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Is your company’s sales funnel drawing potential customers all the way through to successful sales? Or are you struggling to channel the strongest leads?

Managing a healthy sales funnel necessitates providing a steady source of new contacts for each sales rep.  But if you want your funnel to stay unclogged, you need to make sure these new contacts are not only plentiful but are reliable and of good quality. The skill of prospecting and sales development is one that all reps must learn to develop.

Here are the 5 best ways to manually nurture your sales funnel and feed it great leads.

1. A Company’s Website and their Social Networks are your Best Friend.

You’ll find plenty of contacts simply by looking through social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter and identifying leads in your target demographics and industries.

Just by heading over to a company’s website, you can find a treasure trove of information - another easy win to find the contact information you need. If the website doesn’t list the specific person you need to connect with’s email info, learn to discover and verify email conventions. If you know a company uses “firstname.lastname@company.com”, then you can pretty quickly figure out any email address and some companies use a tool like Rapportive to verify. It is essential to be aware of limits set by CASL. 

2. Use Advanced Prospecting Tactics in LinkedIn

 If you’re not a premium user, you may be lamenting the loss of Advanced Search. But there are still lots of ways to effectively prospect using LinkedIn, even with a free account. First off, check out this post which explains how to create boolean searches to replace the advanced search in the new, free, LinkedIn interface.

Next, use this simple LinkedIn InMail hack. With a free account, you can only message 1st degree connections unless you buy InMails. But, LinkedIn lets you send InMails to your 2nd and 3rd degree connections so long as you’re in the same group - no matter what level of LinkedIn account you have. So all you have to do is check out a 2nd or 3rd degree connection’s groups, join an appropriate one and voila - you can message them. 

3. Make Use of Web-Based Solutions

 There are a lots of apps and online tools that you can utilise to nurture your sales funnel and generate leads. For example, use BuzzSumo to find popular articles on a given topic or keyword and check out all the people who have shared the content on social media.

Then use a tool like Import, Kimono, or DataMiner to collect the data (being mindful of CASL restrictions). You can also use BuzzSumo to find top influencers in a given field who may be ripe for prospecting.

Another great tool is Mention which allows you to set up monitoring around your keywords used on social media. It will give you a bunch of Twitter handles of potential clients that you can start nurturing.

4. Do Some Real World Networking.

 Away from social media, there are lots of ways you can connect with potential leads in the real world. Attending conferences is a great way to find new contacts but big events like conferences come at a fairly high investment costs.

Alternatively, smaller meetup style events are often free and a more informal way to connect and network. Check out meetup to find events aimed at your target markets and get out there.

Don’t forget to keep up to date with blogs, forums or discussions boards that relate to your industry and market. Here you’ll find information about upcoming events plus you can begin to nurture some great leads online before meeting people face to face.

5. Don’t Neglect your Existing Data.

 Finally, with all these new online technologies it can be easy to forget that there are tonnes of leads in your CRM. Make sure you know how to properly use your database for prospecting and data mining - don’t leave potential clients left alone untouched and untapped.