{"id":7854,"date":"2011-08-02T13:55:58","date_gmt":"2011-08-02T13:55:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/?p=7854"},"modified":"2023-09-05T02:04:25","modified_gmt":"2023-09-05T02:04:25","slug":"sales-leaders-whats-above-your-b2b-sales-funnel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/?p=7854","title":{"rendered":"Sales Leaders, What&#8217;s Above Your B2B Sales Funnel?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sales leaders, improving B2B lead generation results starts by looking at your sales pipeline definitions, specifically the FIRST stage in your sales process.\u00a0 Does it begin as many do with something like <em>Opportunity Identified<\/em> or <em>Qualifying Opportunity<\/em>?<\/p>\n<p>If you\u2019re like most B2B organizations, Stage One of your sales pipeline is likely a vaguely defined term like one of these we mentioned.\u00a0\u00a0 It is supposed to represent all the opportunities your sales team is allegedly \u201cqualifying\u201d into real deals.\u00a0 Fact is, most sales leaders rarely inspect this stage and fewer still ever count these deals when valuing their pipeline.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Why?\u00a0 Because smart B2B Sales Leaders know most Stage One leads are crap!<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Stage One is the safe zone for reps to park all those prospects, would-be prospects, leads they may some day call back, and leads that died a long time ago.\u00a0\u00a0 It looks good if there are a lot of them in there because it implies great things down the road.<\/p>\n<p>The reality is this stage, and what precedes it, is highly influential in terms of setting the sales organization up for success.\u00a0\u00a0 Not enough qualified leads Above the Funnel (as 3FORWARD calls it) dooms the sales team to missing the number.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s that simple.\u00a0 How do you get better at managing it?\u00a0 We suggest three steps.<\/p>\n<p><strong>1. <\/strong><strong>Creating a B2B Sales Lead Process.<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Establish specific stages of a Lead pipeline.<\/li>\n<li>Define the exact criteria that allow a lead to progress from one stage to the next.<\/li>\n<li>Set goals for the number of leads in each of these stages.\u00a0 Measure and report against these goals weekly.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>2. <\/strong><strong>Formalize and assign the responsibility of Lead Creation.<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Today\u2019s recognized best-practice is for marketing to own Lead Management -from targeting and identification through the qualification stage where leads are promoted to sales.\u00a0 If this is possible with your organization, work now to make this happen.<\/li>\n<li>Apply goals and metrics for how many qualified leads are needed each month to adequately load the top of the sales funnel.\u00a0 You need to create enough leads at the top so there enough opportunities reaching the final pipeline stages to allow the company to achieve its revenue target.<\/li>\n<li>Download our Do I Have Enough Leads Calculator to help you determine this number.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>3. <\/strong><strong>Create a Lead Lifecycle Management program built on Marketing Automation.<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>To create a sustained volume of qualified leads you need a multi-channel, diverse combination of out-bound and in-bound marketing built on lots of value add content, events, social media and other activities.<\/li>\n<li>Marketing Automation, combined with other best practices such as segmentation will enable automated lead nurturing, web-site tracking, lead scoring, personalized communications and lead stage tracking.<\/li>\n<li>Download\u00a0the white paper Increasing Sales Effectiveness with Marketing Automation for lessons learned, tips, checklists and more to make your MA program a success.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>This is a lot of work!\u00a0 Remind me the benefits.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Applying the same \u201cpipeline\u201d rigor to leads and providing visibility to the process is the way to improving the number and quality of your leads.\u00a0 Better leads also result in improved Sales Effectiveness when the sales team can focus their full efforts on qualified opportunities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sales leaders, improving B2B lead generation results starts by looking at your sales pipeline definitions, specifically the FIRST stage in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7854"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7854"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7854\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8194,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7854\/revisions\/8194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}