Streamline Your Sales Life Cycle Stages with airSlate SignNow

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This is a funnel. Specifically the sales funnel. How it works is a pretty easy concept but it gets tricky as you start to classify people as they move through the funnel. Let's break down each of the stages and talk about the terms that you need to know. Subscribers are people who have signed up to receive content from you but haven't done anything else. It doesn't make much sense to spend a whole lot of time trying to sell to your subscribers because the majority of them won't ever become customers. But continue to give them valuable content and encourage them to engage with the hopes that one day they may be interested in what you have to offer. Leads are the people who have shown some interest in what you have to offer but haven't taken much action beyond that. This is the lifecycle stage most frequently used when you're importing contacts from events like conferences or trade shows. Keep people classified as leads until something disqualifies them or they take an action that signals that they're ready to move up to the next stage. A marketing qualified lead is someone who the marketing department has determined is ready for a one-on-one follow up from the sales team. The normal triggers are actions at the bottom of the funnel like asking for a product demo, downloading a product guide, or requesting a quote. However, classifying someone as a MQL is a little more complicated than that. First make sure that your marketing and sales departments agree on what qualified means. For example if your company works with medium sized enterprises, you don't want to pass off a one person company just because that person downloaded a product guide. Also make sure your sales team has all the information that they need about you qualified lead. This varies form company to company but it's usually good to ask for a phone number, job title, or geographic region. Just add that information to the form for your offer. Sales qualified leads are leads that your sales team has accepted as qualified. Sometimes and MQL gets upgraded to an SQL after a sales person or a sales manager reviews their information and decides to pursue them. Other times that action that a lead took to get upgraded to an MQL in the first place will put them in touch with a sales person such as a request for a demo. The sales person will then use that interaction to decide if a lead is truly qualified or not. If you've designated MQLs correctly and your marketing and sales teams are properly aligned, then most of your leads should move to SQLs pretty quickly. People get moved to the opportunity stage once a real sales conversation has begun. This usually means that you have a pretty clear idea of who the decision maker is as well as the products and services they're interested in, how much the deal will be worth, and what their timeline looks like. Customers are people that have decided to buy from you. Shocking I know. But how long people stay classified as customers depends on the type of business that you have. For example if you work with people on a recurring or ongoing basis, people stay classified as customers for as long as they continue working with you. Evangelists are people who are advocates for your business. Some companies classify anyone who has referred business their way as evangelists. Other companies just use this category for all of their happy customers. Both of these are good options, you just need to decide what's best for your company and keep doing it that same way. If you use HubSpot you also have a lifecycle stage called other. We use this as a catch-all category and then further define it by a second custom field. We call the field other clarification and have options such as vendor, influencer, media contact, and more. Hopefully this guide helps you clear up lifecycle stages for your marketing and sales team so you can focus less on what each stage is and focus more on moving leads throughout your funnel. For more marketing tips, hit that subscribe button.