Oscar Chavez is an industry leader invested in turning sales & marketing into profit. Founder of Growthly Group & The Boardroom Chairman.
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The B2B sales funnel model is a marketing strategy that operates based on the concept of revenue enablement, yet many companies fail to execute it to their benefit. A too-narrow focus on sales and/or marketing departments means instead of generating more revenue from funnel-based sales, revenue numbers fall by the end of the quarter.
Effective revenue enablement should view revenue capture not just from a sales/marketing perspective but also from a holistic viewpoint. A strong revenue enablement program will also integrate disciplines from outside of traditional sales and marketing, including design, systems and behavioral and data science. As a disclosure, my company Growthly Group is a provider of the revenue enablement program MarSales™.
In this article, I will address five common problems encountered within B2B sales funnels—and what features readers should seek to include in their revenue enablement solution.
1. A weak but results-driven value proposition can render companies forgettable.
In the first stages of a sales funnel, the marketing and sales departments typically work together to generate awareness of their product, then desire, then a willingness to perform an action such as making a purchase.
But where they often fail to foster this awareness and desire is by having a weak results-driven value proposition. They market their products based on their features and benefits rather than concrete results. This puts a bottleneck in the funnel.
To combat this, companies must invest a considerable amount of time in workshopping the results they provide for their customers. CEOs buy results, nothing else. They don’t care how it’s done until it’s not done properly.
So many companies spend hours of effort defining their product or service’s features and benefits—but these have little influence on the outcome of the deal unless you can also clearly articulate the results you can provide. Features and benefits are a commodity. Results offer value. Always sell value. This is at the very heart of revenue enablement.
2. Appointment-flow businesses beat lead-flow businesses every time.
Too often, lead-flow businesses that focus on leads waste precious time qualifying prospects—when salespeople should be focused on selling. Instead, companies should pivot to providing appointments for their sales reps to maximize the effectiveness of their sales staff.
An effective B2B sales funnel should qualify your prospects in an automated fashion. This way, your leads are already pre-vetted, and your sales team can focus on doing their job. By streamlining the prospecting process, you can also scale your business more effectively.
3. High-value sales teams waste too much time on low-value activities.
Too many companies allow their sales team's valuable time to be wasted on low-value activities: processing orders and billing, sitting in meetings, spending hours in their CRM or chasing leads through cold calls stemming from an ineffective marketing strategy.
Leaders must ensure their teams are able to focus exclusively on high-value activities like spending time with prospects.
To do this, your revenue enablement solution should enable you to thoroughly understand and document the sales process through each decision-making stage of your buyer's journey. This might include such factors as:
• How to entice your customer to decide to meet you.
• How to make a customer decide to buy from you.
• How to make a customer decide to keep buying from you.
If you can integrate these things into your buyer’s journey, then your sales results will multiply, allowing you to scale your business within your B2B sales funnel.
4. A low-converting buyer’s journey through an ineffective sales process leads to a leaky sales funnel.
If many of your potential sales never make it past the first few stages of the buyer’s journey, you’re most likely operating with a leaky sales funnel. A leaky B2B sales funnel reduces conversions, reduces deals and subsequently reduces revenue. This is the direct opposite of revenue enablement.
Companies can benefit from developing a nuanced understanding of each buyer—along with their decision-making process and pain points. This data should help you create content along each stage of the decision process. The content created needs to serve the desired result of helping your prospects understand you are the ideal solution for their pain points. This way, you can plug the holes in your sales funnel, creating a smoother and more seamless buyer’s journey.
5. To effectively measure each conversion point along the buyer's journey, you must have the right metrics in place.
Companies often find themselves not knowing how or where to improve their B2B sales funnel. This is because they don’t have any metrics in place to measure where their weak conversion points are—meaning they can’t track how to optimize and improve it.
Organizations can leverage a range of technologies to map and monitor their employees' performance. Yet while a standard leaderboard is a popular way to do this, it can also be shallow.
A more nuanced way to drive competition and monitor conversion points simultaneously is by monitoring how many leads, appointments, proposals, verbal commitments, contracts closed, conversion percent and total contract value (TCV) your team members are bringing to the table.
This way, when one salesperson scores a lower percentage for closing deals than another salesperson, you can better identify where to train them to fill in the gaps and bring their closing percentages up with the rest of the team's. You'll also be strengthening the points in your buyer’s journey that are lacking in conversion power.
Does your revenue enablement need a refresh?
A B2B sales funnel is only as effective as the business processes supporting it. By focusing on these revenue enablement strategies, your business will be better equipped to generate sustained growth.
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