B2B Sales Funnels & the Role of CRM

Working with existing customers is fantastic, however, without an outbound sales strategy, many companies may find it difficult to grow and expand – particularly if the competition gets there first.

Selling services on the B2B market requires tools adapted to its specification, and this is where a CRM with a B2B sales funnel comes into play.

The importance of having your sales process (or processes), clearly mapped out and defined is vital.

Defining your sales process is crucial in helping your businesses grow. By eliminating much of the guesswork of managing leads and customers, businesses can benefit massively from a defined sales process.

Clearly defined opportunities, at designated stages, allows team members to replace their guesswork with a series of easily observable phases, that can be tracked and measured across every stage of every sales process, ultimately, helping you maximize keep your sales funnel full.

The idea behind the B2B sales funnel is to help channel your prospective clients through a series of content, that starts out as awareness-building and ends at a purchase page or with a sale. But;

• How do we know what those stages should be?
• Where are our B2B prospects?
• And what needs to happen at each stage?

It’s not always easy to tell where a customer is in this all-mysterious funnel, particularly when you’re a B2B company. A business isn’t as transparent as a singular customer, with different touch points and considerations, and therefore can be difficult to figure out, where they are or what they may need. That’s when a customer relationship management system or CRM system, can help.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy for managing company relationships and interactions with both existing customers as well as potential customers.

A quality B2B CRM system should closely map your own sales funnel and be a key part of your sales strategy. Your CRM sales process should help you track every opportunity, through every step of the funnel, and even help you address and refine areas where prospects are leaving the funnel.

See how you can analyze each stage of your sales process in Livespace.

Any CRM system worth its salt should help you determine where each of your prospects fit within the funnel, whether you need to refine the funnel for different prospects, or indeed whether you need to run multiple sales processes.

In Livespace you can create as many sales processes as you need.

Once you’ve configured your sales funnel and processes, you should start to experience;

• Better visibility of your leads and pipeline – keep your sales team on track and up-to-date by knowing what’s in your sales funnel and what isn’t.
• More efficient sales processes – help make your sales teams’ lives easier, enabling them to be more time to be proactive rather than reactive, by patching any holes they’ve discovered in the sales funnel.
• Less guesswork – make notes directly into your prospects funnel from your mobile device and track their progress as they go. The days of searching for ‘that post-it’ with the illegible scribble on it will be a memory.
• More reliable data and reporting – not to mention a better idea of what metrics make a difference to your bottom line.

A B2B sales funnel hosted in a CRM system with hard numbers, leads, and sales projections attached makes for a powerful tool in projecting and managing, the growth of a company. Not to mention, it’s far more actionable than an Excel spreadsheet.

To find out how CRM can benefit your business, check out our website www.livespace.io or you can book a 1-2-1 demo here.