There Is Gold in the Middle of the Funnel

What if there was another 10–20 percent worth of sales lingering somewhere inside your integrated sales and marketing funnel? Chances are, there is. The good news is that you can find that hidden revenue if you look in the right place. By addressing spots where opportunities get stalled out—usually the tricky middle section where leads move from marketing to sales—sales and marketing teams can take action to get leads moving down the funnel again.

Leads often get stuck in the middle sales funnel as they continue to receive marketing content but don’t take that crucial step forward to interact with sales. You can often recognize sticking points by looking for where leads are ballooning (you can visualize it as that cartoon of the boa constrictor with the suspicious lump in its midsection). If you see a place in the middle of your funnel where a disproportionate number of leads are gathering, that is a major indicator of where you are missing out on a sizable chunk of revenue.

It is easy for your progress to become buried mid funnel, and if you aren’t paying attention, you might not even know gold is there. If you don’t have your processes in place and mapped to the sales funnel, it can be frustrating to try to figure out which leads are ready to progress to the buying stage and which are still in need of nurturing. If everyone knows their role and you have complete data, you are much more likely to hit the mother lode.

Finding and Fixing Funnel Clogs

The sales funnel has stages, touch points for digital marketing and steps for salespeople to follow as they nurture leads. When the activities and tracking metrics within these stages are set up correctly, you will be able to see where leads are getting stuck or having low conversion rates. You can also see where conversions are high and where you should be concentrating your efforts to replicate them.

Look for Larger and Growing Populations in Your Funnel

Identifying where populations are starting to balloon within your funnel is the first step to finding and clearing the clog. Usually, these leads are stuck somewhere in the middle stage, where they have for one reason or another not taken that next action to move them forward on their buyer’s journey.

Use Quantitative and Qualitative Data for Insights 

If you are scoring your leads and tracking them, you are more likely to be able to tell where their interest dries up. There should be an observable difference in the numbers between one action and the next. The numbers aren’t going to tell you why people may be getting stuck or how you can fix it. Providing that qualitative data is where your integrated team comes in. If you can point out what activity is damming up the lead stream, they may be able to use their knowledge of the customers and the questions they ask and what they respond to and propose solutions.

Revisit the Steps You Take to Move Leads Down and Through Your Funnel

When you have the data attached to every activity in the funnel, you can see what next actions are not being taken, and you can investigate what might be keeping someone from taking it. If they sign up for your email list and then never open a single thing that comes into the inbox, you may need to review whether the content you are sending is valuable. If they are scheduling a meeting with a salesperson and then not showing up, it might be time to review the way you schedule meetings or send reminders. Discovering a solution to get leads flowing again might take some trial and error, but you will have the data to prove you are focusing on the correct problem rather than flailing around making uninformed guesses.

The Rewards of Targeting Your Choke Points

When you’ve tracked and quantified your problem areas, you will also get the satisfaction of seeing the numbers rise once one of your strategies begins to work. In one instance, a marketing department organized twice-monthly webinars that generated about three hundred to five hundred sign-ups. However, only about 25 percent of people who signed up were attending. Marketing was doing their job by generating sign-ups, but they weren’t sure how to change their technique to get people to actually attend the webinar.

This is where the magic of sales and marketing integration comes in. To fix this problem, the business got the sales team involved and had them start calling people who signed up to remind them to attend. It worked.

Implementing that new strategy also gave the organization a point to work from when they observed another chokepoint: people who attended the webinar but didn’t book an appointment afterward. To address this, the business's sales development representative contacted individuals who didn’t book, and the business was able to generate a 10–20 percent increase in appointments after each webinar. This went on to result in a 10–20 percent revenue boost as well.

If the sales organization hadn’t had the CRM set up to track data for all our activities in the funnel, they would have been able to quantify only the very top and the very bottom. If marketing brought in a thousand leads and sales was only closing twenty of them, without data, the only suggestions would be for marketing to bring in two thousand leads or for the sales team to just try harder (whatever that means).

Make the Most of Your Sales Funnels

Every business leader wants to “do more of what’s working and less of what’s not.” There are too many sales and marketing departments who don’t know how to begin following that direction. Without clarity, you have no idea whether the actions you take to repair your revenue problems make any difference, positive or negative.

If you have one sales funnel set up for your company, you can have multiple. If you are tracking KPIs for the number of leads you bring in and the number of sales you close, you can also have them for every discrete activity in each of your funnels. Drilling down to those tiny details can help you diagnose problems and eventually multiply revenue.

Learn More

A healthy relationship between sales and marketing is vital to an organization’s success. Dive deep into this effective strategy in our book  Sales & Marketing Alignment. If you'd like more insights on how you can improve your sales leadership, contact us.


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