A B2B growth funnel plays a hugely important role for tech startups. But many startup founders miss one or more layers of the funnel that are crucial for scaling growth.
In this video, you’ll get introduced to the eight layers of the B2B growth funnel, get tips on optimizing each part of your funnel, and see what each part of the funnel looks like when working together.
You'll find traffic generation at the top of a B2B growth funnel.
The traffic generation layer addresses how strangers discover your company and typically includes channels such as blogging, search engine optimization (SEO), social publishing, paid search, paid social, public relations, and video.
To measure and improve traffic generation, get a handle on how your traffic is positively impacting lead generation and the balance of the down-funnel layers That are more directly related to revenue growth and company growth.
Next, lead generation helps you convert anonymous website visitors into known leads.
To optimize your lead generation, evaluate how your premium content, calls to action (CTAs), forms, landing pages, and confirmation pages perform.
With a healthy B2B lead generation program and some basic segmentation and nurturing, you'll be generating a steady flow of sales opportunities.
Sales opportunity generation happens when someone from your sales team is in touch with a lead and determines there is some opportunity to do business with that potential customer soon.
Most B2B sales leaders will require that a sales opportunity have a specific deal amount and estimated close date before it can be moved from strictly a sales opportunity to a defined deal.
However, the bar is usually considerably lower to cross the threshold from a lead to a sales opportunity. Often, it just means that the sales team has accepted the lead, and the lead has committed to a specific date and time for a meeting to explore working together.
Sales opportunities and new client acquisition
As a percentage of the sales opportunities generated continue to move down your B2B growth funnel, some of these sales opportunities will become part of your new client acquisition.
To optimize how sales opportunities turn into new customers or clients, you can measure the conversion rate from opportunity to customer. Also, carefully study the blockage points on your deals board where opportunities fail to progress to the next stage.
Successful new client acquisition should lead to initial revenue generation. For any kind of recurring revenue-based business, where your customers subscribe to a service, the initial revenue generation is just the starting line of what most hope to be a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship.
Sustained customer success and company growth
If you see much of a disconnect between new client acquisition projected revenue, based on your deals board, and initial revenue generation, there's likely a significant problem with the sales team mismanaging expectations or closing bad deals, or a significant flaw in your customer onboarding.
To progress from initial revenue generation to sustained customer success, that's generally the domain of your customer success team. To optimize for the stage of the B2B growth funnel, focus on the efficiency of how you help customers achieve their goals around initial value, intended value, and extended value.
For sustained customer success to advance into sustainable revenue generation, pattern recognition, case study validation, and the ability to scale processes have all become essential for connecting the dots from the top of your growth funnel to the bottom layers.
And finally, when all the other layers, from traffic generation to sustainable revenue generation, function synergistically and predictably, you'll be able to invest more aggressively into company growth.
And if you’re serious about optimizing your B2B Growth Funnel?...
Learn more when you enroll now in our free 7-day eCourse: Go-to-Market Strategy 101 for B2B SaaS Startups and Scaleups.
Submit a comment