Creating a Better Sales Funnel for B2B Sales Prospecting

To find and acquire self-educating, invisible buyers your company needs to set aside your traditional funnel based sales mentality and sales prospecting tools and augment your current approach with social selling.

Instead of seeing your selling process as a funnel to be filled at the top with unqualified prospects, picture it instead as a radar screen that is constantly pinging the world around you and identifying and qualifying prospects worthy of being added to your database.

Why Do We Cling To Sales Funnels?

Sales Funnels are some of the oldest sales prospecting tools known to man. They’re often the first tool we are introduced to when we begin selling. But sales funnels are a product of a selling world largely devoid of information on both sides of the selling equation.

Prospects had to talk to a sales person in order to obtain product or service information on which the prospect would then base a buying decision.

Likewise, salespeople couldn’t communicate with or research prospects without talking to them on the phone or meeting with them in person.

But with the proliferation of on-demand, high-speed internet available whenever and wherever people want it has changed the game by changing human behavior.

Now that a Google Search is just a thumb click away, the idea of “Googling it” has fundamentally changed the pre-purchase research model.

The Benefits of a Sales Radar Approach

Enter the Sales Radar, which is a far better sales prospecting tool. As opposed to the sales funnel, which is based on leveraging an outbound prospecting method, the sales radar is focused on sensing buyers in the wild and helping your company identify and classify those prospective buyers.

Through buying signals created by prospects as they conduct their active or passive pre-purchase research, the sales radar triangulates the prospect’s location within the buying process and helps you focus your outbound sales prospecting efforts on only the most appropriate prospects. Just as a submarine uses sonar and radar to navigate underwater, where they lose the benefit of sight, so too can your company better navigate today’s complex sales prospecting landscape which is largely invisible.

Learn How To Build Your Own Sales Radar

I talk a lot more about building a sales radar in my new book, The Invisible Sale or in my social selling workshops.