Improving your sales funnel must be one of your highest importance as an enterprise owner. The sales funnel turns your leads into conversions. If you have an adequate sales funnel, you will get an essential understanding of your consumers’ requirements. And the information will assist you in making the best judgments about your products. This post takes you through the basics of a sales funnel including what is a sales funnel and how to create and manage one for your company.
What is a Sales Funnel? How to Create One?
What is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel usually applied by marketers refers to the journey that the customers go through when they are purchasing something from your website or eCommerce store. While creating a sales funnel, you will have to consider various steps. There is an upper, a center, and a base in a sales funnel. But the structure of your sales funnel counts on your institution’s sales model. Every company suffers failures now and then, but when you have a proper sales funnel management system, then your business will run smoothly.
The sales funnel will help you find out how many users have missed your appointments, it can help you figure out the plot holes in your marketing strategies, and it helps you connect the spreadsheets. You can use sales funnel and marketing automation software at the same time to find out what opportunities you have missed on your marketing campaign.
In more precise words, a sales funnel is a series of steps that the customers have to take to create a long-term or short-term relationship with a business. For example, you are implementing the brick-and-mortar sales funnel. The users who are at the top of your sales funnel will visit your online store. Some people among them will search for products which will be the next step of the sales funnel.
After everything, when the customers finish the purchase, they will be at the bottom of the sales funnel. Regardless of the enterprise that you are handling, a sales funnel can help you all. Sales funnels are used in retail stores, websites, emails, sales teams, personal consultations, and more. You can create any sales funnel, and it can be a part of the platform where you are promoting your business, and you can spread your sales funnel over multiple platforms as well.
Some people refer to the sales funnel as the revenue funnel or sales process. The revenue funnel is the process that your company will first have to identify, then qualify, and sell the products to your potential customers. While you are dividing your sales funnel into the top, middle, and bottom steps; you will have to go through 7 dividing phases.
What are the Sales Funnel Processing Phases?
The 7 dividing phases of the sales funnel are as follows:
Awareness Phase: In the awareness phase, the customers become aware of the products or services.
Interest Phase: In this phase, the customers search for the products they might be interested in.
Evolution Phase: The evolution phase refers to the customers comparing your products with your competitors’ products to reach the final purchasing decision.
Purchase Phase: The customers finally purchase your products or services.
Re-evaluation Phase: Business-to-business operations commonly involve offers that need to be renewed multiple times or at least twice. When a customer is aware of the products and services that your company is providing, or when the contract is coming close to its expiry date, the customer or the business that you are working with might sign up for the re-evaluation process. The re-evaluation process allows the customer to decide if they want to renew the business contract or not.
Repurchase Phase: After the re-evaluation process, the customer repurchases the product or service if he thinks that it is what they want to do.
The marketing team and the sales team work together to find new marketing strategies, tools, and techniques that would help them optimize their sales process.
How to Manage Sales Funnel Effectively?
Managing your sales funnel means reviewing and adjusting your sales strategies over and over again based on the conversions or leads in your funnel. You have to manage your sales funnel according to the details available regarding your customers’ behavior. And then, you will have to apply your sales strategy wherever appropriate. For example, one of your potential customers is stuck in the “interest” stage and is unable to decide on purchasing your product. Primarily, you can send that customer a sales pitch and a follow-up contract. But there can also be a possibility that the lead or potential customer does not want to purchase your product or service anymore.
But as a sales funnel manager, you will have to come up with a strategy that will keep that lead on your funnel so that it is able to move at every stage in the funnel. When a lead completes all the stages in the funnel, it will turn into a conversion and will help you succeed in your business. But how can you persuade a lead to complete all the stages in a sales funnel? You offer them incentives for the services and the products by effectively figuring out their concerns or needs.
The second important element for the sales funnel is optimization. Once you realize that a lead has shown interest in your product or services, you should do something that will help them move to another stage of the funnel. The longer a lead stays on a single stage, the more risks you will find in improving your conversion. The best way to move your lead to the action stage is by giving them urgent deadlines or by offering them incentives and better deals.
Data insights will help you optimize your sales funnel. The essential technologies that create sales reporting are account and contact management, sales forecasting tools, and customer relationship management systems. Particularly customer relationship management systems help you optimize your sales funnel by concentrating on customer-related data. When you have the required data to understand the prospects of your business, you can create a better sales funnel for your customers. What you should remember is that while data helps you succeed in your business, the sales funnel is particularly about your audience and not your business.
Why is Sales Funnel Important?
Since the sales funnel helps your customer to move through different stages before purchasing a product, analyzing the stages will help you understand how to grow your business and find more customers. Analyzing your sales funnel will help you determine what’s running incorrectly in your sales funnel, for example, where your headliners are not converting into clients. When you understand your sales funnel closely, you will gain insights into how to influence your leads and help them turn into buying customers.
Analyzing the data will also help you understand what a particular customer is thinking at a particular stage in the sales funnel. And those data can encourage you to invest in your marketing strategies to attract more target audiences. You can use that information to form attractive dealing movements and extend your corporation. Now since you know the basics of the sales funnel, you also need to know how to create a successful sales funnel.
How Do You Build a Sales Funnel Effectively?
When you have a sales funnel, you can track the behavior of your prospects and inspect how engaging your marketing strategy is. There are several ways you can build a sales funnel, and depending on your business, you can follow these methods:
1. Creating a Landing Page
The landing page on your website is the first best place where your potential customers learn about your business and the services or products that you offer. When a prospect reaches your landing page by clicking on an ad or social media link, and if they don’t find the information that they are looking for, they will leave. Therefore, your landing page is the only way you can impress your prospects.
2. Offer What They Want
If your mission is building a sales funnel through email, then you will need the email address of your prospect. But your users will only give you their email address when you show them that you have something that they want. For example, if they are searching for cooking recipes on your website or the web, then you can ask them for their email address and send them a free eBook with all the cooking recipes they might like.
3. Encourage the Visitors
Once a prospect shows interest in your product or gives you their email address, you will have to give them something in return. You can give them some content that will enlighten them regarding your development or assistance. Make sure that the content that you are providing them with is not repetitive and frequent.
4. Close the Offers and Deals
The fastest way to encourage your prospects to move through different stages of a sales funnel is by closing the deal and offers. When a product is on a countdown, your potential customers will find it difficult to ignore that product. Apart from providing them with deals and discounts, you can also offer a free trial which is not easy to ignore.
Conclusion
The sales funnel gives different benefits to your business. For the starter, it defines your sales methods and helps your sales team to optimize your sales process for the marketing journey. When you are constantly investigating user data and brainstorming new ways to convert your leads into customers, it can ultimately create more profits for your business. This article will help you understand every basic detail of the sales funnel, but if you need more information about the same, you can check out our other blog posts.
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Simran works as a technical writer. The graduate in MS Computer Science from the well known CS hub, aka Silicon Valley, is also an editor of the website. She enjoys writing about any tech topic, including programming, algorithms, cloud, data science, and AI. Traveling, sketching, and gardening are the hobbies that interest her.
