How to Optimize a Multi-Stage Marketing Funnel

I just saved Phil $5,000 he was about to waste on marketing His sales were low, and his solution seemed obvious: “I’m going to double my ad budget to double my sales” Wrong move Phil’s funnel is simple: He spends money on digital ads → generates leads → books estimates → sells jobs But the constraint wasn’t lead volume It was everything after the lead Phil’s current numbers: • 30 leads/month (from $5K in ads) • 15 estimates (50% lead-to-estimate) • 4 sales (26% close rate) • $10K average ticket • $40K/month in revenue The problem isn’t leads It’s conversion 1. First constraint: Lead response time Phil was wearing every hat: answering calls, selling jobs, managing projects Leads sat for hours (or days) before anyone followed up. Some were never called at all Solution: Hire a remote admin to instantly respond and follow up until the estimate is booked Now the funnel widens 2. Second constraint: Sales process Phil was closing 26% of estimates when he should be closer to 40% Solution: Train the sales process → Ask better questions → Build rapport Higher close rate = higher average ticket Here’s the math AFTER improving the ratios: • 30 leads per month (same $5k spend) • 24 turn into estimates (80% conversion) • 10 become customers (42% close rate) • Average ticket: $12,000 • $120k total revenue The same $5,000 marketing spend is now generating $120,000 instead of $40,000 He went from break-even to $20K/month profit No extra ad spend needed Lesson: Don’t throw money at the top of the funnel until you fix the middle and bottom Fix the engine before stepping on the gas — Want more business content? Join my free newsletter: https://lnkd.in/e9DEe9vu

Are you leaving money on the table? My bulletproof system to find out and fix it. I've spent the last 6+ years helping 100s of entrepreneurs, startups, and small businesses grow faster. This is how I diagnose where they can quickly 2-3x profits. 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝗢𝗻𝗲: 𝗠𝗮𝗽 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗿𝗲 𝗰𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗷𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗲𝘆 What are the steps someone takes to become a happy, paying customer? - How do they get to the website? - How do they become a lead? - How do they start a sales conversation? - How do they become a customer? - How do they experience value? - How do they refer a friend? - How do they churn? 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝗧𝘄𝗼: 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀. Create a boring old spreadsheet with the conversion rates of each stage of the buyer's journey. 𝘋𝘰 𝘕𝘖𝘛 𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘰𝘯 𝘥𝘢𝘴𝘩𝘣𝘰𝘢𝘳𝘥𝘴. 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘰𝘰 𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘺 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦 𝘵𝘰𝘰 𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘤𝘬𝘭𝘺. Then, track the numbers week over week for the last 6 months. You will instantly notice issues: - Bottlenecks - Huge drop-offs - Lack of progress Quantitative data helps spot patterns. Qualitative data tells you why they exist. 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗲: 𝗗𝗶𝗴 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗴𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗪𝗛𝗬 - Talk to your team to get their thoughts - Ask recent customers about their journey - Review it all from your buyer's perspective 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗿: 𝗖𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗻 𝘁𝗼 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗲 Plan them in 3 categories: 1. Low-hanging fruit Simple changes you can make in a few hours. - Add a Contact Us form to the website - Automate sales meeting reminders - Edit your LinkedIn profile 2. Process tweaks Changes you can make to things you are ALREADY doing. - Bring in legal sooner in the sales process - Send a custom video to new prospects - Templatize your proposals 3. Long term projects These will have the biggest impact, but take the longest time. - Rewrite your sales onboarding process - Create a new marketing funnel - Develop a new offer/product 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝗙𝗶𝘃𝗲: 𝗘𝘅𝗲𝗰𝘂𝘁𝗲, 𝗺𝗲𝗮𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗲, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲 Start putting your plan into action! But keep tracking your metrics to see how they change over time. Are they improving? If not, why not? If so, how can we double down? Simple, but effective as hell. Give it a try, and let me know what you find. If you want help, DM me or book some time. ♻️ Repost if this helped or inspired 🔔 Follow me, Kasey Jones for more 👇 Become your industry's go-to expert

Working across a number of programs at once gives Liam Moroney and me an interesting purview into how people set up their programs. We see a lot of the same mistakes (and many teams think it’s just them), but we also see a lot of great setups. And an ask I’d highly recommend taking to bring to their rev ops counterparts is, to have a clear way of confidently reporting on SDR/BDR meetings in your CRM, regardless of what they’re comped on. My personal recommendation would be to log meetings as actual Event objects, not Tasks, as this allows for much more flexibility in reporting, and avoids them getting lost in the sea of other tasks on lead/account records. However, I’ve also seen this done really well by utilizing Opportunity stages, where: Stage 0 = Discovery (meeting booked, 0% pipeline)  Stage 1 = Pre-Qual / Evaluation (meeting has happened, it’s not DQ’ed but further qualification is needed) Stage 2 = Qualified Pipeline We see too much of marketing reporting based around the far ends of the spectrum - MQLs & pipeline, without much visibility into what happens in between. And without that, it’s very difficult to pull insights of the data. But this one small change enables you to have a shocking amount of clarity into one of the most important inflection points in your funnel. From this, you can see: - Are we actually booking meetings with leads? If not, why?  - If we are booking meetings, are the meetings happening? If not, why? - If the meetings are happening, are they being DQ’ed or moved forward? If DQ’ed, what are the common themes? - If they’ve moved forward, how many are still just sitting in that next stage? Why may that be? I’ve seen both of these approaches work very well technically speaking, and would urge you to try implementing them if you’re lacking that deeper visibility! #b2bmarketing

Hey #b2bmarketers, if you're like me, you're being asked to increase pipeline by at least 50% but you're not getting more budget. Am I right? 😂 If this is you, hold onto your seat because I'm about to share my silver bullet. (Cue record scratching...) 🔙 But seriously, we all know there are no silver bullets but there are a lot of little bushes you can look under across your funnel to find ways to eek out 5% here and 10% there until you piece together the couch change and come up with 50% more pipeline. Here's where I go to find the couch change: 1. Conversion rate of purchase accounts: Assuming you, too are running and account-based model, your ADRs and AEs are likely focusing on purchase-stage accounts. Chances are, they're only getting a 15% conversion to meeting, which is not bad for this market. Look for ways to get this pool up because it wears out fast. Things you can try: Check to see if your TOFU campaign is delivering enough awareness / decision-stage accounts to fill your purchase account bucket down the line. If not, shift media to awareness and pre-awareness to fill that bucket, then focus your automated outbound email sequences on awareness / decision stage to move them into purchase. 2. Individual performance of your AEs and ADRs in getting the right meetings: Chances are, there's a wide range of performance here. In a lot of cases, 30% of your meetings come from one team. So see what they're doing and standardize on that with the team. Put real activity goals in place like # of personalized outreach motions, # of LI emails, # of warm outbound calls (yes, these still work) and make sure you're tracking these by team. 3. Optimize your outbound sequences: If you're like most companies, you've got a lot of sequences running, but for the most part, it will be a handful of those sequences that deliver the goods in warming up prospects. Lean into those and test, test, test, and optimize. Make sure you have the right balance between automated sequences and manual and keep an eye on audience reactions. 4. Look for more ways to increase your audience without compromising your ICP. For instance, Folloze we use Reveal to expose customer contacts of our partner's customers to expand our own database. 70% of our net new customers are also customers of our top partners but not all of their customers are in our database. This week alone, we added 150 new contacts into our database just by cross-referencing in Reveal. 5. Don't forget your competitor campaigns, closed / lost, and adds/moves/changes. We squeeze a lot of juice out of prospects who didn't close in the last two years. We are also catching a lot of competitor fall-out. And, our biggest fans are moving jobs, and we follow them. Based on the above, I feel more like a farmer than a hunter, but that's where we're. Small moves of a lot of little dials get yours there. So those are my big moves at the moment. What are some of yours? #ABM #pipeline Infinite Edge Consulting

Typically, I see growth teams focusing on the biggest funnel drop, but this is usually not the biggest opportunity for growth, and unproductive. Let me explain by going deeper into a more holistic approach to managing growth funnels. Most of the analytics tools available today offer limited funnel metrics: funnel drops and completions. It’s therefore understandable that teams focus on the biggest drop. The truth is - most users won’t complete your funnel anyway. Your product probably wasn’t built for them, there’s no product-market fit, and changing their low intent is unlikely. Optimizing might keep them 1-2 more stages, but they’ll likely churn at the next. Move on! Your best opportunity lies with high-intent users who don’t complete the funnel. They have a good product-market fit and should complete. First identifying this group is crucial to understanding why some don’t succeed. How to identify High-Intent Users: Try changing up your analytics approach, put the dashboards, #correlation, and lengthy #abtesting aside for a minute. Here are a few ways to help you identify your high-intent users. Search for the signals of intent: Shorter time to complete steps, differences in onboarding questions and responses, permissions etc. Group users into segments, such as the marketing received, localizations, user properties, and behavioral groups. Calculate the likelihood of users in a sub-segment completing the funnel. Then, upon aggregating all the sub-segments together, you understand the quality and intent of the segment. Users with the most signals of intent are your high-intent users. Find high-intent users automatically. Consider leveraging a causal model. Loops, for example, automatically identifies high-intent users, by looking at the sub-segments and finding intent signals. It can otherwise be a very manual process when you are limited to funnel drop and completion metrics. How to Identify the Biggest Opportunities: Once you have identified your high-intent users, you need to size the opportunity before starting to form hypotheses. Opportunity size is based on the questions: Assuming this segment completed this step of the funnel, what would be the effect on the total funnel completion rate. Loops automatically presents you the biggest opportunities to improve your funnel. It calculates what would be the impact on the total funnel completion rate, if you improve a specific step of the funnel. Action the Insight: By identifying high-intent users and their pain points and motivations you can better shape the top of the funnel and increase completions. Armed with the confidence and impact insight of your biggest opportunity, you can turn your attention to the specific actions needed for funnel completion, as expected. Remember, most users will drop. Invest your time in identifying and understanding high-intent users. Causal inference models can help you find the answer, with less time, effort, and stress. #productledgrowth #causalml #growth