Middle and Bottom Funnel 101: How To Help Prospects and Close More Deals
Learn from Margaret Wise how marketers can help prospects in the middle and bottom of the funnel make informed decisions and close deals.
Many marketers focus on the lead generation part of their marketing funnel. However, once prospects reach the middle and bottom stages, marketers must understand the buyer behaviors here and help them make informed decisions. Margaret Wise, chief revenue officer, ClickDimensions, explains three ways marketers can help prospects in these later stages and close more deals.
Many marketers consider lead generation as one of the biggest challenges post-pandemic. But while the digital-first buying and selling landscape has made things more difficult, there has been a renewed focus on lead gen for businesses looking to recoup lost revenue. According to Startup Bonsai and BrightTALK, 53% of marketers spend at least half of their entire budget on lead gen efforts, leveraging tactics like making sure the right thought leadership content is available, capturing leads from ebook form-fills, and optimizing your website for new traffic.
As prospects progress through the funnel and enter the middle and bottom phases, some shifts need to occur. The middle of the funnel is where companies establish trust-based relationships with already engaged audiences. In this stage, companies need to differentiate themselves and stand out in the industry compared to competitors. Once prospects make the appropriate comparisons in the middle stage of the funnel, those still engaged move on to the lower phase, where they prepare to make a purchase decision.
For modern marketing and sales teams, it is essential to understand the middle and lower funnel behaviors to help buyers make the most informed decision possible. There are three ways to help prospects in these late buyer journeys: personalization, content, and onboarding.
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1. Personalize Your Interactions
When prospects reach the middle and bottom stages of the sales funnel, they expect highly personalized, one-to-one interactions with sales team members. In these phases, marketers and salespeople should rely less on automation and more on data that drives customized, unique buyer conversations. How do we get there?
Therefore it is important that the marketing and sales teams collect as much data as possible from conversations at the top of the funnel, buyer website behavior, and particular pain points. Once you have that data, organize and present it in a way that makes it usable between both teams. Creating a single source of truth for your data allows you to draw insights and make more informed decisions on approaching these prospects further in the funnel.
Armed with data, you can begin to personalize your interactions with prospects. Each buyer has their own unique pain points and reasons for purchasing your service or product. Personalization ensures marketing and sales communications cut through all the noise consumers are bombarded with. In these last stages of the buying process, customers want to feel heard and understood and that they are being presented with the most relevant information to help them make the best purchase decision.
Salespeople that do this well and tailor their selling approach according to a customer’s unique situation can improve buyer decision-making quality by 11%, according to Gartner.
2. Get the Content Right
When making purchasing decisions, 89% of buyers say it’s very important that vendors provide them with relevant content at each stage of the buying process, according to Forrester. As opposed to content geared for the top of the funnel — eBooks, whitepapers, webinars and other thought leadership pieces — middle and bottom funnel content should help prospects compare services and prices and prepare for success in using the product. Use this as an opportunity to get more specific about your company and what you offer. At this point in the buying journey, prospects are familiar with their challenges and are ready to do something about them.
In the middle stages of the funnel, prospects are actively comparing your organization against competitors in the same space. Arm your marketing and sales teams with content that helps position you as a leader in the industry. Blogs that highlight specific products and services, case studies of successful implementations, and testimonials are helpful here. As prospects progress toward a purchase decision, it is also helpful to show how your organization compares with others in terms of features and pricing.
At the bottom of the funnel, help buyers prepare for success with the product or service. Content pieces like checklists, roles and responsibilities, change management guides, recommendations for measuring ongoing success, and tips and tricks for user adoption can be effective here. Also, consider resources that support migrations — how to migrate solutions, prepare partners, etc.
Post-sales, it is essential to have a content strategy that enhances customer relationships, as 68% of buyers from the above-mentioned Forrester study say they will not expand a contract if they do not receive helpful content. Arm your marketing and sales teams with the information to help shift a prospect’s focus on success and getting the most from their new investment.
3. Establish a Successful Onboarding Process
This brings us to the onboarding process. As marketers and sales teams think about the opportunity’s final stages, specific strategies should be employed to set up a successful new-client onboarding.
Think about the customer journey. The signing of the contract is critical to the organization — it is a big driver of revenue, after all — but it is not huge for the customer. It should not cause a halt in the process, but for many organizations, there is a pause between the contract signing and registering the product to get things up and running. Instead, think about the customer in this journey stage and try to close those gaps to create a smooth process.
Is there a customer portal you can provide access to before the contract gets signed or right after? Is there anything that can be automated for the new customer to allow certain communications to kick in quickly? If an organization has to wait and assign a resource for onboarding or training, consider automation that thanks the customer for their business and provides more resources to help smooth the timeline while delivering the next set of actions a new customer can expect.
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Scaling With Best Practices
Understanding customers has always been a part of a winning business. In the middle and bottom stages of the sales funnel, this means interacting with prospects in highly personalized ways, serving relevant content, and preparing them for success with your product. To do this at scale, marketing and sales teams need to approach the funnel in a unified way supported by automation and complete customer data. By keeping these best practices in mind, organizations can close more deals and drive revenue.
What best practices have you implemented to help prospects in the middle and bottom of the funnel and close more deals? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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