Long lead conversion cycles are the biggest impediments to the sales and marketing professionals in the fast-paced technology-driven financial services industry. In the digital age, your customers are more capable, smarter and better informed than ever before. This modern breed of consumer needs a superior kind of marketing engagements and quick sales cycles.
According to a research done by [i]Harvard University, over the past five years, the average sales cycle length has gone up by 22% due to more decision makers being involved in the buying process coupled with sluggish economic growth. Furthermore, over 25% of sales cycles take approximately seven months or sometimes longer to close. That’s why it’s important for salespeople and marketers to start thinking about the health of their sales cycle.
However, an efficient lead management system can undeniably improve sales and marketing alignment and positively impacts the pace of the sales cycle.
Is Your Sales Funnel Management Platform Really Customer-Centric?
There are all the twists and turns that the average customer takes on his or her journey with your brand—various touchpoints including social marketing, call center, mobile apps, traditional advertising, and website interactions. While introspecting the current system, ask these questions:
- Do you have an efficient funnel management system?
- Does it help you in shortening the sales cycle and sell better?
- Does it provide a consolidated 360° view of operations and customer transactions?
- Is your sales process in sync with all other customer messaging across channels such as email, mobile, social, etc.?
Top 3 critical Customer Engagement & Acquisition challenges to focus:
Disparate Data – The customer information is often siloed in multiple systems, including data within the organization as well as from second and third parties. It may include e-mail messages, interactions from social forums, data from weblogs, and much more, making it extremely difficult to systematically collect, centralize, and share with other groups internally.
Lack of control– Organizations often lack a practical means to analyze large amounts of structured and unstructured data resulting from customer interactions to surface customer sentiments, rising trends, competitive advantages/disadvantages, and other information for timely decision making. There is a scarcity of data scientists who could wrangle that data for you and already engaged with other requests from across the company. And the analytics tools that you have at your fingertips don’t have the comprehensive and up-to-date understanding of your customers that you need. That makes it too difficult to engage and acquire right people at the right time.
Inconsistent customer experience– The rise of technology, the empowered customer, and legacy strategies and solutions have caused the customer experience to become fragmented and disparate. And we should face it that there are many fragile and often broken moments in the customer journey. Additionally, the change in the channel typically adds complexity and threatens to derail purchases and sometimes even hurts loyalty.
How to Address Such Challenges?
A single, unified view of all the disparate customer data can streamline your sales and marketing process and help you to build relationships throughout the length of your sales cycle with lead nurturing and automated follow-up.
Needless to say, companies must apply advanced analytics to gain a 360-degree view of their customers and engage with them in the early stages of the cycle. They must act fast to streamline their prospect funnel management and have a complete integrated view that could help them to efficiently navigate while maintaining a strategic focus on maximizing sales performance.
The Final Thoughts
As the old adage goes, a leaky ship sinks an empire. It holds true in today’s competitive market as having a leaking sales funnel can be depicted as the difference between putting money in your pocket or handing it straight to your competitor. So, if you’re committing these blunders, it’s time to fill the gap now.
Consider making use of the right blend of data strategy and technology to acquire, convert, grow, retain, and win back customers in one seamless omnichannel journey. Identify the “gray areas” in your processes and how they are they affecting your business. Dig deeply into the customer list, re-tune it through an easy filtering step to pair tactics to the specific customer cluster and ensure to bring at-risk customers back into the fold.
How Tavant helped New Penn Financial to bridge the gap between legacy and digital
Recently, FinLeads was selected by New Penn Financial to transform its digital lead engagement processes together. FinLeads helped their sales and marketing teams and loan officers to manage sales funnels more effectively. It also elevated their business performance with real-time analytics, enable a faster loan process, and digitally enhance their overall customer experience.
Want to explore more:
Tavant is committed to helping clients deliver next-gen customer experience. To gain more insights, visit our FinLeads page or just say [email protected] to schedule a meeting.
