The summer sales slump is an easy explanation for a decrease in sales during the slow, lazy dog-days of summer. But that doesn’t mean that all sales activity should stop during the summer months! To stay energized and #FitToSell salespeople need vacations and downtime to get ready for the busy 4th quarter. Slow summer days are also the perfect time for sales professionals and small business owners to fuel their sales funnel to optimize their opportunities in the upcoming months.
What Is A Sales Funnel?
If you’re committed to sales success and to amp up your business growth, a sales funnel is a measurable, trackable sales and marketing strategy to:
- Generate leads
- Connect via a CTA or a sales call
- Turn into an opportunity
- Convert prospects into a sale
- Create retention and build long-term clients
The key to an effective sales funnel – versus just hit-or-miss tactics – is designing your sales strategy to be trackable and measurable so you can repeat sales strategies that succeed – and stop or modify those that don’t.
Measurable Results
The key to a successful sales funnel versus a failed strategy is analysis. To understand if your sales funnel is working, make it measurable and repeatable:
- Quantify the number of leads and conversions
- Use A/B testing to compare and contrast the success of different marketing efforts
- Track repeat customer retention rates
- Optimize your sales funnel
You can optimize your sales funnel in myriad ways, says CrazyEgg, but pay attention to the results:
Take time to build out a sales funnel that represents what you want and what your audience wants.
5 Sales Funnel Strategies to Create This Summer
Use your downtime this to build your sales funnel for summer, fall and the winter holidays. The time you invest now will pay off in leads and sales throughout the coming year, and let you focus on what you do best: sell.
1. Create Content
How does your target audience discover your business?
- Advertising?
- Blogs?
- Social media posts?
- Videos?
- Speaking engagements?
- Trade show?
- Lead magnets?
Identify the ways your audience has traditionally found you, and new opportunities for new audiences to discover you. Use this slow time to refine your current content strategy, create new content for the coming months and develop new content outlets you haven’t tried yet.
2. Build a New Landing Page
Does your marketing send prospects to your website? Get creative and build a new landing page that will work for you and entice visitors to move on to the next step. Test it by checking the bounce rate – how long visitors stay on your landing page.
3. Test New CTAs
Words matter. The right CTAs on your website can convince a visitor to take action – or make them move on. Creating a good Call-To-Action takes time. CTAs should be:
- Actionable – tell visitors what you want them to do
- Compelling – entice visitors to take your desired action
- Direct – subtlety doesn’t work!
- Short – visitors have a short attention span
- Motivational – give them a reason to click
- Entertaining – catch their attention
- Experiential –
- Authentic – deliver what they promise
4. Update Your Facebook Ad Strategy
Everyone loves to hate Facebook. But for many small business owners and salespeople, Facebook is a proven successful sales and marketing tool. According to HootSuite, you can create the perfect FB ad in just minutes (but don’t be surprised if it takes you longer):
- Create a simple CTA with one clear action
- Use an audience targeting strategy that helps you refine over time
- Write a clear and conversational headline
- Use an image that has creative tension with the headline
- Use the description area to remove friction for your CTA
Creating the perfect Facebook ad that converts and delivers takes time – and A/B testing is the perfect tool to analyze and compare results so you get the results you want.
5. Develop a New Email Campaign
According to Opt-in Monster,
One of the big advantages of email marketing is that people still use email widely. In fact, as our article on why email marketing isn’t dead reveals, 90% of adults and 74% of teenagers still use email regularly.
There are 3 different types of emails, says Opt-in Monster:
- Promotional emails talk about offers and sales and are self-promotional
- Relational emails give subscribers what you’ve promised
- Transactional emails are triggered by subscribers’ actions and relate to an action they’ve taken on your site
Know your audience so you can create an email campaign that meets their needs – not yours.
Your marketing funnel strategy should generate leads that convert to sales. During your busiest time periods, it’s difficult to take a step back to update your strategy and optimize your sales funnel. If your sales business is slow during the summertime, it can be the ideal time to create and refine your marketing to meet the needs of new prospects and current clients and hit your sales goals.
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7 Tips to Fill Your Sales Funnel This Summer
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