Sales funnel – everything you should know about it
What is a sales funnel?
A sales funnel is a method of acquiring leads (contacts, potential individual or company customers) through specific activities, growing out of CRM (customer relationship management). It helps the seller reach his target group with his product, and involves a series of activities related to advertising, promotion, strengthening ties with customers.
In other words, a sales funnel is a series of actions that a salesperson takes to attract and retain a customer. We can show the sales funnel with a graph just in the shape of a funnel, where at the very top there are many leads with unspecified expectations. The lower we go, the more specific we have them; at the very bottom we already have sales-directed leads, and with them we try to maintain the relationship. The scheme can be described using the AIDA model (short for attention (attention), interest (interest), desire (desire, need), action (action)), to this we can add the letter “l” loyality (attachment, loyalty).
How to make them pay attention to our product?
In order for our product to sell well, we need to ensure that it is properly advertised. We should make every effort to ensure that the advertisement has a clear and transparent message, and at the same time attractive at the same time.
Stages of the sales funnel
The top of the sales funnel is often referred to as Tofu (Top of the Funnel). At this stage, we try to reach the largest possible group of potential customers. We usually use paid advertisements for this purpose. These can be, for example, info-graphics, redirects to expert articles or reviews. We try to ensure that the point of attraction, attracting the attention of customers, has a high clickbait (click-through rate). It is also worth ensuring that our product attracts customers from the Google search engine itself – so we use appropriate redirecting phrases, we try to make them as precise as possible.
How do we classify leads?
Next we have Mofu (Middle of the funnel) at the lower end of the funnel. There are users here who we start classifying because of what they are interested in. We encourage them to learn more about the product, try to keep in touch with them, encourage more purchases, and collect feedback. The cluster of leads at this point shrinks considerably and we concretize their groups by defining them as hot, warm or cold. Hot leads go to the sales department, the others we try to “warm up” in an appropriate way. We can do this, for example, by offering shopping vouchers or sharing buyer reviews. By observing preferences, we can reach a group of customers and begin to build our reputation as a seller.
Microconversions in the sales funnel
Inside our marketing funnel there can be a turnover of leads, a phenomenon we refer to as micro-conversions. We try to make sure that as many of the leads that are in the funnel as possible travel to the bottom of the funnel, towards the sales department and the establishment of an ongoing relationship. An example of activities conducive to fostering micro-conversion are newsletter signups.
Sales funnel – an application perspective
A sales funnel is worth using in almost any business. Properly designed, it will probably increase the sales rate of selected products. In addition, it is possible to create another separate funnel from grouped leads or one that is combined with an existing one. This gives us a database of information about leads that we can monitor, modify our ways of reaching new customers, manage and expand our sales offerings with new products that, according to all our data, are currently in demand.
