Awareness section.

The sales funnel helps you know how to relate to your customers

The sales funnel gives you an edge against other newbie entrepreneurs.

It helps you improve on the ways you can grow your business.

a beginner in business, you may often find yourself in a visionary state. You have grand ideas and other schemes that make you feel fired up and motivated to get a jump start with your plans.

Sadly, a great idea and the motivation to pursue a business is not enough to make it succeed. An entrepreneur must understand the tricks of the trade in order to avoid the pitfalls of a business flop.

One important concept in the business world is the sales funnel. In case you haven’t heard of this term, it is what business people use as a reference for lead generation and sales closure.

Awareness section. The audience in this portion of the funnel understands that your business exists, but do not particularly show a focused interest.

Interest section. Potential customers know about your business, and they are interested to know more. However, they are not convinced to the point that they would actually avail of your offers.

Decision section. These would-be consumers are deciding if they would go for your offer versus other competitors. This is a critical section because this is the part where you need to build a convincing reason for people to purchase your products or services.

Action section. The final portion of the sales funnel, wherein the consumer has already decided based on your marketing strategy. All marketers have the goal of bringing customers in the action section of the sales funnel.

An online sales funnel can help you focus on the right leads

Implement a long-term process for leads nurturing

Bridges the Gap Between the Content Strategy of Marketing and Sales

Deploying Predictive Content Strategy Scaling-Up Personalization

It Breathes Life to Branding Through Powerful Storytelling

A sales funnel with the right content will inevitably attract new leads to your business.

Of course, the question then becomes: What’s the right content?

That depends on your business, your industry and the type of leads you want to attract.

Think about what you’re an expert in and what problem(s) you solve for your customers. Your content should be valuable to your target audience and answer a question or problem that they have. Format-wise, this can be a downloadable ebook, an online quiz, etc.

The key is that you capture at least everyone’s email when delivering the content they want. That way, these prospects are now in your funnel for you to nurture and build a relationship with.

Ever feel overwhelmed with all the things you could be doing with your marketing? A sales funnel helps keep you focused on what should be happening to both attract leads and convert them into sales.

It’s not necessarily about making your marketing easier, just more effective. You’ll experience fewer missed opportunities as well.

Unfortunately, not all leads will turn into customers, but creating a sales funnel will help you identify which leads to pursue.

This helps you use your time and resources working on the sales leads that have potential rather than spending too much time on the leads that will just never convert.

One way to do this is by including an initial phone call or email survey for new leads. Doing so will help you better understand your prospects and determine who is more serious about buying your product or service

On that note, an online sales funnel can help you sort, evaluate and rank your prospects.

Knowing who requires immediate attention and who needs long-term nurturing, for example, will help prevent any missed opportunities for conversions. Of course, there will be still others who are just a poor fit in general and should garner too much of your time.

Not everyone will make their decision to purchase from you immediately or even quickly. A sales funnel featuring multiple points of contact over a determined period of time is critical for conversions.

The idea is to regularly share your content with them that will educate and build a relationship with them over time until they are ready to finally make their purchasing decision.

We all want to see more of our leads turn into paying customers. Understanding your prospects’ journey to ultimately making a purchase is the way to convert more leads.

It’s about thinking through the eyes of your prospects, what they need, meeting them where they are and building that relationship of trust that earns you that sale.

An overall average sales funnel conversion rate of most industries is about 3 percent. That might not sound like a lot, but take a quick look at what your conversion rate is without a sales funnel (if you know). At least 3 percent is a good starting place for a goal. You can always build up from there.

We’ve already mentioned the unfortunate reality that not all leads will convert to customers. Digital marketing is definitely a numbers game.

However, this doesn’t mean that a buckshot, capture-all approach is what it takes to be successful.

Measure how many leads your sales funnel is capturing and how many convert.

Understanding that conversion rate will help you more accurately forecast your sales volume, which is an important part of running your business and managing your digital marketing effectively.

Need assistance setting up your online sales funnel? Schedule your free DailyStory demo today.

let’s establish the difference between a sales funnel and a sales pipeline. They are often spoken about interchangeably but have some key differences. Your sales pipeline is a visual representation of the stages your prospects have to complete before they become a customer. Your sales funnel, on the other hand, is a visual representation of the conversion-rate between each of those stages.

Your primary goal should be to move as many prospects as you can all the way through your funnel, and in turn, achieve a high conversion-rate. According to Marketo, as many as 96% of your website visitors are not ready to make a purchase yet. But, that doesn’t mean they won’t be further down the line.

SalesForce discovered it can take between six and eight touches to generate a viable sales lead. A robust sales pipeline paired with an effective sales funnel can help you transform these visitors into customers over time and manage the process efficiently.

A sales funnel helps you to define and understand your customers buying habits better.

Understanding how customers find you, why they find you, and why they stay or leave is the key to growing your business.

Sales funnels also allow you to identify and target different members of your “Stage 1” audience based upon the initial content that they displayed interest in.

Creating a sales funnel gives you insights into what leads to pursue.

It lets you devote time and resources working with sales leads that are promising, instead of spending too much time chasing bad leads.

Including preliminary steps in your leads such as ‘initial phone screening’ or ‘initial email survey’ can allow you to understand and interact with your prospects.

Every step of your interaction with prospects gives you an opportunity to learn more about them and figure out who is serious and who is not yet ready to buy.

Having an online sales funnel will help you come up with an organized process for sorting, evaluating, and ranking your sales leads.

This process will help you identify which leads require immediate attention, which leads are more likely to buy, and which leads require a long-term nurturing and follow up to convert them to customers.

Some will easily convert and become loyal customers. Others are a poor fit and will require a lot of attention and persuasion to build trust and establish a working business relationship.

This is particularly useful when you’re dealing with complex big account B2B sales. Such sales take time, typically more than six months before a client can sign a contract and close the deal.

In such cases, having a sales funnel with multiple points of contacts over the engagement period is crucial.

A sales funnel will keep you nurturing the leads by doing follow up over the entire period until they make a buying decision.

An online sales funnel, if enriched with the right content, will attract new leads to your business.

In an ever-evolving business world that is saturated with new business opportunities and plenty of options for consumers, it can be difficult to beat the competition.

Instead of making the efforts to attract every lead, a well-structured sales funnel can let you speak directly to the right leads.

you don’t need to attract every lead, just the right ones.

Online marketing is a numbers game. And with each marketing exposure, you can quantify the number of customers, then use that data to forecast sales over a certain period of time.

When you have a well-organized sales funnel, and you have analyzed the number of prospects whom you have established a working relationship with, you can use it to predict sales volume.