Relying on great products or services is often enough for long-term business success once you are well established. However, if you are starting out, you have to earn that trust first. And not everyone that will become a customer at a later point will trust you from the start. If you can’t sell your own product somewhat systematically, you will loose. Thus, you have to do sales — and you might want to use a sales pipeline early on.
As a self starter, I’ve learned this the hard way. I’m just a late bloomer, I think.
At the beginning, I did have some bad connotations with sales in general. I never grew up knowing good sales people. The only ones I knew were sleazy and greasy type vendors for insurances.
It took a while to understand, that there are different types of sales people. But even sleazy sales guys need some structure. To know what to do, when and which customer is at which point in the negotiation. ... I mean, you can also just wing it and leave it to your first sales rep to clean up your mess, that works pretty well.
The TL:DR: Get a kanban board, put the prospects on the left, paying customers on the right. Add two three stages in between so you know if you have contacted them. To step it up, use a free CRM tool, so you have a contact list and sales funnel in one. Done
The Sales Stages
At its core, a sales pipeline is the journey a potential customer takes from discovering your product to making a purchase.
There is a lot of theory out there, you will hear about awareness, interest, decision, and action. The attention states provide a roadmap for effective customer engagement and business success. The more this becomes linked with marketing, the more sense it will make to you regarding what infos people need at which stage.
On na note: I dislike the often used Sales-Funnel label. I know its semantics, yes, but the idea of a funnel is, that all that you put in on top comes out at the bottom. At least, in chemistry it should. Loosing 98% of customers between lead and conversion does not sound like a funnel to me. More like a leaking water bottle in a backpack. I prefer to use journeys, or sales pyramids, Crowdtamers Marketing uses the sales pyramid analogy as well and explains it nicely. (not affiliated) Use what makes sense to you.
Anyway. By breaking down the customer journey, their jobs they need to do, into stages, you can differentiate what the customer needs at which step.
If it is your first time, I really recommend to start your sales funnel in a CRM. Be it zoho, monday, hubspot, odoo or whatever. (CRM = customer relationship management)
The reason is, that you build up a database of your customers while doing sales.
At a certain point you will have customer support and will hire someone. Then you need a place to keep all the customer data and to take notes. Thus, it makes sense to start using a scalable system from the start.
I used a free trello board when I started. Which was enough. However, at some point I had called hundreds of people and it got messy to keep up with the notes. Thus, I transferred all customer data into a CRM and set it up properly. That was a pain that took about a week.
Prospects and Leads
The first stage is where potential customers become aware of your product or service. I now distinguish between inbound and outbound sales stages, but to start, throw all in one pot. You can hire a sales rep to tinker with the details once you are profitable.
If I find potential customers, I add them to the prospects stage (people that are potential customers, often called leads). After I researched them and they are worth being reached out to, I put them into a stage called qualified leads.
I like to fill the prospect stage through industry research in B2B. There are a lot of lists, organisations and so on to find businesses. In B2C or D2C the playing field is totally different, a lot more happens via content production and search engines. I focus on B2B for now. If you do B2C, you can do the same but use a customer journey instead, and optimise each contact step.
Building Interest
The next stage is building interest in your product or service. I've found that calling the business, followed by personalised emails are a pretty effective method to nurture interested potential customers. Also, providing valuable content, of course. Calls are particularly effective when working with blue collar companies. I'll write about that another time.
What is true, that to build trust, you need to provide value, and you have to keep at it. They usually have enough to do already, and then you show up. So make it worth their while. Define the cadence that you want to go for, as sometimes they will simply forget, as do we. (Cadence is the amount of contacts per x days that you have with them. For instance, on day one you call, three days later a follow up email, one week later a re call...)
Converting Leads into Customers
The next stage is where potential customers make a decision and become paying customers. This is where a well-implemented CRM system becomes a valuable tool.
By creating a custom sales pipeline, you can keep track of where leads are in the funnel in real-time and be more responsive to their needs. We added a Tec-PingPong phase. It is usually the phase, where we need additional team-members with technical help. We will sort out the contracts, check individual demands and potentially negotiate final terms.
Certain industries are really slow, so this takes time. I tend to help them keep their eyes looking forward. Thus, starting to discuss pilot projects or potential rollouts while the tec stuff happens. Mainly, because the management often is not directly involved anymore.
With a CRM, you can keep track of all the meeting notes, know what is left to do with creating tasks and so on. As soon as more than one person is involved, it will make your life a lot easier.
Building Trust and the Repeat Business
Once a prospect has become a customer, I've found that it's crucial to focus on maintaining customer satisfaction, encouraging repeat business, and fostering loyalty.
A great way to achieve this is by following up with personalised communication, such as rollout check ins for a while.
Depending on your product you will also need feedback from them. Maybe you can even recommend them a customer as well? If you have a relationship, the chances that they churn are a lot lower.
Sending personalised offers, promotions, content news or newsletters and stuff becomes now a lot easier. Of course, scraping your email to find hundreds of customer emails is also a possibility.
I believe it is absolutely worth it to create a proper sales pipeline. I have now done it for several startups and it helped all of them massively. To keep track of prospects, being motivated when closing a deal and also to help them tune down on the mental load.
Filling the notes in is tedious, but in the long run, it is 100% worth it.
Ok, that was a long post today, thanks for your time.
Cheers