Understanding the customer journey through the sales funnel is incredibly important. There are several key stages of the sales funnel, typically known as the top, middle and bottom parts of the funnel. By analysing the sales funnel, you can gain valuable insights on how to invest in the right marketing activities or channels, all while creating the most relevant messaging during each stage to convert qualified prospects into buyers.
However, many sales reps or business owners often struggle with actually maintaining customer engagement throughout the sales funnel. After many days or even weeks of sales pitches, calls and demos, the prospect can often drop out of the sales funnel without actually purchasing anything at all. To combat this issue, it’s pivotal to plan and manage your sales funnel using the right tools – and that’s where Leado comes in!
What is Leado?
Leado is an automated cloud-based software solution focused on generating and nurturing leads, using your LinkedIn profile to effectively reach out to your potential clients. This advanced tool lets you schedule a sequence of automated messages that manage the top of funnel approach to your sales process. Leado also has various engagement features which can be used by different stakeholders aside from sales reps, such as startups to attract investors and recruiters to find potential candidates.
Integrating Leado throughout the Sales Funnel
Generally speaking, there are 4 main stages of the Sales Funnel (progressing from the top to the bottom): awareness, interest, decision and action (AIDA model). You can use Leado’s features and tools throughout each of these stages to optimise your lead generation efforts.
- Awareness
The first stage of the sales funnel is called the Awareness level, because it’s basically when people become aware of your product or service. They may have heard about you through traditional advertising methods, social media, digital channels (e.g. website or blog) or even word-of-mouth. For this scenario, your prospect may have found your company through your targeted LinkedIn Ads. But how exactly do you even target the right customers in the first place?
Using Leado, you can properly target your ideal audience by setting up an active LinkedIn Premium or Sales Navigator account. Once you have this set up, it only takes a few minutes to start automating your LinkedIn outreach with the Leado software. Using its advanced filtering capabilities, you can start searching for the most qualified prospects based on categories such as Location, Industry, Company size, Title, Seniority Level, Company Size and much more.
Throughout your Leado campaign, you can resonate with prospects by displaying a cohesive sequence of LinkedIn ads, personalised messages and InMails, designed to optimise sales conversion. This could include more captivating subject lines, personalised greetings, snappy content, and powerful CTAs. You can also optimise your company’s LinkedIn page by using a professional profile banner, crafting Showcase Pages, writing a compelling About Us section with relevant keywords, building a career page, collecting endorsements and displaying your various offered services in key fields.
- Interest
The second stage of the sales funnel is Interest, which occurs when the customer begins doing their own research, comparison shopping and evaluating alternatives. At this level, they’ll start thinking about the problem they’re trying to solve, so this is a crucial stage to ensure that you’re selling them a uniquely relevant and tailored solution to meet their needs.
A key component of maintaining interest with the customer is to avoid overwhelming them with your product or service. If you push your solution too hard, it will turn off prospects and chase them away, causing them to drop out of the sales funnel completely. The goal here is to establish your professional expertise, and offer to help the customer in any way possible so that they can make their own informed decision.
You can boost interest by using Leado’s engagement features. For instance, it allows you to select the desired level of automation and engagement, providing you with relevant features like Connection Invites, Sequential Messaging, Free InMails, Twitter Engagement or Profile View Generator. Sequential messaging is particularly effective since it conveys an intriguing story that compels the desired audience to convert over time. This allows you to form a more powerful connection with the user that evolves throughout the conversion process.
- Decision
Decision is the third stage of the sales funnel, which refers to the moment when the customer is ready to purchase. They might also be considering some other possible options, including you.
This is the perfect opportunity to make the best offer – this could be free shipping, discount codes, bonus products, upgrades, extended trials / demos, webinars, etc. You could even provide more comprehensive info about your company as your prospects dig deeper into pricing or packaging options.
When integrating Leado into this stage, you should pay special attention to the Sequential Messaging tool. Remember that the sales funnel narrows as visitors move through it, with more prospects situated at the top of the funnel compared to buyers at the bottom. This inevitably means that your messaging needs to become increasingly targeted and relevant to the prospect so that they will make the decision to buy from you.
- Action
The fourth stage of the Sales Funnel is Action, located at the very bottom of the funnel. This essentially boils down to whether the prospect makes a purchase or not. If you’re successful, the customer buys your product or service, and becomes part of your business’s ecosystem. However, even if they didn’t, the deal isn’t lost forever. You can further nurture these prospects through the aforementioned engagement features offered by Leado and LinkedIn to make sure that you’re a viable solution to their problems.
Additionally, even if the customer does make a purchase, it doesn’t mean that all your work is over. You still need to maintain customer retention and loyalty so that there are repeat sales and more long-term revenue for your business. You can do this by expressing gratitude for the purchase, inviting customer feedback, giving rewards / incentives for word-of-mouth referrals, and making yourself available for tech support.
To optimise the chances of your prospect buying from you, you can use A/B testing through your Leado campaign. This refers to the process of comparing two versions of a marketing asset (e.g. landing page, email copy, etc.) and measuring the variations in performance. Leado allows you to have multiple campaigns so that you can compare AB test messaging, similar to a Facebook or Google ads campaign. For example, you can test which versions of your Linkedin InMail subject line, personalised greeting or CTA works better.
Optimise your Sales with Leado
The benefits of integrating Leado tools into your lead generation process can add immense value to your pipeline. Using this incredible tool, you can acquire customers outside of your network and enter new markets within days.
Optimising your Leado campaign means that you can reach your desired audience much more quickly and effectively – yet this can be an overwhelming process for many beginners. That’s why Leado enables you to get access to Email Support, 1-on-1 Strategy Calls and a dedicated Account Manager to get the most out of your campaign. Contact us for more info!
