How Economy Changes Affect Your Sales Funnel
As a small business owner, being able to define and understand your own sales funnel is key to a streamlined sales process. That isn’t all – your sales funnel can change fairly drastically over time, so it’s important to anticipate changes and be ready for them.
One of the best examples is a recession. Let’s look at PPC in particular. When our general market is good and people are able to buy and spend as needed, there’s far less pressure on sales to perform. Higher ticket items tend to go a little faster and without hesitation. For instance, a $1000-1500 ticket item might go out the door within minutes when the economy is doing well.
Recession Changes Everything
As we’ve seen in the last few years, nothing good necessarily lasts forever. The last US recession left the seller’s market vulnerable. Whereas a high-ticket item might move quickly in 2006, 2008 was a totally different story. $1000+ items might require a much deeper sales funnel on the part of the seller to guarantee an actual purchase.
The recession sent many sellers out of business who weren’t ready for a deeper sales funnel. Some business owners just weren’t prepared for:
- The need to establish quicker lead response times
- Implementing a social media or email marketing strategy to ‘convince’ people to buy
- Changing or optimizing web pages for deeper visits
- The need to better track the progress of leads through a deeper sales funnel
Business owners who were willing to gather their resources and think about good lead intelligence and new sales funnel strategies had a better chance of surviving the recession.
Sales Funnel Strategy via Marketing Automation
Being prepared for what may come as a business owner is all about developing your funnel – and these days, automating it. Marketing automation allows business owners a better system for tracking leads that works hand-in-hand with a well-defined funnel. The result is a process you can understand, data you can read and a strategy you can execute on.
When you use marketing automation, you’ll find that each step of your sales funnel becomes easy to execute. The specific information you’re able to retain from each customer becomes useful in terms of how the lead approaches your next step, or how he or she will be sold in the future.
If you haven’t tried out marketing automation tools for use with your sales funnel, now is a better time than ever. Talk to one of us here at Lead Liaison about how marketing automation can fill out your funnel and do the hard work for you.
