What is a lead funnel?
A lead funnel is a detailed and visualized plan of all of your lead generation strategies in one place, and how your prospects will be treated to be turned into leads.
Businesses usually have different lead funnels based on their audience and resources available to them.
There are many template lead funnels on the Internet that you can try, however, eventually, you’ll come up with your own lead funnel since no business is the same.
A lead funnel constantly evolves as you go based on the performance of your campaigns and what is happening in the market or competition.
What does a lead funnel do for your business?
Having a lead funnel is very beneficial because it helps businesses stick to their plan and not become disoriented.
Having a lead funnel will also give everybody in your team a clear understanding of what they are going to do and what’s going to happen.
A lead funnel also makes it easier for businesses to realize what and where needs to be improved, fixed or removed in order to achieve better results.
Who needs lead funnels?
A lead is a person or company who is interested in your products/services. So basically, a lead is your potential client.
In order to stay afloat and grow bigger, businesses will need to generate leads constantly.
Businesses usually overlook creating a lead funnel and jump right into generating sales without a real strategy and that could be a mistake.
Businesses should prioritize spending time on creating a good lead funnel and optimizing it as they go.
How to create a lead funnel?
To create your own lead funnel, first, you will need to list out all the strategies that you’re planning to use to get more leads and clients.
There are two main parts of a lead funnel that are finding and contacting prospects.
Prospect generation.
Prospects are the people that you think are most likely to become interested in buying your products/services.
For example, if you’re selling a persuasion skill course, your prospects should be sales persons who are from 20 to 50 years old, working for companies and living in a certain area so that they can attend your class easily.
There are several strategies for prospect generation that you should know about.
- Use a combination of digital marketing software such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, Hunter, etc to generate a list of prospects
- Build a scraper to collect prospects’ data from web pages.
- Run paid ads to generate prospects.
- Lead Magnet and SEO for prospect generation.
- Buy targeted prospects from a reliable B2B leads database.
The first four methods are challenging for beginners due to the complexity of the tasks and the cost.
Most beginners will think the last strategy is expensive but it’s not the case. In fact, buying prospect lists from a reputable B2B leads database is the fastest and most affordable way to generate excellent prospects.
As long as you know how to pick a reliable data provider, it will be all worthwhile for you. For example, Limeleads has been striving every day to provide the best quality prospects and minimize users’ risk.
If you give Limeleads a try, the following are what you will get:
- Free trials (no credit card is required)
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Prospect outreach.
Once you have a good list of prospects, it’s time to reach out to them. There are a few ways for you to contact them, you can choose to use one or a combination of cold calling, cold calling or/and paid ads to reach your prospects and turn them into leads.
Each of the outreach methods has its own pros and cons, however, we recommend focusing on cold emailing because it’s affordable and effective.
Outreach has different steps to turn prospects into leads. For example, if you’re using cold emailing, it would be the first email, then based on a certain type of action that the prospects have taken, you may need to send out the 2nd and the 3rd emails.
Similarly, cold calling and paid ads also need extra steps in order to perform well. If you reach out to your prospects using two or more methods, your outreach process will be more complicated.
Creating a lead funnel.
When you already have all the steps in mind, it’s time to put them into order, which means what step should be taken first, second, third, last, and what is the percentage of each component. The image of a simple lead funnel is shown below to illustrate the points that I’ve mentioned.
This is just a simple lead funnel, you can go more complicated than that. If your lead generation process is extra complex, it may be time for a flowchart.
Without a lead funnel or a flowchart, your team members will not work efficiently because they easily become disoriented and spend more time figuring out what to do next.
Lead funnel Vs. Sales Funnel
A lead funnel illustrates all the strategies and steps to find prospects and turn them into leads, while a sales funnel is a more complex model which usually contains a lead funnel.
A sales funnel describes all the methods and steps that will turn people who haven’t known about the business into clients. Sales funnels are more often talked about compared to lead funnels.
However, sometimes, businesses’ goals aren’t always about just selling. Many businesses have other goals such as finding a partner to work with together them on a project. That’s when a lead funnel is more relevant. A business may use lead and sales funnels at the same time.
Conclusion.
Many small to medium-sized businesses overlook creating a lead funnel and focus on generating sales with no strategy.
Your business probably won’t operate very efficiently without a written detailed plan or lead funnel. A lead funnel will help your business keep track of all your strategies and optimize them for a better result more easily.
There are many lead funnels on the Internet that you can learn about, however, you will ultimately need your own lead funnel for an optimal operation. No worries, every business finds it hard to design a good lead funnel in the beginning but you will realize that your effort will all be worthwhile very soon.
If you need any assistance with lead generation, do not hesitate to contact our support at [email protected] or via our live chat support, we’re happy to help you with anything.