Sales funnels are essential to marketing and selling in the digital age. They break down the sales process into smaller chunks called sрtages. Each stage represents a particular step/checkpoint that your customer has to pass through as they edge closer and closer to buying from you.
You may not realize it, but your customers are participants in your sales funnel, whether you have one or not. For instance, when potential customers see your ad, they are drawn to your landing page. Your sales and marketing teams spring into action and start engaging them with useful content, manuals, videos, and other resources.
Whether the customer buys or not narrows down to the effectiveness of your sales funnel. Thankfully, there are ways to influence that decision. In this article, we’ll go into the full sales funnel definition, explain how it works, and how it can benefit your business. Keep reading!
What is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is a visual map of marketers’ sales process to move potential customers through a series of conversion points. The widest part of the funnel opens up to everyone who visits your website or enters your store. The narrowest section represents the people who become your customers.
Working with a well-structured sales marketing funnel brings many benefits to your company. For starters, it will help you identify where potential customers fall off. It also helps you understand their problems and how to best meet their needs.
Why is the Sales Funnel Important?
Many businesses have a hard time converting prospects into customers. Prospects won’t buy something from you just because you give them a nice brochure or website with your company details. They need a reason to buy from you and not your competitors.Â
For instance, 63% of digital marketers struggle with delivering personalized services. Additionally, 46% of customers expect quick company responses within 4 hours. Yet more than half (62%) of businesses fail to respond to customers.
Sales funnels enable marketers to:
Create personalized marketing strategies for potential customers at each stage of the sales marketing funnel
Keep in touch with target customers at every stage
Closely monitor the campaign and engage with prospects whenever they move to a new stage.
While having a clearly defined sales funnel doesn’t guarantee closing every sale, it can help you improve your marketing strategy. You can find out where people are getting stuck in the funnel and then use that information to improve future marketing campaigns.
What are the Sales Funnel Stages?
A successful sales funnel has distinct stages, beginning with the initial contact with a potential customer and ending with a final sale and continuing relationships with that customer.
Sales funnels vary from business to business. Here are the four main sales funnel stages native to every sales funnel:
1. Awareness Stage
The awareness stage stands at the top of the funnel. Its goal is to make your potential customers aware of who you are and what you offer.
There are several ways to get people talking about your product or service:
Through organic results on search engines
Social media ads
YouTube videos
Advertisements
PodcastsÂ
Content marketing
Customers at the awareness stage have little information about your business. That gives you the perfect opportunity to make a great first impression with great content and useful resources.Â
For instance, when a visitor first lands on your website, you can offer a free ebook or whitepaper in exchange for their email. A useful resource as an incentive keeps your business at the top of their minds.
2. Interest
Here, your potential customers begin to show interest in your product. You can spot this from the number of people who visit your website looking for answers or those who sign up for your email list to receive daily updates.
At this stage, your potential customers know about your business and solutions. So, why not take it up a notch with your CRM tool? How, you might ask? You can use your sales CRM tool’s built-in features in these ways:
Sales automation: Automatically assign a salesperson to engage with the potential customer with relevant content
Use the built-in chatbot to answer questions
Put your unqualified leads into the Leads Inbox and qualify them later
Monitor the sales team’s performance
Track and manage your leads as they progress from one stage to the next stage.
Did you know?
“With only 2% – 5% of an audience actively seeking to purchase at any one time, it is no longer good enough to just send a campaign and hope”
Strategic ABM2021
3. Evaluation/Decision
This is probably the most important stage of the sales funnel. Every effort you’ve put in previous stages narrows down to this moment. Your potential customer wants to know what they’ll achieve from using your product or service.
But more importantly, they want to know if they’re making the right decision. You can help them arrive at a decision by:
Showing how your product or service works through video demos
Showcasing your product or service features
Offering a free trial to help them see your product/service in action.
4. Action
At the bottom of the funnel, we have the action stage. Here, your potential customers have decided to buy or not to buy. They’ve gone through the sales funnel and know what they want and how much it will cost them.Â
You can nudge people to make a purchase with:Â
Limited offer discountsÂ
Flash sales
Expedited shipping
Freebies
Gift cards with purchases.
How to Create a Sales Funnel for Your Business
It’s easy to get caught up in building your online presence and lose sight of your overall strategy. A sales funnel clears the mist surrounding your customer’s progress towards the purchase. This way, your can channel your marketing efforts towards what’s not working and measure the results.Â
With that in mind, how do you create a sales funnel?
Define your audience – Defining your audience helps inform every other decision you make throughout the sales process. It paints a detailed picture of who your customers are and what their challenges are. Once you know who you’re marketing to, you’ll be able to tailor your sales funnel to their specific needs.
Break down your sales process into stages – Every sales process has several discrete stages. All that depends on the nature of the business and its offering. And since the sales process refers to the steps your sales reps take in order to make a sale, you’ll need to factor these into your sales funnel.
Plan out your content marketing strategy – How will you distribute and publish your content? It may include blog posts, webinars, podcasts, videos, and more. To plan out your content marketing strategy, ask these questions:Â
What type of content do you want to publish?Â
Where do you want to publish it?Â
How often do you want to publish content?Â
How will you track your results?Â
This is just a scratch on what you should consider, but it’s enough to get you started.Â
Create a lead magnet – A lead magnet is an incentive that drives people to take action. It can be almost anything, from a coupon, a downloadable PDF or video, or a free e-book. The list goes on and on.
Optimize your sales funnel– An optimized funnel covers issues from every part of the sales process. Each customer responds differently to each specific stage. So it’s important to know at which point they are dropping off and why. Optimizing your sales funnel helps reduce friction points and ensures every customer has an excellent experience with your business.Â
Find the Cracks in Your Sales Funnel Stages
It may sound a little too obvious, but finding the cracks in your sales funnel stages is not something you want to wait to do later. Identifying the holes in the sales funnel enables you to fix them faster and make your funnel more efficient. To do that, you need to perform a keen evaluation.
Here’s what to look for:
Where do most people drop off in their customer journey?
What stages (bottlenecks) prevent users from getting to that next step?
What is your customer conversion rate?
How many deals do you close with your current funnel?
This information should help you figure out where you’re losing opportunities and how to avoid them in the future.
How Sales Funnel Management Can Help
Sales management is critical to the success of your B2B sales process. It’s a continuous process that involves analyzing and monitoring different steps within the sales funnel.
Effective sales funnel management can help marketers;
Focus more on qualified leads – Focusing on unqualified leads who will not eventually buy your product would waste time and resources. Focusing on qualified leads increases your chances of making a sale.
Unclog the pipeline – A sales pipeline can get clogged when a potential buyer gets stuck and cannot move to the next stage. Good sales funnel management keeps the pipeline running smoothly at all times.
Generate a more accurate sales forecast – Effective sales funnel management also helps you measure and obtain detailed analytics in each sales funnel stage. By the end of the day, you’ll have an accurate estimate of the won/lost deals, pending deals, and more.
How to Manage Your Sales Funnel Day to Day With Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a sales CRM that enables businesses to manage their sales process more efficiently. As a salesperson there’s so much to accomplish as a sales manager, from increasing sales, keeping track of your old and new customers, recording won/lost deals, creating reports, and so much more.
Pipedrive’s automated activity feature allows you to set various automated activities from calls, emails, and meetings. You can set up your pipeline or import one from a spreadsheet or an existing template. You can also set up activity reminders to follow up with your customers. And don’t worry if your prospect misses a phone call or meeting; you can always reschedule it straight from your dashboard.
How Automaly Experts Can Help You with Improving Your Sales Funnel in Pipedrive CRM
Automaly is a team of experienced Automation, AI and CRM consultants. We help businesses implement the best Pipedrive integrations and offer ongoing support and training to use them. Automaly helps you understand your lead and campaign data and boost your sales results with the best advice on automation solutions.
Are you looking for experts in using Pipedrive integrations to boost performance? We’ve got you covered. Book a Process Health Check to learn more.
Conclusion
Marketers and sales teams have used sales funnels to close deals for decades. If you are looking to improve the effectiveness of your sales marketing funnel with Pipedrive, don’t hesitate to get in touch with Automaly consultants today!
