What is a Sales Funnel, and How Does It Work?

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. 

You can nudge people to make a purchase with: 

• Limited offer discounts 
• 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. 

With that in mind, how do you create a sales funnel?

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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: 

• What type of content do you want to publish? 
• Where do you want to publish it? 
• How often do you want to publish content? 
• How will you track your results? 

This is just a scratch on what you should consider, but it’s enough to get you started. 

1. 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.
2. 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. 

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!