How to Create a B2B Sales Funnel?

Creating a B2B sales funnel is usually challenging because it requires patience, effort, and expertise to make a funnel that converts visitor to leads, and turns leads into clients. Even when it appears to be very difficult, the sales journey of your consumer is frequently defined as an organized and consistent procedure.

Many companies use a procedure that turns a prospective consumer into a paying customer, which is known as a sales funnel. A sales funnel begins with gathering fresh leads and continues with nurturing those leads until they convert to clients.

Let’s understand how to create a B2B sales funnel before reviewing some of the top techniques for building a funnel that will increase conversions and boost your business’s earnings.

What is a B2B Sales Funnel?

A B2B sales funnel demonstrates to businesses how their clients are engaging with their brand. It outlines the steps people take to become customers and specifies the business activities that are to be carried out at each stage of the sales funnel.

It’s a conventional wisdom, that you must know who your customer is. Creating a B2B Sales Funnel without understanding Ideal Customer Profile and having Buyer Personas in advance, it will be quite hard to achieve high results with any B2B Sales Funnel.

– Although there are many different kinds of sales funnels, they always have the following characteristics:

– Make your customer aware of your company’s products or services through marketing channels.

– Then present your customers an enticing offer that they can’t refuse and start establishing initial contact with your company’s

– You should use several follow-up procedures to encourage your clients to make purchases after the initial contact. 

How B2B Sales Funnel differs from B2C Sales Funnel?

Although, B2B Sales Funnels and B2C Sales Funnels sometimes have identical stages and functions, they usually differ by sales cycle and number of stages.

While B2C Funnel is usually a faster way to make sales, especially when speaking about non-expensive goods, B2B Sales Funnel is a longer way to push your target audience into a decision. B2B Sales Funnel must take into account different persons in a company that make decisions and impact the decisions makers.

While individuals in B2C can make a decision fast and buy something from you, B2B persons, as they are members of companies, usually have to think of their options to buy more precisely and then discuss with their partners or persons who can make a decision to buy.

You can look at a B2B sales funnel from both the customer’s and the company’s perspective.

B2B Sales Funnel stages from a customer’s perspective

Putting yourself in the shoes of a customer allows you to see that the classic B2B sales funnel has the following 5 stages:

1. Awareness – define the problem that your target audience has.

In this stage, you show the prospect that they have a problem. Sometimes people in companies don’t know that they really have a problem, it’s true. And they also have to know that this problem is something that can be resolved. A good example is an employee attrition, that one of our clients resolve – providing a software to calculate employee attrition and provide suggestions to take actions before an employee retires. After a company realises that they have a problem – “Not controlling enough employees’ attrition”, they will go to the next stage. BTW, below you can see the review of our work for Praisidio:

B2B Company Praisidio review

2. Consideration – companies look for solutions and compare them

Now Prospects have realised, that they have a problem and they will start searching for possible solutions. Potential consumers will be curious about what is offered on the market. So they’ll start investigating your business and/or a concrete proposal, compare it to other businesses. At this stage companies might check price, various reviews about service and support teams, quality of products, delivery schedules, and more.

3. Intention – your company seems to be a good fit

This stage starts when a company intends to buy your products or services. This stage mostly comes when a client has considered your company as a good fit to resolve their problem and is now looking for means to make a purchase or talk to your sales team.

The client’s ambiguity clears at this stage. The intention is something when a customer has already decided to purchase something from you but wants some assistance selecting the best good or service.

4. Action – the conversion is happened.

Congrats! The action comes as the last stage. This occurs when a prospect has made up their mind to purchase the goods or services and has taken some action. Usually it’s closing a deal, signing a retainer agreement, buying a SaaS Product and so on.

5. Happiness

When speaking about B2B, companies must be sure that they can keep in touch with vendor if they have any questions, face any bugs in software or need an assistance further.

5 Stages for B2B Sales Funnel

How to create a B2B Sales Funnel?

Also, in B2B the target audience are also people – employees, founders, investors of companies. So, please, know who your audience is, and not only information about a target company, but also about their people.

A good B2B sales funnel will have a direct route leading from the first point of contact to the final transaction.

If you need help with defining Buyer Personas and Ideal Customer Profiles, as well as creating a whole B2B Sales Funnel, schedule a free consultation with me.

The following steps help you create effective B2B sales funnel:

1. Set up your goals

Before working out your B2B Sales Funnel, don’t forget to define goals. It can be pushing your target audience to make a purchase, leave the important information via form, attending at a webinar and others.

It’s crucial to concentrate on a specific goal when working out a B2B sales funnel. This will enable you or your team to take in mind one or two main problems of your target audience and provide them with specific content that will attract.

2. Create a Lead Generation Magnet

Think of a value, that you can provide to your Buyer Persona. Then include this value into a lead magnet. Lead magnet is a perceived value for your target audience that is proposed for free in exchange for their contact information.

The goal of Lead Magnet is to be allowed contacting your buyer personas afterwards and know more information about them. Some examples of lead magnets are below:

– Free Trainings in YouTube

– Free trials to attract people to use your software

– Webinars

– eBooks

– White papers

– Various discounts

– Free demo of your software or service

And others

Usually Lead Magnets can be done separately and placed at a Landing Page, pages that have the highest number of visitors, Social Networks. Then it’s usually promoted by adds in case if you don’t have enough organic, social or referral traffic.

In my opinion, the best software allowing to do it – HubSpot. Velainn is a Certified HubSpot Solution Provider, and we enjoy creating Lead Magnets for our B2B Clients. Schedule a free consultation if you’re interested to know more.

BTW, a Free Consultation is a Lead Magnet:)

3. Qualify Leads

After leads have left their information, you should qualify them based on ready made qualification process. Not all Companies can be qualified as your potential clients. For example, your clients (Companies) might have a concrete geo location, have a specific minimum budget, specific industry and so on.

Partly, the qualification should be done in the previous phase when creating ads and content, though anyway each lead has to pass the qualification stage, so that you don’t waste your time or time of your sales department afterwards.

Keep an eye on your team’s real performance. There are several approaches to taking care of this, but you must choose one that fits you and your group. Tracking the number of leads produced, the number of meetings scheduled, or the number of sales concluded are a few examples of monitoring techniques.

4. Nurture qualified Leads

The key to developing a B2B sales funnel is to foster communication at every stage. Social networking, email, and telephone calls are examples of this. The goal is to engage the consumer in conversation so they may learn more about your company’s products/services. And also gain more trust.

A targeted and contextual email campaign can be a good option here.

The success of a firm depends on understanding the customer’s purchase process. Conversations are very important when you want to have long term B2B clients.

5. Set up your support and communication properly

After a purchase is made, the customer journey goes on, because you must be sure that all your clients (company members) are happy with your product and service. Based on what you sell or provide, to have a long term relationship you should provide all necessary support, resolve issues and answer questions ASAP, so that your clients are delighted and want to work with you long term.

So, get ready to be in touch with your clients, if needed – your sales and / or support team must be ready as well to any upcoming questions or concerns.

Conclusion

Making sales is the main goal of a company. B2B sales funnel is a comprehensive manual on how your company generates leads and closes deals. Although you won’t convert every prospect, even tiny increases in your conversion rate can significantly impact your organization. Effective B2B sales funnel is a nice way to increase customer conversion rate and gain new B2B clients. 

Get in touch with Velainn or schedule a free consultation, if you’re looking to improve your B2B Sales funnel and generate more revenue. 

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