Jan 24, 2023 Cassie Sonnentag

Developing A Digital Sales Funnel

Past Event: Using Digital Tools to Flip The Script on Traditional Fundraising

James Roloff is a digital sales and marketing professional with over 20 years of online experience and nine years in sales management. Roloff helps businesses implement a digital sales strategy to grow their revenue with a digital sales funnel model that converts social media leads to customers. View the event replay on the SMBMad Facebook page.

It’s time to transform

Transformations are all around us, and Roloff said sales are no different.

“From film cameras to smartphone cameras, from DVDs and VHS’s to streaming services,” Roloff said.

“With that transformation to digitizing things, we tend to have better efficacy and efficiency from having digital versus analog components.”

The same can be said for sales. In-person sales methods are labor-intensive and cumbersome; transforming your business by transitioning to digital sales can improve your sales process and productivity.

“It helps you build trust and show empathy at scale, which allows you to effectively find, convert and sell more deals,” Roloff said.

 

The Digital Sales Funnel

A digital sales funnel increases awareness, creates conversions and increases profitable sales. It is broken into three main steps:

Educate – “The goal here is the expand your reach by providing educational content online,” Roloff said. The success of education is either measured by the number of impressions from the content or through benchmarks determined by your company.

Components of the funnel’s educate section include buyer personas, content strategy, social selling, search engine optimization, events and webinars, and email campaigns.

Capture – “This is where you generate leads through calls to action that provide value and the measure of success for this is conversions,” Roloff said.

Components of the capture stage include telling a brand’s story, valuable calls to action, the buyer’s journey, utilizing a customer relationship management system (CRM), sales and marketing alignment, and advertising campaigns. The capture stage helps build customer narratives, better guide customers with strategic content and ultimately build customer excitement for working for you.

Consult – Once you have educated and captured your customers, it is time to become their trusted guide. The consult stage focuses on selling a solution to your prospect’s problem. The goal is to increase sales which is measured through increased revenue.

Several components of this stage include simplifying the buying process, solution selling, nurturing campaigns and building an inner circle. This focuses on the individual customers, their problems and places focus on why you are an impactful solution to their business.

“They trust you and see you as an advisor,” Roloff said. “Through a digital sales funnel, they trust you already, they’ve been educated by you so you are the consultive salesperson who is selling them a sales solution.”

 

Getting started

If you are looking to get started with digital sales in your business, first you must assess your current state. Take a high-level look at your business to determine which parts of your digital sales strategy need improvement. From there, create a plan that outlines what needs to be done and who will be responsible for doing it. Finally, execute your plan, review the results of digital sales in your sales strategy and iterate to continuously improve.

“Digital channels offer exponential growth potential compared to linear analog results,” Roloff said. “This is a marathon, not a sprint. You will start to see success in three months, but once you hit the 12 to 24-month mark, you will see night and day difference in your sales success.”

 

Thanks to SMBMad volunteer Cassie Sonnentag for writing this month’s event recap.

 

NONPROFIT SPOTLIGHT

Midwest Mujeres wants to bring to light the stories of Black, Latina, Asian, LBT women, disabled women, and White women who have barriers to fulfilling their dreams in their personal or professional lives. This small but mighty group is unique because they focus on all women but through a Latina lens. This organization was awarded one of the 2022 SMBMad DreamGrants.

Midwest Mujeres’ work is to lower poverty through education. They provide a virtual learning community with networking, business development, and public speaking experts. As a community of women from all backgrounds coming together to learn from people who reflect our culture and goals, they are breaking the isolation of Latinas in the Midwest.

The group is currently gearing up to host their third cohort and annual Yo Quiero Dinero Conference. They need help with sponsorship, childcare, and organizing both in-person and cohort events. Email them at info@midwestmujeres.com to learn more about how you can get involved!

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