Study Shows 68% of Businesses Haven’t Identified Their Sales Or Marketing Funnel … And It Shows!

Marketing has always been complicated, and has only become more complex over the last few years thanks to evermore empowered buyers, new technologies and a difficult economy that make navigating potential buyers and influencers in target companies harder by the day.

From 2009 to 2011 it’s gotten harder for businesses and marketers to generate leads. What is the biggest challenges businesses and marketers are faced with?

As you can see by the graph above, which breaks the challenges down by the year, generating high quality leads still continues to be the biggest challenge. Generating a high volume of leads comes in #2 for 2011.

The problem is when you compare quality to quantity.

What most businesses are after is “quality” leads because they are, bluntly, easier to close.

However, when we look at the other side of this and look at quantity of leads, while a percentage of them may not be ready to make a buying decision immediate, by overlooking these other leads and not working them it could cost you up to 80% of the sales you could make each year.

In fact, studies show that 68% marketers and businesses have not created and put in place a “lead nurturing” strategy to handle the leads who are not ready to make a buying decision today.

Let’s look at it this way. For every 100 leads you get the average break-down of them is like this:

• 25% are ready to buy now.
• 50% have an interest but won’t buy immediately. They’ll buy down the road from either you or a competitor of yours.
• 25% are bad leads and won’t buy at all.

By not working the 50% of future buyers it’s costing you a lot of money in ongoing revenue!

Why aren’t businesses and marketers working this group?

The top reason is because they don’t realize the significance of them. That’s because they are only focused on “who can we sell right now” and not on “how can we maximize all of the leads we get”.

But when you realize the significant amount of lost sales by ignoring the 50% group it helps you realize that you need to have a proactive sales and marketing funnel that addresses this group of potential buyers.

This is where the importance of having a sales and marketing funnel in place. Because of a changing market place we need to adapt our marketing efforts to how consumers make buying decisions and make sure we’re providing them the kind of information they need so it’s you they are purchasing from.

By having a “lead nurturing” marketing strategy in place you’ll find you’ll be closing far more sales throughout the year.

Plus, a lead nurturing strategy will take so-so leads and turn them into excited prospects who are excited about purchasing your product/service from you.

And when you consider over 50% of businesses do not have a lead nurturing marketing strategy in place the competition for these future buyers is minimal giving you a huge advantage over your competitors. Unlike your competitors:

• You’ve continued to keep your name in front of these future buyers,
• You’ve continued to provide meaningful information to them about the product, and
• You’ve continued to show them why you’re the best business to purchase from.

Because of how consumers make buying decisions this strategy greatly slants the playing field in your favor. It also makes it far easier to sell your product and make the sale, once these future buyers are ready to pull the trigger and make the buying decision!

We Can Help.

To help you put together an effective sales and marketing funnel for both the 25% group that will make a quick decision and the 50% of future buyers, contact us by:

Emailing us

Calling us at 888-638-5529, Ext 102

See how many more sales you can generate this year once you have an effective lead nurturing system in place!