Strategize for Success: Tying Marketing Content to Your Sales Cycle

Successful marketing is built on knowing your customer and catering to their needs. This process is intimately tied to your sales cycle (also known as your sales funnel). By keeping close tabs on your sales funnel and understanding your conversion ratios at every stage, your ability to convert a prospect into a sale increases dramatically.

Effectively tailoring your marketing to customers gets even easier the better you know your sales funnel.

The sales funnel or cycle – the journey that interested parties take from prospects to closed sales in your company – offers many clues to how sales works for your business. As Rich Stillman at Revenue: Action points out, understanding your sales funnel is critical to meeting your annual goals. If you don’t know exactly how many leads move from one stage to the next during this process, then you can’t guarantee that you’ll have enough conversions to meet your end goals.

Image Source: Revenue:Action

Once you know the exact conversion ratios (the percentage of leads that move from one sales stage to the next) for each stage in the funnel, you can identify any low-performing stages or sticking points and make adjustments.

For instance, if you know that you close 1 sale for every 100 leads, and your sales goal is 10 sales, that means that you need to drive 1,000 leads into the top of the funnel to meet that goal. But what if you could optimize the conversion ratio to 5 sales for every 100 leads? That means that for every 1,000 leads in the top of the funnel you close 50 sales (that’s a big difference)!

How do you optimize this process? With targeted content to help the customer easily make the decision to take the next step in your sales cycle.

We’ve found that case studies showcasing the Importance of Digital Marketing and your successful work with clients in related fields and white papers delivering technical expertise on a specialized industry topic are both particularly effective middle-of-the-funnel pieces to help nurture leads.

Addressing sticking points in the sales cycle and utilizing targeted content to support lead nurturing at these stages can boost both the speed and number of leads that turn into sales—helping you reach your sales goals even faster.

Want some guidance on maximizing the effectiveness of your sales cycle with targeted content at each stage? Contact us for a free strategy session today!