstars.

That responsibility falls on your organization, says Patrick Sprouse, who’s managed sales teams up to 200. If you don’t have a process in place, you trust your salesperson’s gut.

And as we know, data is more reliable than anyone’s gut.

What to learn: Your organization needs to have a sales process in place that it constantly tests and refines.

Those are some common sales funnel mistakes that happen out in the field.

Which do you do? Are you willing to take steps to improve them?

');