Marketing. Sales. These two areas of focus are the keys to the success of any company’s sales funnel. And today you are going to get the sales funnel tips you need to scale your processes.
A sales funnel is a visual representation of the various stages of a customer’s journey from becoming aware of your product or service, to making a purchase.
The process typically includes four steps: awareness, validation, experience, and conversion.
Marketing assists the top-of-the-funnel interactions, helping boost awareness through online content such as social media, articles, or webinars. The purpose of sales teams is to move prospects down the funnel until they are converted into paying customers.
Today we are going to be looking at 4 simple tips to take to create an effective funnel and an interactive sales experience that revolutionizes your company and scales your revenue.
Tip 1: Utilize Explainer Videos
The first sales funnel tip is to utilize explainer videos.
At the top of the marketing funnel, explainer videos are setting the stage for effective approaches to drawing in prospective customers. Creating an explainer video can be an essential sales tool for businesses to increase public awareness about their product or service. In addition, these videos work to captivate the audience’s attention and interest them in what you have to sell.
Explainer videos establish credibility and provide industry knowledge about your business, making them an integral part of the marketing strategy. They create an engaging experience that helps drive sales in competitive markets by establishing the dominance of your business above its rivals.
While creating explainer videos for your business, the four things you need to keep in mind are the tone, the length, the layout, and the type of video.
Tone
Every explainer video needs to achieve two things for the viewers: they need to be entertaining and informative.
Entertainment without information will leave your prospects satisfied but with no greater understanding of your product or service or why your company matters. On the flip side, information without an entertaining hue will leave your prospects thoroughly educated, but thoroughly bored as well.
The sweet spot, as depicted in the graphic above, is the overlap between these two elements. And only by staying in that sweet spot can you guarantee an explainer video that adds value to the prospects watching.
Length
The next thing to keep in mind is the length of the video.
The average attention span of a human is 8.25 seconds. According to a popular myth, that is a full second less than the attention span of a goldfish.
Needless to say, the length of your video directly impacts how many of your prospects will actually watch it. Staying between 90 seconds to 3 minutes is usually a good range to stay in, ensuring that your viewers stay engaged enough to complete the full video.
And while this time range is short, it also helps you eliminate any fluff and compress your ideas and descriptions into a more condensed, concise, and clarified piece of content.
Layout
The two optimal layout choices for an explainer video are the Problem-Fix-Outcome layout or simply the product tour.
The Problem-Fix-Outcome layout is fairly straightforward and self-explanatory: these videos highlight the customer’s problem first, then indicate how your company’s solution can fix that problem, and close by showing the positive outcome that will result from your solution.
The product tour on the other hand can be a little more free-form. Product tours usually show a visual of the actual product or a template of what the product offers. And dissimilarly to the Problem-Fix-Outcome layout, these videos take the time to go through features and benefits individually.
On the whole, product tours are more product-facing than Problem-Fix-Outcome layouts. For companies who want to really showcase their product or service and the singularity of their solution, product tours are a great way to achieve that.
But if you are a company that is more interested in connecting with your customers on a personal level through your explainer video, utilizing the Problem-Fix-Outcome layout can be extremely beneficial for your customers to feel seen and heard during the sales process.
Type of Video
The final thing to keep in mind when creating your video is managing the type of video. The two main types of explainer videos are animated (like the one above) and live-action videos.
Animated explainer videos are great for delivering complex ideas in an engaging way, especially for SaaS companies with more complicated solutions. They can also be easily edited in the future if needed. However, they can oftentimes be more expensive to produce than live-action videos due to the time and effort involved in creating the animation.
Live-action explainer videos are usually cheaper to produce than animated ones, as they involve filming real people or objects rather than creating animation from scratch. They also add a level of relatability and humanization to the interaction that animations do not provide. However, these types of videos may not be as effective at conveying complex ideas as animated videos are.
A well-written article on the differences between animated and live-action explainer videos stated that companies should use animated explainer videos if they are interested in delivering complex ideas and should use live-action explainers to connect with their audience on a human level.
Recap of Explainer Videos for Top-of-the-Funnel Marketing
And while the explainer videos themselves might be all that is needed to push the prospect from awareness to validation of your product or service, it is important to end each video with a clear and solid CTA (schedule a demo, start a free trial, etc.) as well to ensure that they are moving in the right direction.
Overall, explainer videos can be incredible tools for marketers and sales representatives to use during top-of-the-funnel prospecting. By following the sales funnel tips, insights, and guidelines above around tone, length, layout, and type of video, you can help engage more prospects and drive them further down the funnel in a resourceful and timely manner.
Tip 2: Provide Product Tours
Product tours are an important part of the second stage of the sales funnel – the validation stage. At this stage, customers are interested in your product or service but they still need more information to make an informed decision. This is where product tours come in.
While similar to explainer videos, product tours focus more on creating affirmation around the specific product or service being sold.
Product tours help customers get an inside look at what your product can do and how it works. By providing a visual overview of your product’s features and benefits, you can help potential customers understand why your product or service is the right choice for them. Product tours also provide an easy way for your customers to learn about your product on their own time, without having to chat with a customer service representative or attend a webinar.
What Makes A Good Product Tour
“You should expect the adoption of any new software to come with a bit of a learning curve,” an article by Appcues reads. “A product tour helps users navigate this friction while promptly revealing an app’s important value-laden features. Good tours should act as a guided journey for new customers who are learning how to use your SaaS product for the first time.”
Rather than simply giving customers a basic overview of the solution your company offers, product tours are extremely useful for prospective customers who are looking for in-depth resources to consume to help make a purchase decision.
These product tours can exist on the website as a slide deck of helpful information or even as a video, similarly structured to the explainer videos we walked through above. These tours can also be sent out to SQLs (sales-qualified leads) to assist in the conversion process.
Good product tools also need good graphics. This can be screenshots of your actual software solution in action or even illustrated visuals that mimic what the actual product should look like similar to the image below.
Even though the prospects watching this tour will probably be deeper in the sales funnel than the leads watching your company’s explainer video, it is still important to include a power call-to-action at the end of the slide deck or video to further motivate your prospects to continue down the funnel.
In short, these sales and marketing tools can be very useful for informing potential customers about your offering and helping them make a purchase decision, and validating the quality and credibility of your solution.
Tip 3: Schedule A Demo
The third stage of the sales funnel is all about providing prospective customers with an experience of the product or service they are interested in purchasing. This sales funnel tip is all about scheduling a demo.
Demos can take many structures – video, live, or interactive – but the purpose is the same for each: to allow prospects to get a feel for your software without the risk or financial implications of a trial or full-on purchase.
Above is an excellent recap and explanation of the purpose of demos and how they can be used to bring value to your prospects.
Tip 4: Increase Conversion Through Trials
The last step in any sales or marketing funnel is to convert prospects into paying customers. And while every phase of the sales process is valuable, conversion is often seen as the most important action to invest in. A great tool to use to increase conversion rates is a trial. Trials are an important part of the sales funnel because they allow potential customers to get a feel for a product or service before committing to a full-fledged purchase. Trials give customers the opportunity to test out features, explore how the product works, and decide if it is right for them. This helps build trust and confidence in the customer’s decision-making process, as well as provides valuable feedback that can be used to improve the product or service. It also makes the buying process much more efficient.
Different Types of Trials
Many companies offer prospective customers short 5-10 day free or discounted trials. Short trials can be incredibly beneficial because along with serving the prospect they often also have a promotional aspect: customers who have already sampled the product or service may be more likely to become paying customers in the future.
Another advantage is that it helps businesses gather valuable data about user behavior and preferences, which can then be used to better tailor products and services to meet customer needs.
The other type of trial is a long trial. These usually last for 30 days and can be an option for more complex software that takes much longer to implement or understand. Long trials can also allow businesses to establish trust with their customers by demonstrating their commitment through providing such an extended trial period. This can go a long way in helping to build relationships and solidify reputations for companies in their respective industries.
On the whole, though, the length of the trial usually depends on the goals of the business and the needs of its customers.
Alternatives to Trials
Another option for boosting conversion by letting customers get a feel for your company’s solution without having to purchase the complete software is providing a freemium subscription plan. Freemium plans can offer customers a simpler version of your software with very limited features. Many companies choose this route, including Canva (shown below), as it is an incredibly effective strategy to retain prospective customers and upsell them in the future. 
Freemium plans have several benefits, including reducing the barrier to entry and allowing for the collection of user data. These plans allow customers to get familiar with the product and decide if it is something they would like to invest in without having any upfront costs.
Overall, freemium subscription plans and free trials are an effective sales funnel tip as they offer both businesses and customers advantages.
Businesses are able to acquire new customers while increasing revenue through premium offerings, while customers are able to test out products before investing in them and access basic features without any upfront costs. By offering trials or freemium plans, companies can increase their conversion rates by giving potential customers a chance to try before they make a large purchase. This can also help boost long-term revenue by creating loyal and happy customers.
Key Takeaways
A sales funnel is a visual representation of a customer’s journey from awareness of a product or service to making a purchase. It typically consists of four steps: awareness, validation, experience and conversion. Awareness involves becoming familiar with the brand or product through various channels. Validation provides customers with additional information to help them make an informed decision. Experience offers users an opportunity to interact with the product before making a purchase. And conversion encourages users to take action by offering rewards or discounted prices.
Creating a perfect funnel to drive people to purchase your software product shouldn’t have to be stressful or challenging. And with the marketing tools, sales techniques, and useful strategies throughout this article, developing a system to drive awareness, solidify validation, enhance the experience, and boost conversion is a simple task.
If you would like to learn more about how Insivia can help you enhance your sales funnel, reach out to us today.