As a business owner, you may have come across the term, ‘sales funnel’ a lot. But, does this marketing jargon confuse you? Fret not, as today’s MSP Advantage blog post dissects the sales funnel for you and explains it’s 3 main sections.
The sales funnel is a model frequently used to describe the purchase cycle. The basic concept can be broken down into three parts:
ToFu: Top of the funnel or ToFu is the stage when you “attract” the prospects to your product or service. You do this primarily through content marketing and advertising. From a search engine perspective, content is the best method to attract prospects to your brand. Content writers are engaged to create meaningful and purpose oriented content for the target audience. This content is search engine optimized (or advertised or both) to pull traffic to your website or blog. A well-established platform for content optimization is Social Media. Talking about the written content and sharing it with your social media contacts is a very effective (not to mention, Google universally accepted) method to up your search engine ranking. Undertaking these activities will help you gather enough fodder (read prospects) for the top of your sales funnel. (Here’s how you can create engaging content) (Link to ready-to-use content info on msp site)
MoFu: The middle of the funnel (MoFu) is a selective club. Not all who made it to the top can find their way down here. As you see the shape of a funnel narrows downwards, this means that the number of prospects is reduced at every stage. In this stage, the marketers have to identify the ones who are really interested in what you have to offer. You can do this by tracking the activity of the prospects, whenever they engage in a conversation with you. For instance, say you run a real estate website and of the visitors who regularly visit your blog, there is this visitor who frequents the cloud services pages and checks out more links in this section than any other section. Through a real time 360-degree tracking of the prospect, you will know what interests your prospect. This is how you can do it – http://www.mspadvantageprogram.com/msp-sales-enablement-software-features/#rel-tim-360)
This data is used in this stage to:-
- Nurture a deeper relationship with the prospects (henceforth to be known as leads
- Cross sell or up sell a product to an existing customer
BoFu: This is more like an exclusive club, by invitation only. The leads have been identified, their interests recorded and you are well acquainted with the activities of the lead, specific interest and know exactly what and how would be the ideal way to pitch to the lead.
Stay tuned for our blog post next week, as we tell you how you can stretch your sales funnel to drive maximum revenue.