What is a sales funnel?
A sales funnel is a marketing term used to capture and describe the excursion that potential customers go through, from prospecting to purchase. A sales funnel consists of several steps, the actual number of which varies with each company’s sales model.
All around built sales funnels without gaps allow companies to shepherd potential customers through the buying system towards purchase completion. By contrast, those funnels with gaps will lead to potential customers exiting the sales cycle, similar to water moving through a strainer.
Why is the sales funnel important?
A sales funnel helps marketers understand a customer’s purchasing process, while also recognizing what stage of this excursion the customer is at. These experiences can be used to conclude which marketing channels and activities will best guide the customer towards a purchase. A sales funnel also allows marketers to tailor and upgrade their activities and messaging to increase transformations.
So, how does a sales funnel work?
As the name recommends, a sales funnel takes in a large number of leads and prospects and narrows them down towards the bottom, providing you with a smaller number of paying customers. While the particulars of the sales funnel contrast from one industry to another — in fact, even from one company to another — we can understand how it works with a basic example:
We should take a gander at the B2C sales funnel for an internet business website. A potential customer for the site will start their excursion as a visitor: someone who could visit the site by tapping on a Google search result, social media post, or advert. At the point when they visit and browse through the website, they may (and ought to) be offered a chance to sign up for the web based business webpage’s email list. In the event that they do, they become a lead. Contingent upon the contact details they share, they can be engaged through various channels like email, message, and telephone. Their interaction with these marketing campaigns is probably going to poke them to get back to the web based business website to browse relevant items or special offers, transforming them into a possibility. From prospect to customer is then a matter of incentivising them enough with item offerings, messaging, or even a basic coupon code.
The 6 stages in a sales funnel
Again, it’s important to take note of that not all companies’ sales funnels will have six levels or stages. Sales funnels vary in size and shape from one company to another and industry to industry. However, a basic sales funnel can be described as consisting of six levels. Marketers can take inspiration from this basic construction to design a sales funnel that suits the necessities of their organization.
1. Awareness: At the actual top of the sales funnel is the awareness stage that is populated by the largest number of individuals. These individuals, not exactly ready to be prospects yet, have recently had their most memorable interactions with your company and its offerings. They have hardly any familiarity with your brand at this stage, but are aware that it exists.
2. Interest: The primary interactions will snare some of these recently aware individuals and draw them marginally more profound into the funnel. With their interest provoked, these individuals will invest some energy getting to find out about your company and your offerings. They could browse your website or catalog, read your blogs, or peruse surveys from past customers.
3. Evaluation: Armed with information gathered during the interest stage, your possibilities will double down on their efforts to know your company and offerings better. They may reach out to your customer service team with explicit inquiries, or finish up a form to access more information. Remember, by this stage they may have already compared your offerings to those of your competitors. So, it is important to clearly answer their inquiries and help them understand how your offerings can solve their problems or necessities.
4. Negotiation and decision: The possibility has now almost chosen to purchase your item or service. Depending on the nature of your offerings, they could begin a negotiation over the value, terms of purchase, or both. But it’s fair to assume that they have a purchase intention at this stage.
5. Sale: We’ve reached the bottom third of the sales funnel — the possibility and dealer have negotiated the provisions of the sale to their mutual satisfaction, and the possibility pays the merchant to officially become a buyer.
6. Renewal or repurchase: The sale stage is not the finish of the sales funnel. Soon a period will come when the sales contract is up for renewal. The customer should now choose if they want to continue with the same dealer. Provided that this is true, there may be a new round of negotiations over cost and purchase terms, trailed by a renewal or repurchase.
Benefits of a sales funnel
An obvious sales funnel can offer several benefits to your company:
1. Relevant and timely messaging: A legitimate sales funnel allows marketers to understand the customer’s purchasing process, and anticipate the inquiries and doubts they may have at various stages. These insights can be used to create and convey relevant and timely marketing messages to the customer.
2. Marketing and sales alignment: In case a customer has questions and can’t reach a salesperson because they are too high up in the funnel, they can in any case get the information they want through marketing outreach. A powerful sales funnel allows marketers to answer the customer’s item/service inquiries without involving a salesperson that early simultaneously.
3. Time and effort savings: A decent sales funnel allows marketers to sift through bad sales leads early on, and center valuable marketing dollars just around leads that exhibit the most noteworthy probability of converting into paying customers.
How to build and nurture a sales funnel—fast
Building a sales funnel doesn’t have to be a very time-intensive effort. With a smidgen of understanding, you can build and maintain a sales funnel that will allow you to recognize and harvest quality leads again and again. Building a sales funnel is all about knowing your leads, possibilities, and customers, engaging them in a timely and relevant manner, and following up tenaciously:
1. Analyze your existing customers
A decent sales funnel is built on a profound understanding of your existing customers. The more customer data you can gather and analyze, the more viable your sales funnel will be. You can gather customer data by actively communicating with your customers, and by tracking their interactions with your digital and offline presence. An analysis of your customers ought to include their pain points, needs, goals, aspirations, and past solutions. Using this data, you can find lookalike audiences, and put out the ideal messaging at the perfect time to attract possibilities.
2. Captivate your target audience
Your audience is probably going to be distracted by the variety of demands on their attention. To compel them into your sales funnel, you want to capture their attention across online and offline platforms. Use compelling content that educates and informs possibilities, assures them that their necessities are known and will be met, and guides them into asking for more information. The content used to capture your audience’s attention can be organic (non-paid social media posts, blog posts, email pamphlets, Website optimization) as well as paid (social media advertising, targeted keywords, influencer content). Find ways to align this content and related campaigns with the interests and needs of your target audience.
3. Create a great landing page
All your content ought to lead your possibilities somewhere – typically, a landing page. This is where you make your initial feeling. A great landing page communicates your identity as a company, what your offerings are, and what needs you can solve. Landing pages can also allure visitors with offers and ought to be used to capture contact data like email addresses. Lastly, but importantly, landing pages ought to have a clear call-to-action that takes the possibility further down the sales funnel.
4. Create a powerful email campaign
Having captured email information from your leads, keep them engaged with a powerful email campaign. A decent email campaign starts by informing and educating leads, helping them understand how your items and services can address their issues. Really at that time would it be advisable for it encouraging to offering your leads offers that compel them to change over into paying customers. Center around inspiring leads to become customers instead of simply bombarding them with unrefined item pitches.
5. Keep following up
At the point when a customer purchases your items and services, they don’t move out of the sales funnel. Instead, they stay at the actual bottom of the funnel, and you want to keep them there. These customers have paid for and used your items and services, and you want them to come back for more. Keep them engaged with recurring communication. Thank them for their purchase and incentivise them to return through promotional (offers) and informational (new item information) campaigns.
Your sales funnel is a dynamic tool; go ahead and tweak it in light of changes in the market and your company’s offerings. The important thing is to have a sales funnel that captures the greatest number of possibilities and successfully narrows them down to a smaller pool of loyal customers
Example of a sales funnel
Imagine a sales funnel for a company that manufactures, markets, and sells stylish furniture online. The company knows that the vast majority of its customers are 30-40 year olds who invest a ton of energy online, specifically on visual social media platforms like Instagram. So, the company runs a progression of Instagram ads using compelling content targeted at potential audiences aged between 30 and 40 years. The Instagram ads course users to the company’s landing page, where a spring up encourages them to sign up for the company’s bulletin to get tips, updates, and, crucially, offers. Individuals that sign up have now become leads.
Throughout the following couple of weeks, these leads are sent content that informs and educates them about the company’s furniture designs and quality. The intent is to inspire them to think about how they can redesign their personal spaces with this company’s furnishings.
At the finish of the email campaign, the company sends these leads a discount coupon. Prepared with ideas for their spaces, the discount coupon helps push the leads towards an actual purchase. After the purchase, the company doesn’t forget about these buyers. They become beneficiaries of one more email campaign with the same goals but unique content.
And there you have it — a sales funnel. At the top, social media users were made aware of the company and its offerings and drawn into the funnel. Their interest was aroused, they evaluated the offerings, and chose to purchase the item. Ideally, they will reestablish their relationship with the company by repurchasing later on.
Measuring a sales funnel’s success
A sales funnel is a dynamic tool. It is probably going to change in shape and size as your business develops, as you understand your customers’ necessities better, as these requirements advance, and as your item and service lines differentiate. A decent sales funnel is regularly changed because of evolving business conditions.
Marketers ought to also actively tweak their sales funnel based on how well it’s performing. A vital measurement to track while evaluating sales funnels is the change rate — how many visitors are being changed over into leads, how many leads into possibilities, and how many possibilities into paying customers? Understanding these change rates will allow you to pinch or expand the funnel in relevant places and eventually arrive at a shape that maximizes transformation at that point in time.
Optimising the sales funnel
The best way to improve your sales funnel is to attempt various things and track the resulting changes in transformation rates. The places where visitors convert into leads, leads into endlessly prospects into customers are crucial. Marketers need to guarantee that the content and activities they use at these points are exceptionally compelling.
An effective method for measuring viability is to intensely run A/B testing. How about we return to the example of our direct-to-buyer furniture brand. To enhance their sales funnel, the marketing team could run several Instagram ads and really take a look at their performance before settling on the best one. They ought to also run A/B testing on their landing page, where visitors are switched over completely to leads, and on their email campaigns, where possibilities are changed over completely to customers.
Optimizing the sales funnel is a constant pattern of testing and incorporating the outcomes.
Conclusion
Sales funnels work best when they are built with specific goals for defined target audiences, and are executed using compelling marketing content. Without these three basic tenets, sales funnels tend to be leaky—they let out prospects and leads before converting them into paying customers.
If you are trying to build a sales funnel for your organisation, or optimise the one that you have, Salesforce solutions can help you. Here’s how:
Pardot, our B2B marketing automation tool, enables you to fill your sales funnel with high quality leads, and intelligently nurture them. With it, you can create beautiful landing pages, forms, and email campaigns to personalise customer engagement.
With our contact management tool, marketers and salespeople have an ever-present snapshot of customers. Meanwhile our opportunity management capability helps you close deals faster by staying connected to the people and information you need. The Salesforce Engage tool allows you to draft and send personalised communications to customers with just one click. It also helps you maintain and view a detailed history of prospect or customer interactions.
Powerful reports and dashboards help you ensure that all your sales and marketing decisions, including the building and optimising of your sales funnel, are data-driven and well-informed.
Read More: what is a the sales funnel lookinglion.com
