Sales funnel, what is it and how does it work?

When it comes to attracting customers to your website, what kind of strategy should you follow? It’s a question we have all asked ourselves, right? However, we have an even more important question for you: Do you know what the best strategies are? If you are new to the world of SEO, it might all sound like a foreign language to you. It’s time for you to learn a bit about the subject, especially if your goal is to have a sales funnel.
Don’t you know what a sales funnel is? And how important is it in a customer acquisition strategy in order to increase the conversion rate? Very well, in this post we are going to clarify all your doubts.

What is a sales funnel?

We could define the sales funnel, or sales funnel, as the way in which a company plans to capture a customer. In other words, a process that begins when the client contacts the company, until the closing of the income sale is produced.

The sales funnel is especially important, since it helps to determine which part of the sales process is failing, which will allow it to be solved, and thus improve the conversion rate.

This is used, above all, in customer acquisition processes for e-commerce. For what reason? Well, because a well-defined sales funnel could be the big difference between billing 1,000 to 10,000 euros a month. Of course, all this falls on the company’s marketing department, but if you go it alone, you have to take care of all this.

However, before we get into the matter with the sales funnel, we will ask you a question: do you know what a lead is?

What is a lead?

The term lead is an Anglicanism, which refers to records with the data of those people who have shown an interest in what the brand offers. This can be through a request for information, such as by going to customer service points.

Sales funnel stages

Are you interested in improving the conversion of your website? Or your business? Well, we are going to explain to you what are the different stages of a sales funnel. You already know: apply it correctly, and you will be able to increase your billing.

1st Stage: Lead

The first stage is a customer contact stage. At this point, the client will find your website, as well as your funnel, beginning to fill up with leads (contacts).

2nd Stage: Prospectus

A stage in which we are dedicated to identifying and classifying the leads generated in the first stage. Filtering leads correctly will save us effort in later steps.

In short, carrying out a good lead stage will help you avoid wasting time and money on generated leads that are not interesting for your product or service. Or what is the same, you will discard the clients that are not potential.

3rd Stage: Opportunity

Here begins the stage in which the potential client cared about some content or offer. With this action, you inform us that you need knowledge that you do not have, so you may need some of our services. At this stage it may also be the case that the company contacts the client, responding to the interests that the client has.

3rd Stage bis: Qualified opportunity

In the previous point, it is possible that you have a sales opportunity, for which it would be good for you to qualify it as:

• Offline media: Each seller must have a list of intelligent questions, the answers to which do not lead to the end of the funnel and allow to know the arguments to use to close.
• Online media: Since we cannot use questions in online media, other tools must be used, such as Lead Nuturing so that the client advances faster through the funnel, or Lead Scoring to score each lead based on the actions they take.

4th Stage: Qualification

A stage in which we must dedicate ourselves to determining the needs of our lead, thus offering them the product they need. Again, there are two ways:

• Offline media: In this type of product, the sale generally occurs at the same time as the classification or commercial visit.
• Online media: In the event that the product is online, you must have correctly completed the database, identifying all the interactions made by each lead. In this way, you can offer them the product or service they need.

5th Stage: Closing

As its name indicates, it is the last stage of the sales funnel. At this stage we close the negotiation and the customer accepts the order, whether for a product or a service.

Maintenance and optimization of a sales funnel

You will have been able to verify that the sales funnel is very important for your business, but how can you maintain it and perform a good optimization of it? With the following techniques:

• Monitoring or tracking: You will have to monitor all your actions, in order to carry out a subsequent analysis to assess the data obtained.
• Data analysis of your lead:Once the data is obtained, analyze it to check the effectiveness of each phase, as well as the action taken. This will allow you to find ways to improve.
• Measurement of the efficiency of the actions: To know your funnel has been successful or not, you must resort to the conversion rate. Thanks to it, you will know the actions that work to improve and the changes that you must incorporate.
• Optimize your actions: In the phases that have had worse results, you should carry out an A/B test. This will allow you to discard the actions with the worst results, starting to use others that work better.