The sales funnel definition might vary depending on who you are asking. In general, it has a clear meaning that we will go deeper into down below.
A sales funnel is the process of moving a prospect from the top of your sales and marketing funnel to the bottom.
They are designed in such a way that prospects get closer and closer to becoming customers, with each step they take down the sales funnel. And like a funnel in real life, there is a top, middle and bottom part of a funnel. At each stage, your goal should be to make it easier for them to buy your product or service by giving them more information about what you have on offer.
How do we best define what a marketing funnel is?
A sales funnel is the marketing journey a potential customer goes through on their way to purchase.
At a practical level, these are most often highly focused and have less clutter and distractions compared to normal websites.
What is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel definition will be described as one way by a marketer. But then a totally different way by let’s say an economy professor. But for us as marketers, it’s always about how to increase leads and sales. Like the image above shows, a sales funnel is created with a beginning and an end. Untouched > Got contact (sales Lead) > Qualified > Presented the proposal > Negotiation process > Locked the Deal.
The salespeople should also be versed will all the steps of sales funnel. Two reasons are present for this:
- They are easily able to address the key requirements of the customer and ultimately deliver the right message at the right time.
- They are able to scale up the sales process, forecast revenue from sales, and achieve their targets.
To put it simply, a sales funnel that is well-defined. Improves the journey of the customer, which is directed linked to the success of a company.
Understanding Sales Funnel Stages
While different organizations manage the sales process differently, the funnel stages are structured in three distinct stages accordingly.
The different stages in a sales funnel are the top of your marketing or sales process, where you find prospects who have clicked on your ads and landed on your website; the middle phases that get them to take an action like subscribing to newsletters or narrowing down their choices by making a purchase decision; and finally at the bottom phase, when they make a final purchase.
A great way to think about these three parts is as following: prospecting leads into qualifying leads which then become customers. A sales funnel’s goal is always going from left to right (from top-of-the marketing section all the way through until it reaches potential clients). The more steps each individual has passed along this path, the higher chance of converting your prospects to buyers.
1. Sales Funnel Top: Discovery and Awareness
Early in journey, the prospective customers go through certain issues and are learning and researching about it.
Here, they’re still identifying challenges. There are different questions as they’ve not named problem – they only know symptoms.
A few examples for questions that they would have for certain industries are:
- For interior decoration: “Why my house doesn’t appear vibrant?”
- Client support software: “Client support industry benchmarks”
- For the provider of electricity: “Average bill for electricity”
At the sales funnel top, the prospect is wanting to feel confident and educated to communicate their issues. The new and untouched prospects are turned into prospects that are contact made. Then they become your leads. You can ask appropriate questions and get your lead qualified.
2. Middle of Sales Funnel: Researching Solutions
Now, your leads have defined problem, and are searching for services and products for a solution.
Some questions they can ask are:
- How to get prompt customer support over the phone?
- How to select the best interior product?
- What’s the best way to reduce electricity bills?
The type of content that would be most relevant for serving the leads in the particular stage would be comparison style checklists, in-depth guides, lists of benefits, and disadvantages along with other insightful pieces.
In this stage, the leads qualified as you’re communicating with them. Asking questions that bring them closer to better decisions for addressing their problem through your product or service.
3. Making Educated Decision for Purchase
Finally, the funnel bottom is when the leads know everything about the issue and how your product is the solution.
Due to this their concerns and questions in the stage remain vendor driven. This the online searches, along with the questions, might appear something like:
- Does (software provider a) has better support features compared to (software provider b)?
- Which interior product would suit my home and last long?
- What are electricity contract terms are best comparing (provider a) verses (provider b)?
This is what would help in making decision suitable with the requirements, certain issues, budget, along with relevant sources.
How A Funnel Can Benefit Any Business
Sales funnels can greatly improve your company’s overall ROI.
A quality sales funnel also helps you track certain metrics whenever you want:
- Transactions that took place in the funnel.
- Average deal size in the funnel.
- The Close ratio: the deal average percentage that you got.
- Sales velocity: the average deal lifetime before it has been won.
All these metrics are essential for analyzing business performance and are connected with each other.
Today there are many sales funnel software – Which one should I choose?
In my honest opinion, Clickfunnels is the very best and easiest to use sales funnel software on the market. It has been developed by two sales veterans over a period of five years and offers the most in-depth features for creating an amazing marketing sales funnel. With Clickfunnels you can create professional-looking landing pages, build out entire online stores, launch high converting digital advertising campaigns with just one system that is easy to use!
Just liked I mentioned above when discussing the sales funnel process, Clickfunnels leads the prospect easily through a series of different pages. Let’s say you start building a landing page. Then when the user opt-ins to your email on the first page, then they will be sent to a product page that explains what you are offering.
After the purchase has been made the customer is then sent automatically to an upsell page. Here you can sell more products to the same customer just with a click of a button! This is a super powerful way of generating more sales and increasing the total order value.
Building a high converting sales funnel with Clickfunnels
The sales funnel conversion rate is the percentage of people who take the desired action when presented with an offer. It can be used to measure the effectiveness of different marketing campaigns and see which one yields more conversions or leads for your business.
You can try Clickfunnels for free!
Hopefully, you now have a clear understanding of the sales funnel definition and how it can benefit you and your business.
With Clickfunnels you will get high sales to funnel conversion rates. It has impressive landing page designs and I have so much experience in seeing great lead generation results with Clickfunnels.
Click here to try ClickFunnels free today!
Another great way is using marketing and sales automation software for plugging holes present in sales funnel and turn the near-missed out sales to real sales. If you want to learn more about funnel software, then you should read more on Clickfunnels.
