A sales funnel is the marketing term for describing the journey of a customer from being a prospect to a real customer. The number of steps in a sales funnel might vary depending on the sales model of your company. A successful sales funnel guides potential customers through the purchase process without letting them fall through a gap.
Why is A Sales Funnel Important?
The sales funnel helps your customers/ prospects understand the journey that they need to take and also the stage of it, where they stand. Apart from that, as a business owner, you also understand, where your deal stands. You get to understand if the prospect will move near the purchase point or will give up on the journey even earlier. Looking at a robust sales funnel, you can also tailor your marketing plans for the future and optimize all activities for conversion.
True to its name, a Marketing or Sales funnel is a format in a conical shape that sucks in a large group of prospects, and leads and then pushes them down the cone to become high-paying customers. The work process of a Marketing Funnel often differs from one business to another. You need to do the tweak in a manner that works perfectly for you. Only then, you will be able to reap the maximum benefit out of your Marketing Funnel and its optimization.
The Basic 6 Stages of a Sales/ Marketing Funnel
A Marketing Funnel may vary in shape and size according to the type of your business. Usually, it consists of 6 stages. We can discuss the basic 6 components and their functionality.
- Awareness
This stage naturally sits atop the complete Marketing Funnel. You can connect with the largest group of people at this stage. They only become aware of the fact that “such a product/ brand exists”.
- Interest
Through the first interaction, you can only generate interest in your product/ service in some of those aware people. All will not get attracted no matter how much effort you put in. But, the interested group will invest some time in knowing more about your business by reading your brochures, catalogs, blogs, reviews, etc.
- Evaluation
After gathering knowledge at the Interest stage, your prospects will put in extra effort in procuring more information about you. By now, they might have even compared your offers with that of your competitors. To win the race, you have to explain how your offers can solve their problems in the best way.
- Decision
At this stage, you get to interact only with the group of people who are ready to make the purchase. So, it is natural for your prospects to strike some negotiations to get the best out of the deal. Negotiation only shows the intention of purchase on the part of the customer.
- Sale
Congratulations, you have already reached the bottom of the funnel, which means, the customer and you have agreed on an amicable term of business to seal the deal and even make the payment. However, you can still have the scope to reap some more benefits from this deal.
- Repurchasing & Renewal
There will be a time when the contract between you and your customer will be up for renewal. Certain Purchase journeys end at the fifth stage, which is ‘Sales’. However, with a little extra effort, you can convince your customer for repurchasing or subscription renewal.
There are multiple variations of a sales funnel that work well for your business. However, the structure we described here, works more or less for all businesses.
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