A lead generation sales funnel is your overall roadmap for taking people from strangers to clients. It informs the way you market to your potential customers at every stage of their journey. But building and managing that funnel can involve some pretty mundane work behind the scenes. So how on earth do you make this easier for you and your sales team?
The answer of course is automating as much of the work as you can.
A recent report from McKinsey estimated that a staggering 30% of activities throughout the lead generation funnel can be automated with little effort and in 2020, 61% of businesses that used sales automation tools to streamline their lead funnel marketing operation exceeded their revenue targets.
But before we get into what you can actually automate, let’s start by taking a look at why lead generation is so important in the first place.
What is lead generation in sales?
Before you make a sale, you need a lead: a person or a business that may be interested in buying your product or signing up for your service—if you can convince them.
Lead generation is all about finding these golden customer leads. Once you have their details, you can introduce them to your product or service and help them decide whether it’s the right fit for them.
Where does the lead generation funnel come in?
A lead generation sales funnel is a step-by-step process that allows businesses to firstly identify prospective customers, and then convert them into paying customers.
When you get your funnel right—the timing, the content, the tone of voice—voila! Your sales grow… as if by magic.
How to supercharge your lead funnel with Magical
A simple yet powerful productivity app, Magical empowers anyone to automate soul-crushing work and move data between websites with two simple keystrokes. Within your lead funnel, it allows you to:
- Scrape data from anywhere, such as LinkedIn or ZoomInfo
- Teleport it instantly into another place (like Salesforce)
- Create personalized templates
- Save chunks of text and recall them whenever you need, and
- Share information instantly, even if your team members are running different operating systems. No complicated integrations. It just works. Abracadabra! 🎩
With Magical you don’t just cut through the boredom of a repetitive task. It lets you plan, execute, and personalize your content strategy so you can put your best foot forward and see engagement and sales increase. It also makes it easy for sales and marketing to collaborate, so you can hone your content and give every member of your team access to consistent messaging.
All in all, Magical helps you speed up your process and supercharge your lead funnel from the top down.
How automation makes each stage of the lead generation sales funnel easier
At the top of the funnel
The top of the funnel (TOFU/ToF) is where you only have prospects. These are people who’ve found your product through an ad, by being referred to your landing page, through social media, or via a lead magnet.
Your job here is to build awareness of your brand. It’s an exciting place to be, full of possibility and potential. But. A lot of these prospects won’t convert. So optimizing your lead generation process here means balancing two things: starting off as strong as you can with as many as you can, and not getting bogged down chasing leads that disappear down one of those pesky rabbit holes.
How can Magical help?
With Magical, you can make it so much easier for your sales team to add new prospects or leads to your CRM or internal database. The app lets you instantly a lead’s personal information from one place on the web (like, say, a LinkedIn profile) and automatically enter it somewhere else (like Salesforce, for example). Pretty nifty!
Even better—how about crafting the perfect templated outreach message using a simple //shortcut, personalizing it instantly with your lead’s details, and hey presto! ✨ It’s done. The right message at the right moment to as many prospects as you like, without making mistakes or losing time.
In the middle of the funnel
When you get to the MOFU/MoF, you’re turning prospects into true leads—people who are actively considering whether they should become your customers or clients.
The task here moves from promoting awareness of your brand and presence in the market, to convincing people that your product or service is the right one for them—that it solves their pain points and it’s a more suitable option than your competitors.
At this point, content is king. Which also means you encounter a lot of copy / paste and re-typing the same information. 🙄
The obvious way to optimize the funnel at this point is to use an automation tool that can hone that content generation in the fastest time possible, while still allowing you to quickly develop messaging that’s perfectly-suited to your customers.
How can Magical help?
With Magical’s template feature you can create endless message templates in your Magical Workspace. Whether you’re following up with people who signed up for a free trial, writing social media posts to keep your followers interested, managing a live chat box, or answering customer questions via email.
Then, you can use the data from your Magical Transfers to fill in the blanks with just a few //keystrokes.
At the bottom of the funnel
The BOFU/BoF is literally the business end of the sales funnel — where leads become customers. At this point, you’ve built a relationship and they trust your company.
So what’s left to do?
The main risk of losing deals at the BOFU stems from leads who are ready to purchase, but somehow trail off and never quite sign on the dotted line. The challenge is to make sure they maintain the momentum at this point and follow through to completion.
How can Magical help?
Automate a final nudge before they sign up—such as an added incentive or a personalized timely reminder. You can add our misspelled words MagicPack to your workspace for an immediate autocorrect function that you can tailor to your organization. (You’re so close to closing the deal now, you wouldn’t want a silly spelling mistake to blow all your hard work.)
The next step: after the funnel
The best thing about Magical is that once a lead converts, you can keep using it to optimize your customer service and communications through the next important stage: customer retention. Using the same templates, transfers, and variables features, customer service teams have saved 356 years using our Chrome extension. 🤯
So what are you waiting for? Join 400,000 users and add Magical to Chrome today.
Quickfire FAQs
What is a lead generation funnel?
A lead generation funnel is a structured method of driving people from initial action or inquiry through to becoming a customer—and even beyond. A funnel typically includes various stages and touch-points. It’s good to visualize these stages and understand what people want, what their obstacles are, and how to nudge them further towards a sale.
How do you get sales funnel leads?
There are countless ways to generate leads for your sales funnel, and your best methods depend on your business, audience, marketing channels, and much more.
On the top level, you have a choice between reaching people through owned, earned, or paid media. Owned media is basically your own properties—your website, blog, etc. Earned media can be boiled down to promotional activities without advertising—for example, PR that gets you attention. And paid media is advertising—digital or otherwise.
And within these categories, there are myriad tactics for generating sales funnel leads. This is where you can start to look at things like cold outreach. You’ll need to test different tactics iteratively to understand not only which ones generate leads, but which ones generate leads that convert further down the funnel.
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