You’ve worked hard to build a sales funnel. You planned it carefully. But it’s still not delivering the results you expected. Sounds familiar? Bad sales funnel design is a common problem many ETS founders face when bootstrapping their company’s sales & marketing operations. This article looks at why that happens and what steps you can take to fix it.
A linear or consumer-market-style sales funnel often fails to reflect the reality of how modern B2B tech customers make purchases. The buyer journey in emerging technology services is a complex web of touchpoints—as many as 8 of them, according to some sources—where research, evaluation, and obtaining stakeholder buy-in can be extensive and even iterative.
Unfortunately, there is no one funnel to rule them all. A cookie-cutter approach with insufficient personalization & segmentation ignores the diverse needs, priorities, and decision-making styles of different groups within your broader target audience. If your messaging doesn’t reflect an understanding of those unique pain points and buyer motivations, it will fail to capture their attention. This means your one-size-fits-all funnel may drop many more leads than you realize.
This is one of the most common mistakes we see in sales funnel design. Your sales funnel performance data will give you some of the biggest clues about design problems, including bottlenecks. But without tracking and analyzing real behavior displayed by real individuals—not hypothetical ones—at every point of the funnel, your funnel design is still not much better than a sketch on paper.
When in doubt, start with your customer. What do you know about how your target audience actually makes purchases? Try to structure your funnel around the natural flow of that decision-making process. For emerging tech services companies, this might mean creating multiple entry points within your funnel to match the non-linear nature of B2B purchases and to accommodate different stakeholders at the same organization who may be at different stages in their purchasing decision.
Personalization is no longer an optional, nice-to-have. It’s an essential component of your sales funnel design. But personalization is a lot deeper than adding someone’s name in the opening line of your message. To personalize your sales funnel, you need to understand your target audience. Once you have sufficient information about their motivations and pain points, you can begin to segment your customers and tailor your messaging for each segment.
Data collection & analysis is not a one-off activity. The most effective sales funnels are never truly "finished." You can implement a data-driven approach by tracking conversion rates and interactions at every point in the funnel. Be sure to A/B test new messaging and offers to determine what resonates better with each customer segment. Customer feedback is also a valuable trove of data, so remember to review it regularly.
Successful tech services companies recognize that sales funnels must evolve and reflect the complex reality of B2B purchases. By redesigning your funnel to align with the buyer's journey, personalizing experiences for different audience segments, and leveraging data for continuous optimization, you can pave the way for a more efficient path to conversion. Your sales funnel is often part of the very first interactions a potential customer has with your brand. Keep it as innovative and adaptable as the tech services you provide. This will help create a customer acquisition system that not only captures leads but converts them into loyal, long-term clients.
At Vixul, we spend a large part of our time reviewing the forecasts created by the founders of our portfolio companies. It is amazing for us to see our founders mature as executives and be able to answer questions they couldn't in the past. Unfortunately, most founders struggle with these issues until we point them in the right direction. We believe the lack of guidance on forecasting is a primary issue for early-stage tech services founders.
That's why we're working on an eBook with detailed instructions on how to set up forecasts for sales pipelines. This will help you plan your new year with better foresight. The book will be free for people on our mailing list when it is published, so please subscribe now to ensure you receive it.