The Six Best Ways to Fix Your Leaky Sales Funnel Fast

So, it’s a new year. It’s a fresh start. You have your New Year’s Resolutions in order and one of those is to patch up your rather leaky sales funnel. If you are a business owner, you’ll most likely already know the importance of a dependable funnel. Ultimately, a steady funnel can lead to more leads, more revenue, and a booming business.

As such, this is an important part of any marketing strategy. It starts with potential customers finding your website and progresses through each stage until they make a purchase. Even though it sounds simple, there are many factors that can go wrong with this.

But, we’ve decided to eliminate some of the guesswork for you. We’re going to walk you through the basics of identifying problems in your funnel and fixing them so that more people make purchases on your site.

What is a sales funnel?

The first step in understanding how to fix your funnel is understanding what a sales funnel actually is. A sales funnel is the journey that potential customers go through from being aware of your business to becoming a paying customer.

A typical sales funnel will have six stages:

• awareness
• interest
• desire
• decision/consideration
• action
• satisfaction

Each stage will have a different number of potential customers and each step in the process is aimed at guiding them closer to becoming customers. However, unfortunately, potential customers can also drop off at each stage of the funnel.

Why is a sales funnel important?

The sales funnel is important because it guides customers through your business until they ultimately end up buying from you. As such, it’s essential to have a well-functioning funnel if you want to make more money from your business. A leaky funnel will not bring you revenue as well as a fully functioning one.

Understanding the sales funnel stages

But, before you can fix your sales funnel, you need to know the different sales funnel stages. As we’ve mentioned, there are usually six main stages to be aware of. Let’s go over those in more detail so that you can fully understand each stage.

Awareness

The first step is awareness. It’s important that potential customers know you exist and it can be easy for them to forget about you when there are so many other companies out there competing with you.

So how do we fix this?

You need to make sure you have a strong marketing campaign. Your content needs to be compelling and informative so that potential customers know what they need from your business before coming in contact with it for the first time. SEO can also really help with this because it can help make sure you’re seen on Google and potential clients can find you when they’re searching for things.

Interest

After people are aware of your brand, they may become interested in looking at some of your content or reading reviews about how great you are. Interest will last for longer periods of time than awareness. In fact, it may take customers several months after they are aware of your business before they actually decide to try it out.

So how do we fix this?

You need to keep your potential customers engaged by regularly sharing new content and updating old content. People don’t want to see the same information every day, so you can mix it up with different types of updates such as videos or infographics. But, also make sure that you keep it relevant – in fact, the more relevant, the better, and the more you are likely to interest people.

Desire

Once potential customers are aware of your brand and interested in it, they may start to develop a desire for the products that you provide. They’ll want to find out more about what they can gain from working with you instead of someone else. This may be when they decide to sign up for your free trial or test out your product for themselves.

So how do we fix this?

You need to create content that shows people exactly why they should work with you. This can be difficult to do if you’re not sure what your potential customers are looking for, but the more data that you have about them, the easier it will be.

Decision/Consideration

At this stage of the sales funnel, people are weighing up their options and considering whether or not working with you is the right decision. They’ll want to know what they’re getting themselves into before making a commitment.

So how do we fix this?

You need to make it easy for potential customers to access information about your business. This means providing plenty of content on your website, as well as creating case studies and testimonials from happy customers. It’s also important for both sales and customer support are engaging with customers at this time, both keeping them happy, and solving any problems that they might have.

Action

Now that people have decided to work with you, it’s time for them to take action! This is the final of the sales funnel stages before the person becomes a paying customer. Nonetheless, unfortunately, there are still plenty of people who drop out of the funnel at this stage. Whether it’s due to budget restraint or simply changing their mind about your products, it’s important to make sure that you’re doing everything possible to keep them on the line.

So how do we fix this?

You need to be proactive in engaging potential customers at this stage of the sales funnel. This is where nurturing and other sales tactics come in handy. You’ll want to send regular emails, make sure there are definitely no issues, and keep them updated on the progress of their order.

Satisfaction

Finally, we have satisfaction. This is when your customers are paid customers, fully aware of what you can do for them, and they’re happy with the results that you’ve provided. They’ll hopefully want to share their stories and recommendations about working with your business, which will help attract more potential customers in the future.

In this stage, it’s important to continue nurturing your customers. Whether you talk to them via email, chatbots, or customer support portal, poor customer care, and onboarding can quickly lead to people becoming unsatisfied, leaving your business, and ultimately mean that the people you worked so hard to acquire will churn.

So how do we fix this?

You need to provide value for your customers. This means not only delivering what you promised in the first place but also going above and beyond expectations once they are paying you. You can’t suddenly stop caring for them as soon as they give you their money.

Instead, you can make sure they have a smooth onboarding, be there to offer them any support when they need it, and keep them updated on new products or services that you’re releasing. They should ideally have an even better experience with you than what they had originally thought.

Overall, customer retention is just as important as every other part of the sales funnel.

How to identify your sales funnel problems

The next step is identifying the problems in your sales funnel stages. This can be tricky because it’s not always easy to see where things are going wrong. But there are a few ways that you can help identify the problem areas.

You can use tools like Google Analytics to gather data about your website traffic and see where people are dropping off in their journey. You can also look for spikes or drops of inactivity, which will indicate that something is going wrong somewhere.

Heat maps on your website are also great tools to find out where people are clicking and where you could potentially add more value.

However, one of the easiest ways to identify problems with your funnel is by speaking with current or past customers. Find out any issues that they are having, what made them decide to work with you in the first place, and why they left if they are former customers. You could do this via satisfaction surveys, questionnaires, or even simply calling them up.

Customer support is also key to identifying problems with your process because you gain valuable insight from the customers themselves. Whether you have an online chat, email support, or offer phone calls to help people out, customer support can give invaluable insights. Not only will they tell you what went wrong, but you can use that information to identify any common issues and improve upon them in the future. If multiple people mention a certain issue then it’s clearly something worth looking into.

Once you know where potential customers are dropping off at each stage of the funnel, it’ll be much easier for you to create an action plan on how to fix those problem areas so there are no more drop-offs along the way! It might take some time before everything falls perfectly into place again, but every step you take forward will help you attract more customers and grow your business.

Overall…

Being able to identify problems and fix them is the key to having a successful sales funnel that can grow your business. If you’re struggling with identifying these issues then try speaking with past or current customers to gain some valuable insight, or use data analytics tools to help you out. Remember that it’s not always easy to see where things are going wrong, but with a bit of detective work, you can figure out the areas that need the most improvement, repair the damage, and boost your business!