Most Modern MSPs would probably say that, after customer satisfaction, customer acquisition is their #1 priority. If your business is going to scale efficiently, then you need a repeatable sales model and a predictable sales engine. But what does that really mean? Well, among other things, it means you are fueling your sales funnel with the right quantity and quality of leads to drive customer acquisition forward each and every month. In this post, I break down the stages of the funnel and the key metrics that will tell you if you are fueling your sales funnel effectively.

Thanks to the volume of industry dialogue surrounding inbound marketing, there is a general understanding of the stages of the sales funnel and how marketing should function as a demand generation machine. The funnel is divided into three stages to represent a prospective buyer's progression through the sales process and the marketing strategies that are used to nurture interest. The sales funnel stages are illustrated in the diagram below.

This diagram can be used to represent any source of leads, but in this post, we are going to focus on your website as the principal starting point for your buyers. It is safe to say that in this day and age, virtually all prospective buyers will research their options on the web and consume web content as the key ingredient of their product or service evaluation.

Of course you want as many visitors as possible to your site - it's the equivalent of foot traffic at the shopping mall. So spending time and a little bit of money on SEO and PPC strategies to increase traffic is a worthwhile investment. Once they are there, your content must successfully convert site visitors into registered leads. This is done with an "offer", also known as a "call to action" (CTA) and a landing page to collect information about your suspect.

So the first two metrics you care about are the number of unique visitors to your site and your conversion rate to landing page registrations. Use educational content such as white papers, tutorials, eBooks and checklists for these "Top of Funnel" marketing activities.

The next step is to qualify your suspects into prospects with a lead scoring strategy of some kind. You will want to build this lead scoring formula carefully so that it can be used consistently across all sources of leads to properly qualify them.

The next metric you care about is the qualification rate of suspects (unqualified leads) into prospects (qualified leads). Depending on the score, some of your prospects will be "sales ready" leads. In other words, they meet all the typical criteria for Budget, Authority, Need and Timescale (BANT). Sales-ready leads should be immediately converted to opportunities and contacted by sales.

Non-sales-ready leads should either be disqualified and purged from your lead database or placed into a lead nurturing program. These "Middle of the Funnel" marketing strategies will nurture buyer interest and guide them into the buyerzone over time without spending valuable sales rep time and effort unnecessarily. Use content that is more focused and targeted at buyer interest with vehicles such as webinars, case studies and marketing brochures that articulate the business value of your solutions.

The "Bottom of the Funnel" is where sales-ready leads are actively worked as opportunities by your sales team. Here the role of marketing, and other pre-sales resources, is to accelerate the sales cycle. Free trials, demos and assessments can be used as a precursor to a preparing a quotation or proposal. You should have boilerplate materials for all of these activities to control the consistency and accuracy of the marketing message at all stages of the sales cycle. Conducting a TCO and ROI analysis is often a valuable exercise at this stage of the sales process. It positions the cost of your service as a means to reduce your customer's operating expenses or to enable higher growth and organizational efficiency.

In this third and final stage of the funnel, the key metrics to track are customer close rate and average deal value. You can also apply metrics that measure the effectiveness of sales and marketing across all three funnel stages. Average sales cycle time and total marketing ROI are two ways to do this. And of course, measuring your total cost of customer acquisition will tell you if your sales and marketing investments are in proportion to the total customer value (gross margin dollars over the life of the contract) they return to the company.

Remember, compelling content and consistent execution is the key to making your metrics as strong as they can be. If you invest the right amount of time and money into content creation, marketing execution and managing metrics, you will fuel your sales funnel effectively and accelerate the growth of your CSB business.