What is a Sales Funnel?
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According to Forrester Research, businesses that guide leads through a sales funnel get 50% more leads who are ready to make a purchase. With that in mind, it’s important to take the time to learn about sales funnels. Join us in the article below as we explore how to attract leads and guide them through an optimized sales funnel.
You can use the information you pick up here to improve how you engage with leads and reduce friction in all your business relationships.
Let’s get started!
Why is a Sales Funnel so Important?
When it comes to sales and marketing endeavors, the purpose of a sales funnel is to help professionals visualize the customer journey clearly. It does this by displaying each step a customer travels through, from the first interaction with the business to finally purchasing a product or service. And if a customer has not made it to the end of a sales funnel, the sales representative can easily track at which stage the individual stopped interacting with the business.
Then, sales and marketing teams can collaborate on better business strategies to tackle the stages that are weak and blocking deal closures.
Stages of a Sales Funnel
A sales funnel is great for targeting the exact weak points in your sales process. For this reason, it should be a main priority for businesses to understand their sales funnel in great detail. So, let’s dive into learning about the different stages found in a common sales funnel. This knowledge will definitely help you identify where you are losing customers.
| Sales Funnel | Description | Team Goals |
|---|---|---|
| Stage 1: Awareness | In this stage, your future customers know that your products and services exist. You can get leads into this stage by promoting your brands via social media platforms or various types of adverts. | Professionals working in this stage of the sales funnel strive to make their business brand known to as many people as they can. |
| Stage 2: Interaction | Potential customers enter this stage of the sales funnel when they start actively seeking information about a business. | Professionals ensure that valuable business information is readily available to leads. This information is posted as articles and videos. They usually explain how a business can solve a customer’s need or problem. |
| Stage 3: Interest | At this stage, since people are already aware of your products and services, they start to show interest in certain ways to learn more about your business. For example, you might get an increase in visitors to your website, or more people start to subscribe to your company newsletter. | Professionals will directly engage with potential customers much more in this stage. They could provide people with detailed information and answer burning questions while discussing unique needs or problems. |
| Stage 4: Action | During this stage, the lead converts to a customer by purchasing a product or service from your company. | To have a well-run purchasing process that is easy for customers to navigate. |
These are just a few stages you could find in a sales funnel. Remember that each sales funnel is unique and will represent the distinctive requirements of a business model.
Example of a Sales Funnel
We often hear less is more! So, let’s take a break from reading and look at the image below that illustrates the sales funnel we just explained. You can use it as a reminder of how to get leads into a sales funnel, but feel free to tweak it to your custom business requirements.
Building Your Sales Funnel
Now that we have gone through the theory of a sales funnel, it’s time to create one. We are sure your marketing and sales teams will appreciate a sales funnel in their lives. It will help to refine their tasks in each stage of a customer’s purchasing journey.
Here is a general outline with top tips to consider for when you create your specific sales funnel.
Identify Your Target Audience
The first step in crafting a custom sales funnel would be understanding who your ideal customer is. You can do this by building buyer personas. These detailed descriptions should explain a customer’s:
Then, you can analyze the market in which your business operates. Make sure to state your specific industry and the competitors that exist in your field. This research will let you know if there are any gaps in the market that your products and services can fill.
Create Awareness
Now, you can create the first stage of the sales funnel, known as “Awareness. “ At this point, marketing teams are tasked with attracting as many prospects as they can. A common approach to drawing potential customers in is to create and share business content. This will include:
Capture Leads
Once prospects are interacting with your content, it’s time to capture their data. This step can be placed in the middle of your sales funnel. In this stage, you could offer prospects free trials of your products and services in exchange for their contact details. Other lead magnet ideas to collect lead data include:
Nurture Your Leads
After receiving lead data, you should try to build a connection with these individuals who are interested in your products and services. One way to do this is to send emails to leads that include valuable content about your products and services. These custom email campaigns can be tailored to your leads’ preferences and can include:
And we know this could be a time-consuming task, so we suggest implementing marketing automation tools into your system. With them, your marketing teams will be able to quickly complete manual tasks, such as
- Sending follow-up notifications with email automation tools.
- Scoring lead data in a database.
- Segmenting target audiences based on behaviors.
Present Your Offer
The next step would be to show off your products and services. A great way to do this is to give demonstrations to prospects so you can explain in depth how your products and services can elevate their experiences or solve problems. Offering free trials of your products and services is also a way to get prospects to commit to making a purchase.
Close the Sale
At this stage, a sales representative will contact the qualified lead with the intent of getting the individual to purchase a product or service. The sales representative will approach the lead with a prepared personalized message, usually with a special offer. These sales tactics are often used in lead or customer consultations to close a deal.
Keep Your Customers Happy
Once a lead has converted to a customer through purchasing a product or service, you want to keep them happy. This tip will ensure, your customers remain loyal and continue to purchase your products and services. One way to keep customers content is to create a seamless onboarding experience for them.
An onboarding program can include exciting tutorials or videos to show customers how to access support services if they run into any problems. This level of engagement can help customers feel supported and ensures that they feel satisfied they have made the right purchase.
Metrics to Monitor in Your Sales Funnel
We understand that a sales funnel that worked yesterday, might not work today. For this reason, it is wise to constantly monitor your sales funnel and optimize it as the market evolves. Remember to track key metrics at every stage of your sales funnel.
Analyze and Optimize
Conversion rates, drop-off rates, and ROIs are good statistics to analyze when you want to improve sales processes. But what are the others? Let’s dive deeper and learn about some more metrics that can be analyzed in a sales funnel.
Traffic Sources: This metric gives marketing teams an idea of where website visitors come from. You can study traffic source data to find out which marketing channel is sending leads to your sales funnel. Then, you can optimize marketing strategies by spreading out your resources correctly.
Lead Conversion Rate: This metric monitors the percentage of website visitors who were inspired to engage with your business. For example, a lead could sign up for a company newsletter or book a demo with a technical expert.
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): This metric refers to the fees paid to obtain a lead or customer from traffic sources. This statistic is useful in determining the profitability of each of your channels.
Cost Per Lead (CPL): This metric is used to check how much money is spent on acquiring new leads. Businesses pay attention to this metric when they want more information on the profitability of their marketing initiatives. After analyzing CPL, marketers can build effective strategies that accelerate their efforts to create sales opportunities.
Average Order Value: This metric tells you the average amount of money that a customer spends when they purchase products or services on your website. Analysts can study average order value metrics to predict customer behaviors and overall revenue of a business.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV): You might know this metric by its other name, Lifetime Value (LTV). Either way, this metric roughly calculates the amount of money they can come from a customer over a period of time. CLTV is often analyzed to understand the value that each customer brings to the business, which will impact how marketing and sales strategies are implemented.
Churn Rate: This metric calculates how many customers stop purchasing your products and services. As you can imagine, this is a pretty important metric to understand in a sales funnel. The churn rate explains how successful a company is at keeping its customers after they have made a purchase.
Follow-Ups: This metric monitors how many times your employee actively interacts with a lead. Sales and marketing professionals are the key people who would try to engage with leads and help them along the sales funnel.
Total Revenue: This metric calculates all the money spent by customers to purchase your products and services. These are people who have successfully made it through a sales funnel. Therefore, studying this metric helps businesses to measure financial success, as well as the effectiveness of marketing and sales techniques in a sales funnel.
Return on Investment (ROI): This is one of the more common metrics in business. It is studied to calculate the financial returns of an investment compared to its cost value. So, when it comes to a sales funnel, an ROI measures the amount of revenue gained from marketing and sales initiatives.
Managing Your Sales Funnel
Understanding your sales funnel from top to bottom can give you insights into how you are converting leads into customers. Therefore, it’s important to track, manage, and optimize your sales funnel so your business can grow to new heights.
So, how do we make this task easy? After learning about sales funnels and metrics, we realized there is a lot of data to track and analyze. Here are two pieces of advice we can give you!
1. Use a Robust CRM
As Salesforce is the number 1 customer relationship management (CRM) platform in the world, we can recommend adding it to your software stack. This powerful platform is a dream for sales professionals. It helps to speed up many of the administrative tasks that they need to perform, so they can focus on interacting with leads better.
With Salesforce, your business can digitally manage a sales funnel. Here are a few tasks you can optimize in a sales funnel thanks to Salesforce tools:
- Generating Leads
- Tracking Leads
- Salesforce Lead Conversions
But what about the professionals who love Salesforce Marketing Cloud? This digital marketing platform is often used by marketers to manage campaigns across various channels. Luckily with Marketing Cloud, teams also get tools to improve a sales funnel.
For example, marketers can use it to optimize lead generation and customer retention initiatives. Since Marketing Cloud is a premium Salesforce product, you will be happy to hear that it directly integrates into your CRM and Salesforce Sales Cloud if you need it.
2. Automate Your Sales Processes
Great, you now have a single location to securely store data. Next, you need to remove the manual tasks associated with transferring data into Salesforce. This can be a time-consuming process, especially if you are manually copy-pasting lead data into Salesforce.
Could you imagine what could happen to your key metrics if this data was incorrectly added into Salesforce due to common typos or errors:
To eliminate manual administrative tasks and keep data quality high, we recommend Titan’s workflow automation software. Our Titan Flow app can give you 10, 000 Salesforce automations per second so you can quickly speed up any business process. The best part about choosing Titan is that you can create these Salesforce automations using no code.
Titan has a 4.96 out of 5-star rating on the AppExchange marketplace. Let’s take a look at a few features below to find out why they are so popular:
Continuous Learning with Titan
Thanks for taking the time to explore sales funnels with us. We covered the importance of sales funnels, how to build one, and the key metrics you can analyze from the data it collects. If you need help with automating your sales funnel tasks and processes, make sure to contact Titan.
We can help your sales and marketing teams design and execute any process to connect users inside and out of Salesforce. For more information and what you can achieve with our no-code Flow builder, contact us through one of our social media links below.
See you soon!
Disclaimer: The comparisons listed in this article are based on information provided by the companies online and online reviews from users. If you found a mistake, please contact us.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do sales funnels really work?
They do if they have been designed and then managed correctly.
Why do sales funnels fail?
There are many reasons. One reason why a sales funnel might fail is due to its stages misaligning with real life. For example, if the sales funnel is not representative of the actual customer journey it can be inaccurate.
This can happen when a sales funnel has many stages for sales and marketing teams. When each team tries to engage with the lead or launch an initiative, the individual might get confused and back away from the business entirely. This will result in the lead falling out of the sales funnel and the business missing a sale.
What businesses need sales funnels?
Those who want to follow a structured process to convert leads into customers.
How do I market my funnel?
Essentially, you want to drive your traffic to a sales funnel with marketing. There are many strategies to do this, but we suggest setting your foundation first, like identifying your target audience correctly. To do this, get your marketers to create buyer personas so they can get to know the following about customers:
- Demographic Details
- Pain Points
- Buying Behaviors
Once you know who your target audience is, you can design custom marketing tasks and campaigns to attract leads to your sales funnel.
