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MenuHow do we set up a sales funnel for our tour company that will help us reach travel agencies to re-sell our tours?
We would like to get advice and guidance for setting up a robust sales plan, pipeline, and strategy for reaching out aggressively to travel agencies all over the world. We need help on how to set up our pipepine, the funnel, and how to avoid mistakes as we execute.
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Hello! This is a great question. I have been helping startups and small business owners with their funnels for quite some time now. My name is Humberto Valle, I'm an MBA strategist with Unthink and actually recently completed another Sales Funnel Marketing Guide, you can find it here: http://bit.ly/2j4XPid
With that said, I will be as helpful as possible to you in this response.
1) Define Your Brand
What makes you remarkable?
The first step toward answering this question is conducting a self-audit to identify your purpose, strengths, values and passion. In a fiercely competitive cleaning maid service environment, it’s essential to crystallize your competitive advantage. Some cleaning professionals differentiate themselves through their individual achievements (e.g., well-known clients, endorsements) while others boast added value (e.g., JD, MBA, Successful exits, number of employees, etc.).
- Understand Your Audience
Define your target audience — and arm yourself with intelligence about what drives them to take action. Determine who you’re talking to: consider age, gender, personality, and profession. Then, identify your clients’ pain points: how can you solve their needs better than your competitors? What is their preferred channel of communication? Answering each of these questions thoroughly is imperative. Just like when networking, building rapport is what makes a brand good.
- Know Your Competition
With rising confidence in the real estate market, there are many new cleaning companies popping up every day - which means more and more competition. In order to stand out, gather intelligence on who you’re up against and go for an opposite plethora of efforts and experiences that will help you build a different brand from the rest. Then, be better than them. One key question to answer in this process: what niches within my city and industry are not being exploited by the largest cleaning companies? Once you figure it out, you’re ready to put your stake in the ground - copy their efforts for managerial to get started, promote where they are and they are aren't. Subscribe to our newsletter and I will follow up later with ways on doing this.
2) Live Where Your Customers Live (not - literally)
In order to get customers’ attention, you have to live where your customers live. And today more than ever before, where customers live is on social media. But, if you want to multiply your success opportunity, you must be where your competitors aren't. That isn't social media, per se.
You can choose to avoid Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube on purpose, assume they don't exist and use that are a rule of thumb forcing you to find alternate platforms that would be potentially favored by your prospect clients but not used by competitors to reach them. Create beautiful sales funnel marketing campaigns that consider the acquisition as more than cookie cutter reach.
Lead Generation Is About Anticipating A Buyer's Needs:
When you create a funnel, as you are sketching it out you should aim to address each phase of their buyer journey from awareness, consideration and decision because chances are your audience will be at various interest levels when they first encounter your ad/service.
My first approach would be optimizing the website for SEO, making sure all pieces are coherent across all platforms, then address occasionally a major competitor and its key differences. Using linkedin and google ads I would generate awareness and traffic to the site to kickstart Google Analytics for retargeting purposes, then follow them through other platforms via ads offering stories, case studies, guides, best practices, and data they can use with their own clients in exchange for lead information, then nurture them through email marketing. If all this is set up on a platform like Hubspot, you could essentially invest the time upfront and then let it run on auto-pilot.
To learn more you can read more about lead generation on my blog post: http://blog.unthink.me/lead-generation-best-practices-for-top-of-the-sales-funnel-marketing
Every business needs these systems:
1. Lead generation
2. Qualification
3. Closing.
If it's missing one or more, it won't make money. A fourth system, for Fulfillment, is also a darn good idea.
Many tools are sold as a "business in a box" or a complete solution when in actual fact they are a small piece of just one of these systems. For example, whiteboard explainer videos were all the rage awhile back. People jumped on board because they were told the videos would make sales brainlessly easy. Ha ha, the joke's on them and the only people who made money were the software creators.
Where's the traffic in that situation (leads system)?
Maybe a little qualification in the video, if it's written correctly.
Maybe a little closing (conversion to sale, moving the lead to become a buyer) if the copy is good and the offer is a match to the viewer.
But as a "business in a box"? A complete system? Seriously flawed. Many pieces missing.
You have an idea of your target market. How will you attract them? How will you capture those leads, then nurture them? And after that, what offer will you present them with?
These are the nature of all those mistakes you want to avoid. No one is going to give you this expertise for free. It's earned by the school of hard knocks--they sure didn't teach it to me 20+ years ago in college--and it comes at a price.
Related Questions
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I would like to hold weekly one-to-one meetings with my telesales team. What structure and questions deliver the best results?
It would be nice to know what you are selling, the sales cycle, the types of buyers, etc. This is important and would let me customize my answer for you. But, here are some generic thoughts. The problem with sales meeting is keeping it interesting for the people who are not speaking or giving their "update" and to make it a learning experience rather than an update of what they did. One thing that has worked very well with me to ask each person to come prepared to discuss these topics: 1. Give me three things you did this week that you think worked really well and you want to share with the rest of the group. 2. Give me three things you did last week that you won't do any more, that you think just are not working. 3. Tell us about the biggest sale you made last week. What made it close? What value proposition did the customer buy? How can you take what you learned from that and use it for all sales in the future. I work with a lot of inside sales teams helping them craft their messages and sales process with the goals of improving close rates and increased sales velocity. BobBH
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Startup Looking To Hire First Sales Employee - And completely lost. Any advice on compensation structure (benefits?), items that need to be in place?
Instead of repeating the wisdom of others, I'll link to it below. Here is a great blog post on hiring your first salesperson: http://tomtunguz.com/when-to-hire-a-salesperson Also, Mark Suster has written a ton of great post on his blog about startup sales. http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/on-selling/CH
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How to compensate a sales person?
Hi! I would be careful in compensating only by commission. This will give you the kind of sales reps you might not want. If you were to invest your time, would you not want to receive some kind of fixed fee for the invested time? Also, by paying commission based, you are telling the sales guy that you don't know if the product will sell, but that you don't want to be the one risking the time invested. I'd go for a mix.OL
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I am working on creating a sales compensation plan for a recurring revenue model are there any pitfalls I need to be aware of when creating this?
Personally, I'm a fan of sales comp plans being tied to ongoing performance. Sure, the salesperson should get some of that long tail, but only while he continues to work productively at the company. Once he leaves, he should lose the tail, since someone else will likely need to step into the relationship with his customers. But there are too many variables to give a universal answer. The true answer is this: You need to pay your salespeople enough so that they are motivated to keep working for you rather than seeking alternative employment. This means you need to analyze at-quota pay, and ensure that your base and commission structures provide a market-level of compensation at quota. You can muck with anything you want as long as that goal is met.DF
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Looking for help determining ideal marketing automation -> CRM workflow.
It sounds like you're off to a good start with your lead generation. While it is important to keep lead volume strong, it's even more important to have a way to follow up with these leads and continue pushing them through your sales funnel until you can convert them into revenue. Without that follow-up, especially if you're generating leads through PPC, you're likely wasting the budget and energy you're putting toward your marketing efforts in the first place. The first thing I'd recommend you do is create an automatic "kick-back" email that triggers as soon as a lead downloads your ebook. Be sure to thank them for downloading, give them a link to access the ebook, and then (most importantly) include your call-to-action for the next step you want them to take. Second, figure out how you're going to handle these leads from a sales perspective. If you're stretched for bandwidth, I'd recommend a system where you assign dollar values to different types of leads, and only have a sales rep follow up with your highest value leads. How much is an ebook lead worth to your business? How much is a demo lead? What about someone who actively requests to be contacted? You'll find that as you get these systems and processes underway, it'll be extremely useful to have a CRM system both for integrating with your marketing efforts and for helping your sales team to be able to sort and prioritize the leads they're reaching out to. Lead conversion is a daily focus of mine in my role at HubSpot, and I'd be happy to chat further about how to get a strong marketing/sales funnel set up so you're better equipped to manage the leads you generate and better able to convert them into dollars. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help!SB
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