Fine-Tune Your B2B Sales Funnel: Power Up Lead Gen - Podcast Recording

Automated Transcript

Alastair Cole 0:04

Hello, good afternoon and welcome. Welcome to The Sales Scoop. This is a show for small businesses who want to improve how they sell. We bring you the shiniest pearls of wisdom from experienced sellers, and cover the hottest topics in b2b sales. I’m Alastair Cole, your host for today and Co-founder of The Uplift Partnership. And I'm joined today by my friend and Co-founder Kiran Gill. Tell us a little bit about yourself Kiran.

Kiran Gill 0:38

Hi. My name is Kiran and I'm also a director and Co-founder of The Uplift Partnership. I've got 25 years worth of business development experience firsthand in complex selling. And for the last all over 10 years, I've been working in sales operations, helping companies, businesses of all shapes and sizes to fine tune their lead generation.

Alastair Cole 1:02

Thank you and together with our CTO, Douglas, we are Uplift — We accelerate sales for small businesses. And today's topic, delightfully is fine tuning your b2b sales funnel and powering up lead generation and deal closing a really important topic Kiran and one with lots of nuance, lots of detail, what are the first things that come to mind for you when we talk about b2b sales funnels?

Kiran Gill 1:36

Ah, it's just hours of fun isn't that that's where they're, they're the roof, what do they always say, you know, where the rubber hits the road. So a lot of businesses, a lot of small businesses, especially the kind of businesses, I've worked with tech businesses that are going through that phase where they developed a piece of, they've got their piece of tech, they develop their service, their offering, and now they're ready to go to market. And this is where it really gets fun. However, you know, a poorly designed sales funnel, or a poorly designed sales funnel at the top of the actual funnel can cause absolute mayhem and even probably can be, you know, disastrous for the business, you might have a great service you've great product that you've worked tirelessly to get ready. And all forced a bit because you know, the top of the funnel isn't isn't being built correctly. And you just don't create enough leads.

Alastair Cole 2:30

Yeah, I would gold us there. And we're going to dig into all of that top bottom middle of the funnel with some examples that we've got, you know, it would be fantastic if just highly qualified, high value leads just arrived at your door. But that's just that just doesn't happen 99% of the time, it's about hard work. And getting into things like data analysis and optimization and a B testing customer feedback. And the and the interplay between sales and marketing, all absolutely critical. And our experience of fine tuning funnels for small businesses is that we're able to deliver more than double the number of meetings that we get them to resulting in four times higher win rates, and a 251% return on investment. Those numbers from clients that we've worked with over the last couple of years and some nice words there from 360 sales diagnostic product, we they've been able to take the temperature of small businesses over the last year or so working with over 50 and the here we've got a score of the sales methodology maturity that we've seen in those startups. So they're scoring on average 41.2% for sales methodology, which is really the kind of nuts and bolts of the sales funnel. And as you can see, the sales methodology sits inside our sales strategy section within the 360. So 41.2 You know, not not super high, and lots of work that can be done in that area. So what we're going to do is dive into a sales funnel, we're going to build a picture of a sales funnel with your healthcare and and then once we've built that framework, and we're all on the same page, we're going to pick out a handful of areas that are commonly underserved and can probably be relatively easily optimised by small businesses and people on the call. Happy with that my friend? Yep. Oh, good. Excellent. Right. Well, we're going to lead off with a funnel that we've designed. The ideal customer profile here is targeting a small business in the UK tech sector, fewer than 50 stars And we're going to build this out. So Kiran, perhaps you can just start by talking us through the, you know why we've got six different slices of this funnel and what they are. Okay.

Kiran Gill 5:12

So there's lots of different ways of building a funnel. Firstly, let me just say that so and the way that we're showing you is the way that we would initially start a small business that has one product, who is selling into one market, we can go a lot more sophisticated with these things, we've got a slice down to six different phases of outreach, as I would call them, all the ways that you're going to be picking up leads at the top end of the funnel. So the first part on the left hand side is your cold, cold social, that's what we would call your LinkedIn, that kind of area. Remember, we're talking business to business and most business, the business, social activity is done on LinkedIn. In most countries, there are some other providers, but let's just call it LinkedIn for now, cold email. Again, these are clients that you're going to be contacting, that you've never had any contact with and your first kind of contact with them is going to be through email. And then we've got in the middle there people that you're already connected to in some such way. They've been in your, your, your kind of network, either, you know, either you take through your social network, or whichever way your business network, you've got them in your CRM, and they're connected to you in some such way. They might have been past customers, or they might be new customers, people that you've connected with the yellow one in the middle where it says community matching. Now this is quite an interesting one. And something that I think small businesses should utilise, especially when they're in large areas. This is where you've got networking events, small networking events, where you are going to breakfast clubs, you're part of an association, you could be a part of a founders network, there's loads of these small kind of if, depending on where you are in the world, there's loads of these kinds of networking kind of places where you can, you know, just for smaller meetings, then after that, what we've got is the larger one that is major networking events. So we've got it as in person real live events there, I think that's what the IRL events stand for. And these are your big events, these are the ones you know, you might only do two or three of these a year where you might be flying off to a different country, or they are bigger events in one of the bigger cities in your in wherever you live. And then finally, the golden standard hot inbound leads, these are leads that are coming to you. And they're saying I'm ready to buy.

Alastair Cole 7:37

Thank you, that's really helpful about breaking it across those six. I mean, in that community matching Lunch Club is one of the ones that we really like, you know, they're relatively high touch meetings. But if your profile is sorted, you can get great connections and great opportunities there. So thanks for taking us through those six. Let's then add those a different axis that kind of effectively the steps of the sales process, talk us through those steps on the left hand side as you move down the funnel. Yep,

Kiran Gill 8:08

so we've spoken about these before. So any of those of you who have joined any of our past webinars or live live events, you've seen this process on the left hand side that we've got done before. So this is what you would call a sales process. It's also part of your funnel. So initially, you have that initial contact, this is where people have actually, you know, you've made contact using one of those six kinds of different ways of making contact, you've got contact with that person. After that they've turned into this is an active calm conversation, active conversation, meaning not where you're just talking about the weather. And you know whether there's anything there or not, we're talking about whether there is active conversation, where they're interested in what you're actually doing, then what you have, the next stage is where we call it opportunity opportunities where the meeting first happens, that act that conversation has now led to a meeting. And that meeting is a good Bestival first meeting with the client. After that we call it presenting. Now remember, we're talking about complex b2b selling. There are two chances, the chances are that you will have several meetings with the client before you will present anything to them. Because you need to understand what they actually want. What you're selling is normally what the b2b kind of selling process that we're looking at here is something that is complex, something that takes several meetings to, you know, to understand and to actually qualify, and then what you come out with is the actual presenting part. Then finally, you'll get to that point where you send a proposal, that means the proposal has been sent to you, you might even fall into negotiation there and some kind of objection handling potentially. But this is where you know, you've sent the proposal, you have an understanding of what the client wants, and you've given them a proposal. And finally, you're either going to win that deal. You're either going to close with it or you're going to lose the deal, unfortunately, and that says you're a very probable kind of sales funnel that I would expect most b2b companies to have.

Alastair Cole 10:06

Thank you, that's really helpful to start building that out with those different slices and those different steps. And then what's next is for us to add a little bit of the calculation and the metrics and the mechanics of how, how opportunities flow down. And so we've added here, the percentage that we would expect to move from, move down that funnel. And there's different numbers here, my friend, depending on what kind it is, whether it's called Social to heart outbound, and also the numbers change down the down the funnel there, maybe you could just just talk a little bit about why they're different, or different, different numbers in different patches. Yeah, so

Kiran Gill 10:54

The way we'll look at it for this company is that obviously, the top number out there where it says, called social 50, is the effort level, this is the amount of effort you know, the kind of juice to the engine that you should be giving it. So are, you know, 15% of your lead generation should be targeted in code, social, and then email should be about 25% of your effort level, and so forth. As you come down, what you have now is what you grill is the metric of how many of those, so let's say you had 100, cold emails went out, you're expecting initial contact from about 10% of those people or actually repel it, you make some kind of conversation. And as it goes down, you'll see then that for that to turn into a meeting, only 10% of those 10% will then turn into a meeting so of those 10, people that initially have a contact with you in your email contact, I will one of those will turn into a meeting. Then after that, it goes down and down. And as you do you slowly create your funnel, and you'll get your metrics from there.

Alastair Cole 12:05

That's awesome. Thanks. And on the left hand side with kind of cold social and cold email, they're relatively similar numbers, you know, they're low at the top, because you're just not going to get the responses. But then hopefully, those numbers are higher, lower down, talk us through a little bit about the right hand side of the funnel, how our community matching is different and in real life events, and hot outbound, because those numbers are a little bit different.

Kiran Gill 12:29

Yep. So the thing is, different types of activities will be different, or will lead to different depending on the company. And depending on where you are and what you're selling and your competition, you might find that there are certain activities that will generate better leads, or maybe generate more leads. So you see that on the right hand side. Yes, it's only 5% of your effort level, because you remember, these people are getting in contact with you. And remember, we're talking from a sales point of view. You know, there's a lot that goes into how to make an inbound lead, there's a lot that goes on, it normally comes from marketing. Very, very little comes from a sales point of view. Yeah, so what you'll find is that the numbers are higher, but there's got to be less of them, especially for a small business.

Alastair Cole 13:17

Thank you. That's really helpful. So that's, that's the funnel, right? For a fictitious small business that we've put together, they're hunting small businesses in the UK in the tech sector with less than 50% staff. That's how we've set it up. These percentages are drawn from our own experience of what you should be going out to market with. And what we're going to do now is that we've got that funnel, right that b2b sales funnel. Now we want to help pick out areas where it can be fine tuned. Right, so we've got five areas across that funnel in different tranches that we're going to look at. And Kiran is going to talk us through why that wage wage is a potential area of concern and what you might be able to do to optimise it so let's start let's start with the first one. So you want to pick out my friend, that top left hand corner, so called Social, arguably the coldest you know, you have to even before you're messaging anybody on LinkedIn, you need to have made a connection request that can be automated or done manually. So that's like the hardest area. What do you want to pick out in that zone in the top left my friend?

Kiran Gill 14:35

Yep. So when it comes to cold now we are not talking about blanket balm. I will never ever endorse that for any company. What we're talking about here is targeted account strategy. So some people call what is an account well targeted account management, where you're actually targeting accounts that are ideal customers for you now they might not be buying Endo. However, these are clients that are ICP for you. The major thing here is that your ICP, your ideal customer profile needs to be perfectly reset, it needs to be worked properly here, if you're if you've got that wrong in any such way that 10% will drop like anything. And you'll find that your your, even your outreach won't even make any kind of you'll be sending out but you're you're sending out to the wrong people. So suddenly, your funnels collapse, just because your ICP is wrong. Also, if you are in certain countries, you will find that connection rate rates are a lot higher than certain other countries. So your effort level there, in certain kinds of countries, you might say, Well, no, we're going to put a lot more effort into this, because this is where we're getting a lot more traction. So the major thing here is, look at your race ICP, make sure that it's correctly defined. If it isn't, you need to put some work in there. And if you're going to do this connection request, make sure that you know, your LinkedIn profile looks good. It makes sense that you're, you know, your offering is out there, you're not looking like you're looking for a job that is about your company, your business. And you have to do all of that social selling that you know lots and lots of people talk about out there.

Alastair Cole 16:17

I think it was Gartner who said that they saw a 60% increase in conversions when ICPs were curated properly and enough time spent in them. So great advice, they're really focusing on your ideal customer profile. The second area we're going to look at is inside those first degree connections, you already have connections, you've already got warm, warm leads in the funnel and a bit further down now. So between that presenting and proposal sent stage, what are your What are your thoughts on that area, my friend. So

Kiran Gill 16:57

realistically, at this point, if your deal qualification hasn't been done correctly, you're going to be falling out. Now remember, think about how far you've gotten this deal. If you look across all of those numbers, that they're all at 50%, it's quite an easy thing to say. By that time, you should have a great understanding of what the client actually wants. If you don't, that means there's something wrong with your deal qualification. In our last webinar, we spoke about lead qualification, we talked about how, you know, you should have a qualification methodology that you're always using, and that you're making sure that you understand what the client wants, and also what you can supply. So is the value there is their need. And by the time you get there, realistically, you should have a great understanding of your business case. And that's the point where you can send a proposal. Now, if you suddenly find in your metrics that you are losing a lot of deals that are going from proposed proposal sent down into or sorry, from presenting to a proposal sent and things are your metrics are falling out there, then you've got a problem with your deal qualification need to go back have a look at how you're qualifying those leads. And maybe you need some expert help or maybe look at different ways of qualifying.

Alastair Cole 18:10

Yeah, and that we know that value affirmation is a really big deal when you get into that deal closing as well as high levels of qualification that are required. Also, sellers need to be able to demonstrate the value really clearly, understand what buyers tick, what's going to float their boat and how the solution is going to save their lives and make them look like a hero inside the business. So that deal qualification is really important. It's one of the reasons that we built our revenue coach SAS platform to support small businesses with deals closing. Check out revenue coach.ai. Let's move on to number three. Which is an inside kind of community matching and smaller networking events. Would you want to pick up the keyword here?

Kiran Gill 19:01

Yeah. So when it comes to community matching these events might be weekly, bi weekly, once a month, they might be digital, they might depend on how you do these. I honestly believe that most salespeople must stop, most salespeople of any size of companies should be doing these. Even though I worked at a very very large UK bank. We were where we were told to go into the community and join these kinds of community business kind of places because there's always leads there you're always talking to local businesses, you're talking to different peoples. Now the great thing about this, is it is a long game. However, once you have made those connections with you know industry leaders and people around and you start getting leads, you might also find that leads are going to come to you. It's a lot of effort, but it's well worth it and that's why the number is at 70%. I find that working in these kinds of areas you do find that you will get quality leads, and they tend to be the right kind of leads you're looking for. However, it does take time and effort to build that kind of community.

Alastair Cole 20:12

Okay, let's, let's move on to area number four, as we work our way across the funnel forth, when you pick out something in, in the world of, you know, proper large in real life networking events, what do you what do you want to pick up here? My friend?

Kiran Gill 20:29

Yeah, one of the major bugbears is when companies spend a lot of money going to events, and you find that, you know, your salespeople, or the people you sent there are actually just hanging around with their colleagues and actually not doing anything. And it turns into a bit of a jolly. Now remember, when you're a small business, you haven't got the time or the effort to go through these. So first of all, you need to make sure that you're going to the right event, and you should be going to an event where you know that you're potentially going to be finding clients. So your research needs to be done beforehand. Now, when you have got to this kind of event at that point, what you then can find is that what you're looking for is that you're the prospects and the opportunities you're finding, you need to make sure that your process is in place. So after the event, you've collected your business cards, you need to make sure that your emails are ready to go the day after, you need to make those connections, you need to get in contact with those people. Because it's always great to have all these business cards or all these connections that you've come from an event, but no one follows up on those because we all then fall back into our normal routine. And we end up doing other things. And we've spent maybe 1000s to go to an event. And we've just wasted all those opportunities. And again, these potentially could be very high end leads that could close a lot quicker than your cold social.

Alastair Cole 21:50

Yeah, I think that's great advice. You know, we've close business at those kinds of events. There's such great quality leads, you make a personal connection. Your clients are always asking me about what they should be doing in real world events? Absolutely. You know, hands down. Absolutely. You know, where we're at the SAME sales Expo at the end of this month. And then we've got tech London coming up and getting some pretzels. There's lots of stuff going on. And they are so high quality. I think that's great, great advice. And, you know, you just articulated something that I've done so many times, you know, I don't know, but often I've had a pack of cards on my desk for weeks and months that I haven't taken action and that is eroding away. So I think that's really great advice. The fifth and final area we're going to pick out here is hot inbound.

Kiran Gill 22:42

You can just see it there. Can't you Aleister it's 80% those deeds? Can you imagine clients that qualify themselves, they've looked at your website, they think, oh my god, this is the best thing I've ever seen these guys do exactly what I want. I want a meeting with these people. And that meeting then turns into the conversation moves very, very quickly. Maybe they are assessing you against other suppliers and vendors out there. However, you know, they've come to you. Now, this is really difficult for small and small businesses, startups, because you know, content marketing is difficult. It takes time, it takes effort, you need a very good person, you need good people around you who know how to do this. However, if you can get your business to start building these leads, if you could let you imagine if you could get 10 of those a month. You know, yeah, Easy Street.

Alastair Cole 23:31

Yeah, they're real gold dust, really hard to get to. And that's why those numbers are high. So yeah, and that's, again, the integration of the collaboration between sales and marketing working together. You know, I think sellers last year, in a study by HubSpot rated as high as high quality only 7% of the leads. And as per usual, it's marketing that gets the blame. They're not helping enough. And I think that that collaboration is really really important. So look, thanks. That's like a whistle stop tour of five areas. That could be fine tuned in the sales funnel. And, you know, for each of those areas, there are lots of things that you can do to get the ball rolling. And we've collected those into a list of sales actions. Talk us through this a little bit, my friend, just in terms of what kinds of actions talk about beginning at the bottom end of the funnel, where are they from?

Kiran Gill 24:36

Yeah, these are mainly from the top of the funnel. I will tell you this, because what I find is with most salespeople, and what you're going to find is what how are they actually doing their day to day jobs? What are their actions, and you've got connection requests are things that you do on LinkedIn, you've got emails, obviously, that everyone's sending constantly. You've got direct messages that you can send. These are different sales actions and everyday use. You should be doing 10s of these everyday, if not more than that if you can, if you can muster it. And the more you do these, this is your activity. Yeah.

Alastair Cole 25:10

And we're calling, we're grouping them all together into sales actions. And that feeds into our next slide, where we are talking through the actions that should be taken by individual sellers. And then the outcomes that result from that. And the magic number, the magic number here is 618. Right? that you're seeing at the top of June right, which is a fully fledged month 618 sales actions, right is what you should be when your sales engine is working properly. So these, these, this six month plan that we're putting, we've put in here for q2, and sorry, Q one and q2, two of this year, comprising the first half of the year h1, we've made an assert, we followed on with this ideal customer profile going after UK tech sector, small business, we've assumed an average deal size of 25,000 pounds, and a sales cycle of 90 days. We've also assumed that it'll take April and May to get up to speed where those numbers are a bit lower. And so June is the first month where we're hitting full stride and 618 sales actions from that list that we showed on on the previous slide are required every month for each individual seller. You know, that's your number, Kiran 618, what would you talk us through what that means for the rest of that, that funnel in June and across the board for the other months?

Kiran Gill 26:55

Yeah, so these individual sales actions are the bread and butter for your prospecting. And if they're not done, and if you're only doing a fraction of those, your numbers will drop, they just will. So it's as simple as that. One of the first things I do when I go into a company, and they ask me to find out what's going wrong, is that I'll start looking for their actions and figure out what's happening. Most of the time, these things won't even be reported, or you won't be able to even find them. And that's when you start really worrying about well, we don't actually know what we're doing. So we don't actually know how to fix it. So when you're looking at your sales engine, you need to look at these numbers. And you think from that top part, those actions are going to result. Now, you might think to yourself 618 actions to get at three active conversations seems a lot. This is the great thing about sales funnels, and sales engines, you can start tweaking with those numbers that we showed you before. Now, minuscule little movements, better ICP that are better content management, or marketing, all those things, suddenly just start adding one or 2% Here and there. And suddenly your funnel starts exploding, and you're getting a lot more business than you thought you would be.

Alastair Cole 28:10

And we're into one of your favourite areas, marginal gains, right, which makes, you know, absolute sense, you know, you're 1% better in all the areas has a compound effect. So, you know, based on our example, the sales team here of this seller, this individual seller selling average deal size at 25,000. You know, starting to ramp up in April, May and June. So by the time you get to June, you're doing 618 actions that's rolling down to what closing one deal in June. And then July is then down from the full strength 618. And so it's August and September to back up what's happening there in July and August, my friend, why are those numbers lower?

Kiran Gill 28:54

So remember, we're talking about a northern hemisphere seller, I know we've got a global audience here. So not everybody works on these kinds of calendars. However, what you'll see here is that potentially in July and August for our seller, people are going away on holiday, that doesn't mean that they might be even going on a holiday as well. So directions, however, you have to remember that potentially your buyers will also be going on holiday. So you are going to have points where you're going to have a lull in your kind of prospecting. The big thing I have to say here, and the major thing I normally see most startups and small businesses are is that they just stopped prospecting for no apparent reason. Because they've got a couple of clients. And now they don't have to think about getting new business. This is absolutely the worst thing to do. You've got to continue doing your sales actions. You've got to continue that funnel going. And the more you make this into a routine and a habit, the easier it becomes because new business just keeps on coming and you suddenly think to yourself, why did we ever do this in the first place?

Alastair Cole 29:58

Gotta keep your foot on the pedal there and you know, if you this is the kind of detail we go into with clients, if you work through those, those first those first two quarters of this year, with a 25,000 pound average deal size, you'd be looking at 143 pounds, or 443,000 pounds of incremental new business. As a result on the right hand side, look at the h1, column 5.7 deals on average. Now 680 might seem like, you know, a crazy number for an individual seller to do, you have to bear in mind that a lot of that is certainly the cold outreach that can be automated and semi automated, and not just the sales side, but also the marketing side. So those hot inbound leads can be automated. And we've seen from Gartner's assessment at the end of last year, that 27% extra bandwidth is available to sellers if they're able to harness technology and accurately harness AI. And that's something that we do very well. We have lots of computer science expertise, we build our own SAS products, we build our own semi automated products. So don't worry if 618 Seems like a founder seller seems like an unattainable number, because technology is here to help. So now that that's kind of us, we're running a little bit over. So we'll just wrap up quite quickly, some of the data that we showed at the top of the show the scores of myth, maturity and sales methodology came through our 360 sales diagnostic products, you can get more information at the Oculus partnership, come forward slash 360. It's an hour, it's a 75 minute interview with me or Kiran or both of us. And you get a full score and breakdown of your sales function, bespoke recommendations. And a revenue roadmap, if you're interested, head over to the website forward slash 360. Really all that's left for me to do is talk about the next event. And it's going to be pretty much two weeks. We're not doing it on Tuesday. For the first time in living memory, it's going to be Monday, the 22nd of April, because that Tuesday and Wednesday, we'll be at the SME Expo Excel. We may be launching a live impromptu webinar or some kind of live event from there. But we'll be doing the next version of this show. On Monday, the 22nd be a topic that's very close to your heart care. And you want to talk us through why we've picked what we've picked for next time. i Yeah,

Kiran Gill 32:34

Well, you know, it's a follow on to what we've been talking about. It's a complex buying group. It's getting harder to sell to bigger organisations, even medium sized organisations are getting very complex. And yeah, I think it's one of those topics that 'is interesting because it's changing continuously. And it builds back into what we've been speaking about here on about the funnel. So yeah, hopefully, it'll be fun. Fun. I don't know whether it'll be fun. It

Alastair Cole 32:59

will be. It won't be so complex buying groups of really hot topics. Certainly if you're selling into enterprise, there's so much to think about, you know, people leaving in the middle of a deal cycle. How do you shepherd, guide, and steer those bigger groups across the board? How do you map out the decision making unit when it's when it's bigger? So yeah, there's lots of bases to cover. So join us on Monday, the 22nd of April for that show. That's it. That's all from us. Thanks very much for your time and expertise. Kiran, appreciate it.

Kiran Gill 33:32

No problem. And Thanks, mate.

Alastair Cole 33:34

And we'll leave it there. Thanks for watching everybody. That's it for now. Bye for now. See you next time.

Kiran Gill 33:41

Talk to you soon. Bye.