How to Build a Sales Funnel Strategy
From first contact to the final goal: learn how to build a winning sales funnel strategy to boost your conversions!
A customer's relationship with a company unfolds like a story, one best seen as a long journey. First, people need to know the brand exists. Then, they need to understand what it is and what it offers. Over time, they decide whether or not to make a purchase. All of these stages are part of the sales funnel, and they can be planned strategically.
The sales funnel is a planning process that takes into account every phase of the consumer's relationship with the brand. It starts at the awareness stage and moves through education, evaluation and approval. If the experience is good, it can also lead customers to share it with new people.
Making sure the customer goes through every stage of the sales funnel is what will increase your company's number of conversions. In this article, learn how to reach that goal with tips for putting together a golden strategy!
What is a sales funnel?
The sales funnel is a model that represents the journey a customer takes with a company. In other words, from the moment they discover the brand to the point where they complete a purchase.
This model can also be called a sales pipeline, and it's based on an inverted pyramid. At the top is the stage of discovery and awareness. This is the stage with the most people, where the potential customer has the chance to learn more about the problem they're facing.
Next comes the middle of the funnel, where consideration happens, when the potential customer is already aware of their problems. However, they haven't yet decided what they'll do to solve them. That's why they're looking for solutions and partners to help with the task. This stage has fewer people than the first, since some people aren't looking for specific options to address their pain points.
Finally, there's the bottom of the funnel, the stage where the potential customer is ready to decide to buy. This phase is even narrower and holds only a small percentage of people compared to the top. Even so, it should have the right number of ideal leads for the company and generate conversions in line with its goals. That's why it's important to work with good strategies.
How to build a successful sales funnel strategy
By planning your sales funnel, you can come up with ways to get more people to reach the bottom and, above all, choose your company as their solution.
That's why preparing the funnel should be a highly analytical process, aimed at spotting bottlenecks, recognizing areas for improvement and defining the marketing and sales strategies that will convince customers to continue along the buying journey.
Below, check out the key tips for reaching this goal and building a successful sales funnel strategy!
Map the buying journey
To start, try outlining the journey the customer will take with your company. It's like putting yourself in the consumer's shoes and going through every stage of the sales funnel.
From this perspective, you can identify the essential elements to ensure a positive experience and minimize the problems that might push the consumer to give up. At this point, you can also observe the triggers that convinced the lead to move on to the next stage.
The marketing team can join forces with the sales team to map out this entire journey. After all, these are the two areas of the company that work directly on the sales funnel to win the customer from the very first contact.
Define your persona
A foolproof strategy is useless if it isn't aimed at the right audience. What makes a marketing plan successful is how well it aligns with the company's ideal customer profile.
That's why it's important to create a persona, that is, a semi-fictional character that represents everything your target audience is. This way, you can estimate who your ideal consumer is, what they like and how they buy.
With this outline in place, you can improve your customer prospecting. As a result, lead segmentation also becomes more accurate, and the other sales funnel techniques can be applied successfully.
Determine the first point of contact
One of the crucial moments in the sales funnel is the consumer's first contact with the brand. This is the stage with the highest volume of leads, and it calls for a successful strategy to convince them to move on through the rest of the journey.
Making sure the first experience with the company is positive is essential to increase the chances of the lead moving to the next stage of the funnel. So the goal is to make a good impression and create an impact that sparks curiosity to keep getting to know the brand.
Work with goals
The entire internal process can be improved with achievable goals. This lets you keep internal track of when it's time to shift your conversion techniques to a new stage of the funnel.
These goals are usually called milestones, and they represent the moment when the lead is ready to move forward. In this context, tracking engagement metrics can offer valuable insights into when to guide the consumer at the best possible time.
Know when to move the funnel
To get the timing right, you need a strategy focused on customer success. It's about applying the best initiatives at the key moment while also presenting the crucial information that drives the decision-making process.
The quality of your communication and your interaction with leads will be essential to identify the right moment to move the funnel and make sure the action is neither premature nor late.
Nail your follow-ups
One strategy you can use to move the lead to the next stage of the funnel is called a follow-up. This process involves direct communication through emails, calls, messages or other channels. This contact can even be automated and personalized.
The aim is to make this contact generate a first conversion. That's why it should only happen once the relationship between the brand and the lead is at least somewhat established, to increase the chances of the audience accepting it.
Your approach is also a great trick. Presenting the advantages of investing in your brand, with the most fitting arguments for the moment, can be the secret to keeping the lead moving through the funnel.
Minimize risks
Reducing risks is also necessary so you don't miss opportunities and can keep building your relationship with the customer. In other words, you need to make sure your business isn't wasting energy for nothing, or wasting the lead's time and attention.
Minimizing risks also means creating a strategy tailored to your ideal customer profile to find the ideal timing. Getting to know the potential customer and spotting the signs that they're ready to move through the funnel, all based on data, can help reduce the chances of failure.
Highlight what sets you apart
It will be hard to win the lead's attention if your business has nothing appealing to offer. Working on what sets you apart at every stage of the funnel is important to drive engagement and make your audience see value in your brand.
That's why having a well-prepared team and maintaining effective internal communication are important measures. With skilled professionals who are well informed about the company's reality, you can present your differentiators persuasively, to the point of encouraging the lead to want to learn more and more about the brand until they close the deal.
Invest in optimization tools
As you've seen, not every process needs to be manual. Many sales funnel tracking tasks can be automated, especially with CRM software. It's no wonder that nearly 50% of companies that have used a Customer Relationship Management system recognize its positive impact on customer retention and satisfaction, according to a Codeless survey.
Working with real data will help you build a reliable persona and invest in appropriate, personalized and effective strategies for your intended audience. This way, you can train your systems with the right information and make the process of generating conversions much smoother.
In other words, the more you invest in organizing your sales funnel, the more strategic it can become. This process involves plenty of analysis, use of real data and study to identify the strategic points for moving leads through the next stages. So don't spare any time or energy in developing an efficient plan, and use technology to increase your conversions.
Maximize your conversions with Keepo! Use Keepo to optimize every stage of your sales funnel. Create personalized minisites that capture visitors' attention, showcase your products and strategically guide your audience all the way to purchase. Start turning visitors into customers with Keepo today!
