How to Push Existing Leads Through the Funnel Faster

You’ve caught a prospect’s interest, they’ve spent time on your web page, attended free seminars or whatever, but how do you speed up the process of moving them through your marketing funnel? Now that you know they are a quality lead, you can invest some effort into accelerating them through your marketing process. Follow these 4 steps to get you on your way to increasing your revenue:

1. Reconfigure the funnel: Typically marketers would dump a truckload of names into the top of a funnel without understanding the sales process or how customers moved through the funnel. Marketing and sales teams must align to figure out how to create quality leads instead of relying on quantities to get you sales. If you put quality leads into the funnel, you’re more apt to increase the quantity of sales closures – a reverse of the old methodologies that believed quantity would beget quantity.
2. Analyze, analyze, analyze: The better you know your customer, the easier it will be to engage with them and build a relationship. The first step in accelerating existing leads through the funnel, then, is to gather as much data as possible. Only then can you move forward.
3. Get Personal: Once you know your customer, you can send them information that’s relevant to them in a timely manner, engaging them appropriately and nurturing your lead, thus pushing them along in their decisions. Send qualified buyers emails offering specific training programs, or contact them with phone offers specifically targeted at them, for example, so you can build profitable customer relationships with them.
4. Give incentives: If you create a referral program in which you offer existing customers a small gift for getting you a new lead and maybe a bigger one if you close a sale with a referred lead, for instance, the results will be two-fold. Not only will you create new leads, but you’ll also give your existing leads incentive to purchase your products or services. If they’ve purchased from you in the past, this is also a great opportunity in which to upsell to them.

At a recent summit, Marketo discovered that 90 per cent of revenue comes from existing customers (subscription business) and that upselling pulls in profits over time. These facts make it easy to believe in the lifecycle value of a customer. Focus just as much energy on your existing leads and getting them through the funnel faster and you’ll start to see the results.

What is your strategy for getting existing leads through the marketing funnel faster? Let’s get a discussion going.