What is the Sales Funnel?
You hear the word Sales Funnel frequently in the realm of inbound marketing. You can compare these to a funnel for new customers whereme
e you oversee your entire marketing and sales process . This one is wide at the top and narrow at the bottom.
From the top of the sales funnel, unqualified prospects enter. These are all the people who might benefit from your service or product but whom you have not yet had contact with, nor are you sure if they fit into your target audience.
At the very bottom of the sales funnel, new customers come out. They have gone through the entire marketing or sales process.
The metaphor of the funnel is used because prospects fall off each step. For example, this will include people who are just curious about your terms, people who want to see what the competition is doing, or people who are not yet completely convinced about your product or service.
Why should you use the Sales Funnel?
By using the sales funnel and quantifying your prospects in numbers, you can see perfectly at each step what works and what percent actually convert to customers.
With this data, you can change the entire process slightly each time to increase your percentage of customers. It also gives you the ability to address certain problem (that you didn’t know about before) and give you the info on what stage in the process salespeople should focus on.
The different phases of a Sales Funnel :
- Attention phase : This is where the prospect comes to know that your product or service exists.
- Interest stage : This is where the prospect’s interest is piqued and he starts doing some more research on his own.
- Evaluation phase : Now your prospect is going to compare your product or service with possible competition.
- Decision phase : The prospect decides that he chooses your product and now negotiations start.
- Purchase phase : The prospect purchases your product or service.
- re-evaluation phase : After he gets to know your product/service, he is going to compare his experience with his expectations.
- Repurchase phase : If he is satisfied he will make another purchase from you.
An example of the Sales Funnel at Groupon:
- Traffic comes in through ads, direct marketing, referrals, affiliates etc….
- People land on the home page of the website where they have to leave their email address and personal information.
- You get to see personalized offers.
- You land on the purchase form.
- You purchase to.
- You will be notified weekly of new offers to convince you to make another purchase.
This is a reasonable “standard” way that you can do much more with. Thus, on your own website you could still work with tripwires, upsells, downsells, cross-sells, all-in-one packages and much more….
What exactly is the sales funnel?
The sales funnel shows how many people enter from the top of the funnel as prospects and how many eventually convert to customers. These numbers are measurable and editable. This gives you a good view of where problems are occurring but also where your salespeople need to focus for maximum results.
