How To Get Leads Into Your Sales Funnel

Sales funnels, this is where you want your potential customers to go. Going through your funnel will help educate leads on what you offer and show the value you and your company can add to their business. Everyone's sales funnels will be slightly different, but they all have the same end goal -- turning leads into clients. If you don’t have a great sales funnel strategy, that’s ok. We’re going to take you through Boundless Media’s CEO and Co-Founder, Nico De Bruyn’s approach to fill your funnel with leads and turn them into clients.

Before you go funneling in leads, you need to know the best medium to reach your ideal customer persona (ICP). Knowing where your ideal clients are and using those platforms to reach out will ensure you are getting quality leads. When we look at organic outreach, which is what Boundless Media does, this can be LinkedIn, Facebook, cold emails, cold calling, or other forms of non-paid outreach. LinkedIn and cold emails are what we focus on.

If you’re using LinkedIn, the first thing you want to do is make sure your profile is optimized. Doing this will help your leads get a good understanding of what you offer. Once your profile is optimized, you need to start working on your customized connection messages to reach your target market. When you send your connection message, two things can happen. #1- They can tell you they’re not interested or just not respond to you, and you take them out of your sequence. #2- They respond, and you start a drip campaign where you will drip content to them. The content you send should be educational, informative, and add value to the lead. You can send anything from case studies to podcasts, as long as it adds value.

Cold email is very similar to outreach on social media. You want to have a customized cold email to send. If they don’t respond, you move on, but you want to start sending information right away if they do. Of course, the goal is to take people from a lead, bring them into your funnel, book a meeting, then turn them into a client. However, you are going to get people that don’t respond. If they don’t respond to you, try to get them added to your newsletter email list or some sort of connection sequence so you can reach out to them again in the future.

What do you do when someone does respond to you, and you start sending them information? Now you start the business development process. This takes some research and very personalized messages, but you can still use templates, and it’s very effective. Once someone says, “Yes, I’m interested!” you will send them a message that is an observation plus a question. The observation can come from a part of their website, a post they shared, a blog they wrote, or anything else that talks about that person or their business. The observation should be about them, and the questions should be asking how they currently solve the problem you want to solve. For example, if you’re selling websites, you might ask, “How do you like the functionality of your website right now?” You’re not being too salesy, but you’re letting them know you’re interested in them.

Your observations and questions will differ for each person and in each industry. It’s a good idea to have templates ready to go, so you need to customize your message once you have the data. You can easily craft and send the email or message. If they don’t respond to you from this message, you’ll start engaging with them in different ways two days after you’ve sent your email. Engage with them on social media, like and comment on their posts, share a post they made, or any other way of engaging with them. Two days after that, if they still haven’t responded, you’re going to engage with them again. You don’t want to send a message yet. This time you can endorse their skills on LinkedIn or send them a meme or article they can benefit from. Three days after that, you’ll send a message that discusses something they said in their first response to you and a question. From there, after a week of no response, send a simple message that says something along the lines, “Have you deferred this project?” A week later, if you still don’t hear anything, send them a nice good-bye message, and mark that you need to follow up with them in two months and ask if they want to be added to your newsletter. Remember, the business development part of this process isn’t very salesy. This is informative and needs to build a relationship with your prospect. Save the sales for when they book a meeting.

So now your lead is filtering down through your funnel, and they want a meeting. What do you do now? A couple of different things can happen when you’re ready to set an appointment. First, they can book a meeting right away when you send your calendar link. Once a meeting is booked, you should start an educational drip campaign until you have your meeting.

If they don’t book right away, you’ll start another follow-up process. This schedule is similar to the business development schedule. You will send your calendar link and even information you included in earlier communications 1, 3, 9, and 14 days after sending the initial link to book a meeting.

Just because someone doesn’t book a meeting right away doesn’t mean they’re not interested anymore. Maybe they were getting ready to click the link, and they had a phone call, or they saw the email, had a meeting, and then just forgot. That’s why the follow-up is so important. You want to stay top of mind until they book a call with you. If your final message doesn’t get a response, you’ll fall back to the business development cycle and reengage with them through whatever platform you use.

This is a process that has been very successful for Boundless Media. We not only use this method for ourselves, but we also use it for our clients. If you need help with your lead gen or getting a good sales funnel strategy going, we’re here to help. We can do everything for you, from optimizing your profile for LinkedIn to setting up cold email and message campaigns, and we can manage it all for you. We can do the work so you can sit back and wait until it’s time to sell! If you’d like more info, contact us today!

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