The Steps You Need to Define the Stages of Your Sales & Marketing Funnel

到现在为止，大多数营销人员了解修补的重要性销售与营销之间的传统裂痕。The mistrust and miscommunication that’s so often found between the two teams can act like an anchor on your company’s growth rate. In fact,在销售和营销团队之间保持良好对齐的组织在2010年实现了20％的年收入增长,according to a study by the Aberdeen Group。相比之下,一致性差的公司的收入下降了4％。

Often, one of the biggest blockers for sales and marketing alignment is the very different views each team has of the funnel. For example, they might disagree about the number of stages a lead passes through before becoming a customer. Furthermore, they often use different terminology to describe those stages. But in order to adopt an effective SMarketing (get it?) strategy, sales and marketing must have a unified picture of the funnel and standard definitions of each stage in the process. For example, HubSpot’s SMarketing team uses the following funnel stages:

But that's just our funnel ... what doesyourslook like? And how exactly can you make sure both teams are aligned in their definition of the funnel? Follow these steps to help define the stages of your funnel that both Sales and Marketing can agree upon and collaborate around.

第一步:了解铅质量

Focus on the definition of a营销Qualified Lead(MQL). This is the crucial handoff point between marketing and sales, so it’s essential that the teams agree on the terminology. Every company’s definition of an MQL will vary, but it should reflect a combination of traits and actions that indicate a lead is both a good fit for your company and ready to talk to a salesperson. Here’s one way to examine your funnel to assess lead quality and determine whether a lead is ready for sales follow-up:

Aspects of Lead Qualification

Is the lead a good fit?

您的公司可bob全站app能会针对拥有5,000名或更多员工的金融服务公司，或者少于100名员工的小型服务业务。或者，您可能只对一定规模的制造公司感兴趣。在这些类别中，您还可以确定单个铅概况，例如标题或职位描述以及在决策过程中的作用，例如经济买家，最终用户，影响者。线索与您理想的客户资料的一致性如何确定您是否以及何时将其交给销售团队。

领导感兴趣吗？

A lead’s activity can reveal how close they are to a buying decision. For example, if a lead has only visited your website once, or has just begun following you on Twitter, they may be aware of your company but aren’t particularly engaged yet. A lead that requests a demo or views pricing information is showing a lot more interest.

Where a lead falls within the four quadrants of this matrix dictates the next step your marketing or sales team should take. For example:

• Good Fit & Interested:Leads in the upper right quadrant are a good fit for your company and are highly engaged with your marketing. These are hot leads that require immediate follow-up from your sales team -- usually in fewer than 24 hours.
• Good Fit But Less Interested:Leads in the upper left quadrant are a good fit for your company but don’t show a lot of interest yet. Perhaps they’ve only signed up for an email newsletter or downloaded one piece of educational content. These are leads that the marketing team needs to nurture.
• Lots of Interest, But Not a Good Fit:Leads in the lower right don’t necessarily fit your ideal customer profile, but are highly engaged with your brand. They might have subscribed to your blog and email newsletter, downloaded your ebooks, and attended your webinars. It’s worth having a sales rep do a low-cost follow-up with these fans to see if there’s an easy sale to make from a non-traditional customer. Sometimes leads that don’t seem like a fit have a good reason to buy your product. They can also turn into great evangelists for your products or services, thus providing you with indirect support as non-customers. That’s why you can’t automate the entire sales andmarketing process。At some point, a good marketer or sales rep can spot an opportunity that your systems might overlook.
• Little Interest & No Fit:左下象限的潜在客户并不适合您的公司，并且对您的营销内容没有太大的兴趣。bob全站app他们绝对不值得销售代表的时间。不要害怕将它们带出您的沟通流。

Step 2: Develop Your Definition of an MQL

Using this matrix as your guide, develop an MQL definition based on the combination of fit and interest that’s right for your company. Some marketers may focus more on fit because they have a tightly defined market; other marketers may have a broad customer base and focus more on interest level. That decision depends on your business model.

MQL definitions in those two cases might look like this:

1. A Focus on Fit:A contact with XYZ title or role who has filled out a landing page form and works at a financial services company in the U.S. with more than 5,000 employees.
2. A Focus on Interest Level:A contact with the ABC title or role who has requested a product demonstration from a sales rep and works at any U.S.-based company.

Whichever approach you chose, base your definitions on data -- not on gut instinct. Even experienced marketers and salespeople can be way off base in their assumptions about what makes a good lead.

Step 3: Implement Lead Scoring

Using alead scoring or lead grading program这取决于您的数据closed-loop analysiscan help you determine the importance of different activities. Here is an example of what lead scoring can look like for you:

Here's how to implement a lead scoring system:

Examine Behavioral History

Examine the activity history of recent customers and analyze how many actions they took before becoming a customer -- i.e., the number of page views or number of conversions, such as downloading a report or registering for a webinar, etc.

Identify Patterns

Look for patters that indicate a lead’s likelihood of closing. For example, if a lead that downloads ten pieces of content from your website or visits your site more than 15 times in one month, she is more likely to close. Consider incorporating frequency measures into your MQL definition.

List Activities

Also, list all the activities that a lead can take before becoming a customer, and analyze the close rate for each one. For example, to determine the close rate for a webinar, look at all customers that had watched a webinar, then divide that number by the total number of leads that originally registered for the webinar. That gives you the close rate for leads from that
特定事件。

Calculate Average Close Rates

Using the close rates for individual actions, calculate the average close rate for all your marketing activities. Then look for actions that have a significantly higher close rate. For example, if your average close rate is around 1%, you might find a handful of actions that
have a 3%-5% close rate. Add these top-closing events to your definition of an MQL. Any lead that engages in at least one of these activities, and is a good fit for your company, would be considered an MQL. Use those close rates to decide what score to give different activities in your lead scoring or lead grading system.

步骤4:Optimize the Stages of Your Sales Funnel

Now that you've identified the different stages of your sales funnel, it's important to optimize each of those stages on an ongoing basis. And that means continual analysis of key metrics at each stage of the funnel, such as:

You should be looking at these metricsall the timeso you can assess whether you're slipping in any one area ... because you don't want to suffer a blip in your funnel. If your funnel develops a clog or hole somewhere along the way -- and it will, it's only natural -- you need to be able to identify it and fix it to保持销售和营销机器效率。而且，如果您使用多种不同类型的潜在客户，也应考虑每个线索的指标，这样您就知道某些细分市场对您的业务比其他细分更有价值（甚至更好，如果某些细分市场有更多潜力比您曾经意识到的）！

Image credit:danxoneil