Introduction

It is much easier to help a customer when you know what they think and where they are in their journey. How well do they know you? What are they trying to solve? Why haven’t they bought it yet? These are all important questions that you may not get to ask your customers in person- especially if you are generating leads or doing any kind of business online. This is where a sales funnel comes in. Your sales funnel is meant to help your business understand and answer these questions in the most practical (and least stalkerish) way possible. And when done right, your funnel can help you reduce the associated risk and expenses from guessing what your customer wants in that stage of their journey. This blog post will help you make sense of the sales funnel strategy and guide you on what to know as you start your funnel-building journey.

What is a sales funnel?

Mailchimp defines it as “the customer journey that someone takes before making a purchase”. It helps you visualize how your customers move through your sales pipeline from prospecting to purchase. Keeping a close eye on your funnel will help you understand how your customers behave, what triggers them to take action quicker, what puts them off, and how you can position yourself to ease them into each stage of the journey.

Your customer goes through a journey of thoughts and mental decisions before they become buyers (the customer journey). They move from the awareness and lead generation stage at the top of the funnel to the middle of the funnel, where they need to be nurtured and engaged. Then down the bottom of the funnel, where they actually click to buy your product.

Mapping the Customer's Mental Journey

Your customer’s thought process during their journey through your pipeline might look like this:

Stage 1: Ugh, this is annoying/is this going to be a problem/ this can be improved.

Stage 2: What are my options to solve this?

Stage 3: Okay, I’ve found a few possible solutions. But which one would be the best alternative for me right now?

Stage 4: Can I trust this business?

Stage 5: Is this the right choice for me? (plus FAQs)

Sales Funnel Checklist 101

If you don’t currently have a defined sales funnel working for your business, this checklist will serve as a guide to walk you through the essentials.

1. Target Audience

Who exactly are you targeting and what’s their pain point? Getting this right might be easier if you’ve already defined your customer avatar as a business. You need to be able to answer this very well to build a better, higher-converting funnel.

2.Clear goals

Even though your end goal is to close the sale, it’s best not to skip any part of the funnel process. The goal in each stage of the funnel is to get customers closer to the next stage of their journey without making it feel forced or overly ‘salesy’—customers are much more likely to become (loyal) customers when they feel understood where they are in their customer journey.

That said, you’ll need to have a clearly defined set of expected outcomes for each part of the funnel. You may need to learn more about your industry’s standard metrics and adjust your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to match. This will help you measure the success of your funnel at each stage and hint at a few things you could tweak to improve it.

3.Getting the leads

Now, you’ll need people coming through your ‘door’-what marketers often refer to as getting traffic. Whether you choose to create content, run ads, or draw eyeballs from social media, you need to have as many page visitors as possible. With the right offer or incentive (lead magnet), you’ll be able to attract a percentage of these page visitors into your sales funnel.

4.Lead Nurture Techniques

Leads within your funnel may need several interactions with your brand before they make a purchase. With the right tools, like Customer Relationship Management software, you’ll be able to ethically track your customer’s journey. You’ll also need to implement strategies like email marketing and retargeting, which will go a long way toward personalizing your customer’s experience.

5.Qualify

Not all the leads that come into your funnel are best suited for the product you’re promoting. This is especially true if the offer you’re promoting is a higher-ticket product. Regardless, you will need to qualify the leads that come into your funnel. If for example, you’re selling a service that is tailored towards students who want to study abroad, not all those who come through your funnel may fit that criteria - they may have their own motivation for going down your funnel. Qualifying your leads will help you retain the highest quality of leads and reduce the number of failed closings when it’s time to make the sale. This saves a lot of time and resources because you can focus on those most likely to convert.

6.Close It

Closing the deal with the customers might require some additional incentives, clarifications, and follow-ups. You will need to be very intentional about the sales techniques you use to close the sale - make sure it’s compelling yet it should still carry the same brand voice that the lead has heard and followed even till this point (the bottom of the funnel).

7.Testing and Optimizing Your Funnel

You’ll need to revisit your funnel, checking its metrics and analyzing the data you find. From the data, you may need to tweak and test specific parts of your funnel - headlines, CTAs, and more. The more optimized your funnel is, the more conversions you’ll see. This means that, working on your funnel may cause you to increase the percentage of leads that get to the deal-closing stage.

Essential Tools for Building a Sales Funnel

To set your funnel up, you’ll need the help of some important tools. The following are the ones you’ll most likely need in your sales funnel set up.

Landing page builders like Aweber, Mailchimp, and ConstantContact will help you create mini websites that you can specifically tailor to get your customer avatar to perform an action. It helps you personalize your message to the exact stage they are in their journey, and are therefore more likely to drive results.

Done right, email marketing can be one of the most effective ways to keep your leads interested and engaged. Email marketing platforms help you automate your campaigns, so that you can still have a personalized touch even as you scale.

Analytics tools can be extremely helpful when you’re trying to keep track, analyze, and understand your customers’ behavior objectively. You’ll also be able to keep track of what works and what you can tweak in your funnel to give you better results.

With the help of Customer Relationship Management tools, it becomes much easier to manage customer relationship data and tailor your message and product to them at each stage.

Common Sales Funnel Mistakes to Avoid

• Getting concerned when there are drop-offs in the number of people entering each stage of the funnel: it’s normal to have only a fraction of your page visitors moving through to the next stage of the customer journey. The funnel is like a filter - it sieves through the multitude of page viewers and helps match your product to high-quality leads.

• You’ll need to be very clear on who your target audience is. A funnel is all about personalization, and the clearer you are on who your ideal customer is, the more powerful your sales funnel becomes.

  
  

• Follow up. No, it’s not only a sales thing - your marketing needs it too. Thankfully, a chunk of the follow-up process can be automated. And you can use the data you’ve collected from the CRM to personalize your follow-ups even further. Doing this will likely increase your conversions significantly.

  
  

• Keep it simple. There are so many kinds of funnels for different objectives. While some funnels might need to be more complicated than others, a general rule of thumb is to keep it simple, especially in the beginning.

  
  

• Look at the data and test. Don’t get lazy about it. Testing and tweaking your funnel can help you optimize the results you get from it, both in quality and quantity.

Conclusion

In summary, a sales funnel can be an extremely useful strategy to adopt into your marketing and sales pipeline. It makes it so much easier to hand-hold your customers through their journey from being aware of their problem till they get to know about your business and become raving fans of yours. But before you get started, you need to be very clear on who your ideal customer is and the barriers that may delay them from reaching the next stage of their journey. The tools and the checklist we discussed should help you gain more insight on how funnels work and why it’s so important. We also looked at some common mistakes many businesses make in building and managing their sales funnel. With the above to guide you, you can now create and build out a funnel to match your business. Want to learn more about sales funnels and how you can use them to boost your conversions, visit our blog at Clicks and Things