Sales Funnel

Sales progress through a sales funnel defined by stages, with each stage narrowing the potential customers to those who flow through the next and eventually become paying customers or lost opportunities.

Stages in a sales funnel define how sales efforts engage with potential customers and will typically resemble the following.

Various factors can play into how wide each portion of the funnel may initially be and how it may narrow in conversion towards later stages.

The stages towards the top of the funnel (prospecting and lead qualification) define initial outreach, which may be influenced by the number of potential customers in the market and the effectiveness of initial messaging to generate interest in those customers.

The stages towards the bottom of the funnel (sales calls, proposal, close) may be influenced by a fit with customer needs, messaging, switching costs from market alternatives, pricing, and operational processes.

Prospecting

Identifying potential customers is essential requires consistent engagement and strategic refinement. Look for who might be facing the problems your company can help solve.

Lead Qualification

Initial outreach to potential customers (e.g. through email or LinkedIn) to see who may be interested in trying your product should seek understanding of their problems more so than pitching solutions. Send short, clear messages without buzzwords which reflect a desire to understand their problems and why they might be looking for solutions.

Sales Calls

Deepen your understanding of a potential customer’s problems and needs to refine your problem and solution hypothesis. Ask open ended questions in seeking understanding, build rapport, and express how you care about solving those same problems. Once you have an understanding of customer needs, you can showcase a tailored demonstration of how your product can meet those needs and how it may bring value to their specific situation rather than showcasing generic features. This stage of the sales funnel may represent multiple meetings - minimizing the time to close sales shouldn’t come at the expense of doing customer discovery and understanding customer needs (demos can come in a separate call with the context of that understanding and be refined to their needs).

Proposal

Set and send a quote of the expected contract to bill the customer. Review and negotiate with the customer where necessary and produce a signed contact.

Closed

Closed Won: A paying customer is one outcome of the sales funnel. Customer setup and onboarding may be applicable once won.

Closed Lost: Not every potential customer will be a won opportunity. Lost deals can inform you on how to more effectively tackle prospects and can refine who your solutions are intended for.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software

CRMs can help showcase the differing conversion rates of potential customers between each of the stages of the sales funnel. Use CRMs to track key information at every stage to keep track of factors driving conversion and help determine where sales can be better optimized.

CRMs can track where deals are lost, information about the sales process, and help follow up in the future when the product/service and the customer’s needs may be more aligned.

As companies grow, sales teams will have more complex needs for collaboration, management, and integration with other workflows. The software used for CRM by most enterprise businesses is Salesforce. The customization and rich feature set in Salesforce are other aspects of what makes it the preferred tool for most enterprises.

Market-specific CRMs exist as well that may be more specifically tailored to align with business and market needs. Working with a scalable long-term software platform for CRM is recommended to focus on best practices and keep the team aligned.