B2B sales funnels are perhaps the most complex and challenging funnel to implement. It’s not enough to just have a great product or service; you must find ways to make it accessible to your target market.
And while sales funnels are powerful for driving targeted leads to your ideal buyer, they can also be prone to failure. Whether you’re just starting your B2B sales funnel or using a tried-and-true model, these obstacles are sure to crop up.
In this article, we’ll look at the common reasons why B2B sales funnels fail. We’ll also explore strategies to improve this, such as improving your lead generation process, optimizing your landing pages, streamlining your checkout, and refining your follow-up process.
Introduction To B2B Sales Funnels
A B2B sales funnel is a process that businesses use to convert prospects into customers. It’s an important part of the sales process, as it helps to nurture leads and guide them down the sales pipeline. A successful sales funnel can effectively capture leads and convert them into loyal customers.
A B2B sales funnel typically involves the following steps:
- Lead generation – capturing leads and getting them interested in your product or service.
- Lead nurturing – building relationships with leads and keeping them engaged with your business.
- Conversion – turning leads into customers.
- Retention – keeping customers engaged and ensuring they keep coming back.
For a B2B sales funnel to be successful, it must be able to capture leads and convert them into customers effectively. However, many businesses fail to get their sales funnels to work, and that’s why it’s important to understand the underlying reasons why this happens.
Common Reasons Why B2B Sales Funnels Fail
Are you struggling to get your B2B sales funnel to work? You’re not alone. Many businesses fail to make their sales funnels work, which is why it’s important to understand why they fail.
Here are some of the most common:
- Poor Lead Generation Strategy – It can be difficult to fill up your sales funnel if you don’t have a reliable way of generating leads. Without leads, it’s impossible to make sales.
- Leads Are Not Nurtured – If you don’t nurture your leads, they may lose interest in your product or service. It’s important to keep leads engaged and interested in what you have to offer.
- Low Conversion Rate – If your conversion rate is down, you cannot turn leads into customers effectively. This could be due to a number of factors, such as an ineffective sales pitch or a confusing checkout process.
- Poor Follow-Up Process – If you don’t have a good follow-up process in place, your leads can easily get lost in the mix. It’s important to have a system in place that allows you to follow up with leads and keep them engaged with your business.
By understanding the common reasons why B2B sales funnels fail, you can begin to diagnose your own sales funnel and identify problem areas.
Strategies For Improving Your B2B Sales Funnel
Now that you’ve identified the problem areas in your B2B sales funnel, it’s time to start improving. Here are some strategies for enhancing your B2B sales funnel:
1. Improve your lead generation approach
A solid lead generation strategy will hone your targeting skills and optimize your conversion rate.
One of the best ways to improve your lead generation process is to use multiple channels to reach your target audience. This could include using email marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, cold calling, and more.
Similarly, a tool that gathers all the leads in one place is important so that you can rest assured that all the leads coming your way are added to your pipeline.
For instance, if you’re a WooCommerce store owner, Wholesale Lead Capture is the optimal choice if you run a WooCommerce store and want to ensure you don’t miss any leads.
This tool comes with four main features (which are essential in targeting leads):
- Registration Form Builder
- Automated Email Sequence
- Default Email Templates
- Complete Approvals System
2. Optimize your landing pages
Next, optimize your landing pages, as this helps boost your conversion rate. Landing pages are a crucial part of your B2B sales funnels because this is where you will find the bulk of your visitors — they are 80% of site visitors, and you want them to stay!
There are many ways to create an effective landing page. For one, you can use a single page or a sequence of pages to convey your message.
It can be as simple as including the keyword you want to appear in the AdWords search box on your page, or it can be more detailed with keywords and links that will lead to other pages within your site.
Additionally, your landing page should make sense for the visitor, not just repeat the same information repeatedly. If it’s difficult for them to understand what you’re trying to say or how exactly they can benefit from visiting your website, then it will probably not be worth their time or money.
3. Streamline the ordering and check-out process
If you’re a startup or an online business that sells products online, then the most important part of your operations is how your customers order from you. How you check out and ship your products to your customers can also greatly impact your bottom line.
Today’s world is fast-paced, and responding to customers’ needs should be faster than ever. The way we order products and services today has changed dramatically. Nowadays, customers expect instant gratification when shopping online or calling a store.
They want to know if orders will be filled and shipped out the same day or within an hour.
This means that if you’re still stuck on the traditional ways of spreadsheets and printed forms, you’ll less likely grow and scale your business. Even more so, your B2B sales funnel is destined to fail.
Fortunately, Wholesale Suite came up with a superb solution to this dilemma: Wholesale Order Form.
This is the most efficient one-page WooCommerce order form plugin. It helps streamline your ordering and checkout process, decrease customer frustration, and increase order size by:
- Having your whole catalog on one page
- Providing slim line tabulated interface which works for desktop, mobile & tablet
- Enabling hierarchical category filter
- Excluding specific categories or products
- And many more!
4. Refining follow-up and retention process
Are you seeing a pattern emerging? As you can see, the best way to improve your B2B sales funnels is to have consistent, high-quality customer service.
In other words: have follow-up and retention processes in place that make customers feel like they can always come back for repeat business.
Follow-up and retention are the two most important pillars of any successful business. They make a store succeed or fail and will determine the longevity of your brand. Regardless of how much care you take in developing your product offerings or how well-planned your store layout is, there will always be a chance for the competition to come out with an improved version.
There are many ways to do this. You can set up automated email sequences, provide helpful resources, host engaging sales & marketing events, offer loyalty program points and store credits, or maybe simply just give away coupons where they can save big from your deals.
In any case, follow-up and retention are relevant in increasing your repeated and long-term conversions. So make sure you don’t skip this step!
Conclusion
As you can see, there are a number of reasons why B2B sales funnels fail. You can improve your sales funnel by understanding the underlying causes and taking a step-by-step approach to diagnosing the problem areas.
In this article, we discussed key areas in a B2B sales funnel and some of the ways you can refine yours to help you scale your business even more:
- Improve your lead generation approach
- Optimize your landing pages
- Streamline the ordering and check-out process
- Refining follow-up and retention process
Although it can be intimidating to start from scratch, Wholesale Suite makes it easy to enhance your sales funnels by giving you an all-in-one solution. Read more about this powerful plugin here.
Do you have any tips for improving B2B sales funnels? Let us know in the comments below!
