Sales Funnel Stages & How to Create Sales Funnel

Irrespective of what your business offers, getting prospective customers to walk through the stages of your sales is no easy task. To pull this off, you must be exceptional when it comes to warming prospects up.

Only that way can they part with their hard-earned money for your product or services. As you already know, it is not an easy task, which is why a guide such as this will help you scale through.

Based on the hostile climate and fierce competition, knowing how to maximize your sales, funnel stages, and marketing strategies will help you grow your business.

If you can master the steps, you can use some formidable tactics to improve the number of potential customers that go from one stage to another. If you want to double your sales and grow your customer base, it is paramount that you understand how to implement this marketing strategy in your business. By getting to the bottom of your marketing agency sales process you can become closer to the funner creation.

Since this is going to be a pretty long article, let’s dive in.

What Is The Sale Funnel?

Sales funnels merely depict stages an individual has to undergo to become a customer. For a brick and mortar business, the sales funnel’s first step is walking into the store.

When a customer starts browsing through the products or items, they are on the next stage’s funnel. When they select some product and move to check-out, it means they have reached the last step.

The four essential sales funnel stages include:

• Awareness
• Interest
• Decision
• Action

The Sales Funnel Stages

The first stage in the sales funnel is awareness, which can be done by creating brand awareness using social media marketing. There are other alternatives to try, like Google AdWords, sponsored posts, radio, or TV adverts.

This sales journey differs based on the prospect, niche, and products and services your business offers. Before you start building your sales funnel, it is essential to have a clear business vision and use it as a guide to creating an effective sales funnel.

In this section, you’re going to learn about the various sales funneling stages and how to leverage this incident to grow.

1. Awareness

It is often the first stage, and it happens when a prospect learns about your business, products, and service. At this stage, they are aware of their problem, and they are looking for a solution. The common channel used to arrive at this stage is likely through an ad, a Google search, a post shared on social media, etc.

With a robust marketing strategy, creating awareness for your products and services is doable. However, you will need to discover the most effective strategy that will work for your business. It could be referral marketing, influencer marketing, or social media marketing.

2. Interest

In this stage, your potential customer is searching for solutions and ways to get it. Typically, the search begins on Google. If you have an online presence like a business website, attracting them to your website won’t be a problem.

When a prospect show interest, they are likely to bookmark your website, following your social handles, and subscribe to your mailing list. But in a world where trust is hard to earn, you have no guarantee that this will work out fine. All you can do is ensure that the stages are smooth, neat with no distraction.

3. Decision

If your business happens to have the solution to a prospect’s problem, it calls for the decision stage. In this situation, your potential customer is considering taking advantage of the answer you’re offering. If you reach this stage where a prospect is struggling with a decision, it means you’re halfway into success.

This stage entails your potential customer paying more attention to your offers, packages, and options.

4. Action

It is the final stage, and it happens when the visitors sign the contract or use the purchase button. Once the money has been paid, you no longer have to worry as your campaign was a success. Take note that the final stage doesn’t mean interaction with customers is over.

There is a lot you need to do to ensure that they keep coming back for more products and services. If you had a dream of building a more significant customer base, you could do that by merely getting your customer’s contact details.

5. Retention

Your business exists to serve the customer, which can only happen when you make the right decisions. To keep them aboard your business, you need to keep them happy. That way, they will spread the world and even become passionate.

The only way to make customers happy is to solve their needs and strive to improve. If you want customers to engage with your products and services continually, share contents by sharing them as:

• Emails
• Special offers
• Technical assistance literature
• Surveys/outreach and follow-up, etc.

How To Create Your Sales Funnel

1. Understand Your Customers

Many of your competitors might already have a sales funnel in place. That shouldn’t cause any worry, as you can quickly learn about their strategies. The aim is to discover as much as you can about your potential customers. When you understand your customer, solving their need wouldn’t have to be a problem.

Also, it helps you to focus on your most important and relevant selling point. To help you perform better, some questions you need to ask yourself include:

• What are your current challenges?
• What are your present fear, goal, and aspiration?
• What have you done to solve this problem and achieve absolutely calmness over the situation?

With detailed information on the list, you can understand your customer’s pain points and take measures to solve them.

Information about your customers will help you create a customer persona that easily converts from a visitor to a customer. However, you can’t build the same sales funnel for all your customers, since they have a different reason for buying the product.

Also, their buying decision and manner of usage differs, making it clear that you can’t use the same sales funnel for all your target market.

2. Get Your Target’s Attention

The first step to converting a visitor to a lead, and finally, a customer, is first to grab their attention. What this means is putting your content in front of your potential customers. You will have to invest in content marketing since that’s the only way to grab attention.

By taking the organic route and posting your content on multiple channels, you will create the needed awareness for your business. If your marketing budget is impressive, you can run a few ads that target your audience. If you’re targeting companies or professionals alike, you might need to use LinkedIn to grow your business. If you fail to create the needed attention, you won’t be able to pull off this funnel marketing strategy. There are hundreds of techniques that guide you on creating awareness for your business and brand.

3. Create A Landing Page

While running your marketing campaigns for visibility, you need to take them somewhere with an offer they can’t overlook. Instead of pushing sales to their face, it is better to focus on capturing leads instead.

With a great looking landing page, you should be able to convince a potential customer to subscribe to your email list. Ensure that the call to action is bold enough, whether it’s getting access to an eBook or watching an instructional material.

Whatever be the case, your aim should be to design a responsive landing page, fast load speed, and less distracting. It means incorporating minimalism into your landing page design will be in your best interest. With a clear call to action, taking action will never be a problem. See this example for outdoor patio fencing for restaurants.

4. Run An Email Drip Campaign

Email marketing is very much alive and can be a formidable tool that can help you convert your leads to customers. To do that, you need to provide them with excellent content they will love. It would help if you did this regularly, but not frequently to avoid turning them off.

Once or twice a week is ideal and capable of yielding positive result. Through your email marketing, you get the chance to educate your audience, even learn about some obstacles and objections which you need to ratify for them to buy.

Email marketing aims to convince your lead to take action finally. It could be buying a product, booking an appointment, or any action your business considers value. When you make an irresistible offer at the end of your drip campaign, your leads won’t hesitate to take the expected action.

5. Tracking Strategies

If you want to beat your competitors in this game, you need to understand and possibly use most of the tools. With these tools, you can see about 20% to 30% of your competitor’s sales funnel. To determine the tools they are using, you will need to download some add-ons for Google Chrome.

One of the best plugins that do the job is Ghostery. With this tool, you will see the ‘invisible’ web, detecting trackers, beacons, web bugs, and pixels placed on a website by Google, Facebook, or any other platform with access to your internet activity.

Although this plugin is not supposed to be visible, you can use it to discover which tracker or program your competitor uses. This information will help you determine if you’re to follow the same route or look for another.

The second Chrome plugin is BuiltWith Technology Profiler, which helps you see the tool stack running on a website. If you’re in the marketing or eCommerce industry, you will find this tool very beneficial when running your business.

The endgame is to dig up information that will help you build a better sales channel than your competitors. When you understand their strategies and the tools they use, you can hack the process by giving your business a better chance at succeeding.

6. Add A Guarantee

No matter how mouth-watering your offer is, you need to convince the customer that this isn’t a ‘too good to be true’ scenario. You want to minimize your customer’s risk when purchasing your products and services.

There are many ways to go around this, like offering a money-back guarantee, double your money-back guarantee or any other kind. You can use the risk-reversal to make your customers know that the risk is on you as a business.

When you offer a guarantee, you prove to them that they have nothing to lose. Also, such measures come off as confidence, which is vital for a successful conversion. By building trust through guarantees, you give your potential customer no reason to back off.

If you can take a look at the landing pages of competitors, you will come to learn how this strategy helps convince a customer to take action. If the offer is irresistible, with some money-back guarantee, you won’t have to worry about the deal not going through.

7. Have Social Proof

When people read testimonials, reviews, or anything similar about a product, it shows that people are buying the product. Thus, it serves as encouragement for your lead to proceed through all the sales stages. It is not in your place to back up your claims; your customer’s testimonials will do that.

On your landing page, make sure you integrate social proof by showcasing testimonials or reviews from customers. As long as these social proofs are complimentary, they will help convince the customer along the way.

But when you fail to include this critical element, converting prospects to customers becomes a gamble, you might lose.

Conclusion

If you want to boost sales, increase your customer base, and create awareness for your business, you must master how to create a good sales funnel that always deliver. 

You can do that by understanding your target market and ensuring that the funnel stages are straightforward and easy to follow.

When you incorporate the right practice, you will see these leads interact with your offers before they exit for good.