Beginner Sales Funnel Guide

Do you know what a sales funnel is or how to build a successful sales funnel that converts to actual sales? If not, you could be missing out on hundreds of thousands of dollars every year! You can automate your marketing strategies and scale your business even further with the correct sales funnel. While understanding sales funnels can be tricky, we have created this sales funnel guide for beginners to help you understand what a sales funnel is and how to build one.

What is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel represents the customer journey in becoming a converted client. The marketing term that describes the journey potential customers take to make a purchase is a sales funnel. A sales funnel has several steps, these steps are commonly referred to as the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel, however, these steps can change depending on a company’s sales model and the journey their consumers take.
Sales and marketing automation tools help close the gaps in your sales funnel and convert near-misses into sales. One of the most important components that is useful in marketing automation and sales funnel software is triggered emails. These are emails and messages that are triggered by a specific behavior.

A sales funnel is a marketing strategy for converting cold prospects into long-term clients by funneling them through five stages. The concept of a “funnel” implies that you’ll start with a large group of potential customers before narrowing them down to a smaller group of highly targeted, high-value customers that are primed for making a purchase.
You can be more precise about how and when you deliver offers by breaking the customer’s journey down into smaller phases.

Why is it important to have a sales funnel?

A well-designed sales funnel provides the sales team with key insights into the needs of a potential customer. You can appropriately depict your consumers’ path in the buying process if you have a detailed sales funnel. Understanding your funnel can assist you in identifying holes in your prospective customers’ buying journeys as well as where potential consumers are skipping out and not converting.
You’ll be missing out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential revenue if you don’t grasp your sales funnel. A sales funnel can help you understand what potential consumers are thinking and doing at various stages of their purchase decision; this understanding will help you lead consumers further down the sales funnel.

These insights allow you to allocate resources to the most effective marketing activities and channels, craft the most appropriate messaging at each stage, and convert more leads into paying customers, allowing you to better utilize your sales team by bringing prospective customers into the sales process.

Sales Funnel AIDA: Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action

Elias St. Elmo Lewis, a pioneer in advertising and sales, created the AIDA model in the late 1800s. It has subsequently formed the foundation of nearly every successful advertising and marketing strategy.
AIDA guides potential buyers through the emotional path of making a purchase, from first interest to action.

Awareness

The first step of the sales process, also known as “attention,” is where a business draws the attention of customers through marketing material or a valuable baseline offer.

Interest

Here, the business will start to cultivate a stronger bond with its potential customer, becoming more involved in understanding their ambitions and issues. You can start delivering preliminary solutions this way, allowing them to experience “quick wins” – and become more involved in your messaging.

Desire

Consumers that have reached this stage are convinced that they have a problem that needs to be solved. In addition, they’re warming to the concept of making a purchase to fix the problem. At this stage, the business demonstrates how its premium solution or product may help address the consumer’s given problem.

Action

Potential customers decide whether to buy the brand’s product or service at the end of the sales funnel, the action stage. You’ll need to emphasize the worth of your offer and the drawbacks of not purchasing it.

How to build a successful sales funnel

Audience research

Audience research is an essential step in building a successful sales funnel. If you do not know who your audience is, you can not build a sales funnel to target them. Once you have finished your audience research, you can move on to tailoring your sales funnel to fit into their purchase journey.

Build a landing page

Potential customers will most likely learn about your firm through a landing page. They’ll get to the landing page if they click on an ad, join a webinar, or download an ebook. That page should clearly state who you are as a company and what makes you stand out against your competition. Make sure that the landing page has a form for potential customers to fill out in order to collect their information. You want to get their email address so you can connect with them in the future.

Offer value

This is the point where you must give something in exchange for your potential customers’ email addresses. A lead magnet, like a whitepaper or ebook, is a great method to give your landing page visitors something useful.

Grow your relationship

Your potential customers will have progressed from the Awareness stage to the Interest stage at this point. You may want to build an email marketing series to deliver content regarding your business as you have collected potential customers’ email addresses from the landing page.

You want to offer something that will influence potential customers and push them towards making a purchase choice as they progress into the Decision stage. This could be a product demonstration, a longer free trial, or a special price.

Keep the process going

You’ll either gain new clients or learn why certain consumers aren’t interested in buying in the Action phase. Either way, keep the communication open and focus on product education, engagement, and retention for new consumers. Create a fresh nurturing series for prospects who did not make a purchase and follow up with them every few months.