What a leader needs to know about a sales funnel. What is a sales funnel in simple terms? What a funnel looks like

Is the process of attracting, retaining customers and leading them to a sale. Sales funnel in simple words- this is the path of a potential client from the first acquaintance with the offer to the purchase of goods, services, information.

The sales funnel looks like a cone

Visually, the sales funnel is depicted in the form of a cone, where the upper, wide part corresponds to the first acquaintance, and the bottom of the cone - to the closing of the deal. As you can see from the figure, each level works on the principle of a sieve, screening passes through it to the next level. Marketers see the ideal sales funnel in the form of a pipe: as many interested customers have entered it, so many have become buyers. In practice, this is almost impossible to implement.

The ability to build a sales funnel is essential for business owners, marketers, and sales managers. This will increase the efficiency of investments in advertising and increase the company's profit several times.

To create the right sales funnel, you need to work hard, and start by studying the information.

In this article, you will learn:

• what is and where is it applied sales funnel,
• differences in approaches in online and offline businesses,
• How does it work model AIDA v sales funnels,
• get a phased plan for creating a funnel,
• learn how to measure and optimize conversions at different stages of the funnel.

If the company already has finished model After reading the article, you will be able to analyze and improve your conversion rates. We will touch upon this issue at the end of the text.

Sales funnel. Application area

In fact, the sales funnel is present everywhere: from the presidential election to the choice of wallpaper for renovation. Each of us at one time or another becomes a participant or creator of the funnel.

Example: 1000 people a day see the sign of the store, 800 of them have a need for these goods, 700 people became interested and took the time to go to the store, 300 of them asked the seller about the goods, 150 bought.

This is a classic example to understand what is a sales funnel... At each stage, some of the potential customers are eliminated for various reasons. Some didn’t like the name of the store, others didn’t like the sign, the seller, the product, the price, the third didn’t have the funds to buy here and now, the fourth needed to consult with the family.

The same happens when selling through a website.

Customers find it through search engines or social networks, look at offers, accept an invitation to subscribe to a newsletter or leave their contact information. Then you interact with them through the phone or mailing list.

The lead-out stages are called levels or stages of the funnel. Each level has its own rules, ways of attracting and retaining customers.

This scheme works for online and offline sales methods.

The differences are that offline it is more difficult, and sometimes even impossible, to track where a potential client came from: from TV ads, newspapers, flyers, etc. This makes it more difficult to analyze and adjust the effectiveness of the funnel.

The benefits of an online sales funnel are analytics and forecasting.

1. It is possible to track where the client came from (Yandex metric);
2. Find out his behavior and interests (webvisor, heat maps),
3. Be in touch with him, starting from the moment of receiving contacts (sending mailings, interesting offers, do upsells),
4. Conduct surveys of buyers who have already made a purchase (according to surveys of buyers of the authoritative publication Harvard Business Review, a brand's interest in their opinion increases loyalty several times),
5. Record all purchases.

In a highly competitive environment, knowledge of the sales funnel and the ability to create it will allow entrepreneurs to effectively use advertising budgets, build relationships with potential customers and get more profit.

Today, direct selling is losing ground, and customers are demanding a soft, unobtrusive approach, taking into account their interests. This is evidenced by the new trend of stores without cash registers, where the client himself makes a purchase decision, the development of online sales.

AIDA Model

The concept of a sales funnel came from the United States in 1989. Attorney Elias Lewis proposed a “purchase funnel” concept based on the psychology of customer behavior during purchasing decisions. 30 years later, a new marketing model, AIDA, was born. To this day, it remains the working scheme of all marketers in the world.

AIDA is a concept of customer maturation from the moment of first learning about a product to the moment of making a purchase. It consists of 4 stages:

• attention (attention);
• interest (interest);
• desire (desire);
• action.

The concept of the acquisition funnel and the concept of customer maturation have come together in one new term - sales funnel.

Depending on the type of business and tasks, the funnel can have a different number of stages. But the main ones always remain 4.

1. To attract attention(for example, by means of advertising)
   this is the stage when people already know about their needs and begin to collect information on this issue. They go to social networks, click ads in search engines, watch videos on Youtube. This process takes different time... Sometimes a purchase occurs already at this stage. But more often it is the time of studying, evaluating information.
2. Arousing interest(using the correct presentation of information and direct contact with the client). This is the time when the client can be tamed with useful content, responsive communication.
3. The emergence of desire. The client already knows what he wants, but still hesitates where to buy. This is the time to remove his doubts (working out objections), to give an offer that will favorably distinguish you from your competitors: free shipping, a gift, a discount on the second thing. It is important to limit the time when a customer will receive a purchase bonus. So, he will make a decision faster.
4. Performing an action. This is the goal towards which we went by launching the funnel. After reaching it, work with the client does not stop. Submit new suggestions, ask for recommendations and feedback, keep in touch with the customer, and continue to lead the customer to the next goal. According to statistics, repeat sales are much easier to do, because a trusting relationship has been formed.

Over the past few years, the role of repeat sales in the overall marketing strategy companies are becoming more important. There are several reasons:

• the average sales receipt increases,
• retention is cheaper than attraction,
• higher customer loyalty.

In the book “Service as competitive advantage"John Shawl - famous businessman and a consultant on the implementation of service strategy in large companies in the world, statistics on repeat sales are given:

• attracting new customers costs the company 5-10 times more,
• 75% of the profit can be saved by keeping the client,
• attracting new customers is constantly becoming more expensive, retention remains at about the same level,
• large base regular customers with brand loyalty makes the brand itself attractive for investment.

5 steps to creating a sales funnel

Let's move on to creating a sales funnel in practice. In trading, a clear action plan is a priority, so let's divide the actions into 5 steps.

Step 1. Creation, packaging of goods / services and development of USP (unique selling proposition).

According to the AIDA model, this is the zero stage, which occurs before the client meets the company. The customer's response will depend on the quality of the product and the uniqueness of the presentation.

“We have the most low prices and most high quality”Does not work anymore, there are many such proposals.

Another thing: “Buy two and get a third item as a gift” or “Didn't you like the quality? Get your money back. ”

USP should spark interest and distinguish you from competitors, solve a customer problem, appeal for the benefit or pleasure of the acquisition.

To do this, study the audience, its interests, pains, needs, behavior. Go to Yandex Wordstat, fill in the keywords on the topic. Register in Yandex Metrics, analyze the behavior of your visitors. Then move the observations into the content of the landing page and blog.

At the same stage, landing pages are created and profiles for advertising in social networks are prepared. Ideally, use all possible tools to attract client masses:

• landing pages (landing pages),
• blogs,
• sales scripts,
• e-mail newsletter,
• accounts for contextual advertising,
• seo-texts on the site,
• other.

Only after you are fully prepared for a meeting with a client, start an advertising campaign to attract a client flow.

Step 2. Cold contacts with the audience. At this stage, the available channels for attracting potential customers are launched to get acquainted with the offer. This is the first contact of the audience with the company.

If we are talking about offline sales, then the skill of the sellers is important at this stage. If we are talking about online sales, then the quality of the content that the visitor of the resource gets acquainted with plays a role here. An important role is played by the usability (ease of use) of the site, the readiness of the consultant to answer questions.

At this stage, no more than 10% of sales are closed, only the most decisive or time-limited customers make a purchase from the first touch.

Step 3. Stirring up interest in the proposal. Various goodies and bonuses come into play here:

• receiving free useful content in e-mail newsletters,
• contests and sweepstakes in social networks,
• offline events for product acquaintance and others.

Step 4. The conviction of the exclusiveness of the offer. At this stage, it is necessary to remove doubts and work out objections. Working with a warm customer base and driving hot with an offer you can't refuse.

Step 5. Action, purchase. The customer went to the bottom of the funnel and closed it with a purchase.

To nudge the customer to this step, apply the principle of direct selling. Head-on sales work better at this stage. In this case, the client believes that he made the decision on his own.

Closing a deal is the goal of the sales funnel. The result of the funnel as a whole depends on the number of transactions. The measure of the success of the sales funnel is called conversion. Let's take a closer look at this concept.

Conversion. Analysis of the effectiveness of the sales funnel

Conversion is the ratio of actions taken to possible ones, expressed as a percentage. Conversions can be calculated at each stage of the funnel.

Conversion formula: Divide perfect by possible, multiply by 100.

To make it immediately clear how to calculate the conversion, let's look at examples from online and offline businesses.

For example, 1000 passers-by passed by the store, of which 100 visitors entered the store using an advertising banner. We calculate the conversion by the formula: 100: 1000x100 = 10%

That is, the effectiveness of the banner (conversion) is 10%.

Out of 100 who entered the store bought 7

The effectiveness of the sales funnel is 7%.

Example with online business... By contextual advertising there were 1000 hits. Of these, 400 went to the site. The conversion rate of this stage is 40%.

20 out of 400 visitors left contacts. The conversion of this stage is 20: 400x100 = 5%

The higher the conversion, the higher the performance of the entire sales funnel. Knowing the conversion, it is easy to analyze the effectiveness of each stage, take action to improve performance.

What is a sales funnel and what is it for? What are the stages of a sales funnel? How to do funnel analysis and increase conversions with the right questions?

Hello dear readers! With you are the authors of the business magazine KhiterBober.ru Alexander Berezhnov and Vitaly Tsyganok.

A sales funnel is one of the main business tools for any entrepreneur. If you are in business or just planning, then this article is the first step to your success.

From the article you will learn:

• What is a sales funnel and what is it for?
• What are the stages of a sales funnel?
• How to analyze a funnel and increase conversion in it?
• What are CRM and CPM and how to work with them?

Thanks to a properly built sales funnel, our business also works well.

We hope that after reading this article, you will increase sales in your commercial project.

Any aspiring businessman involved in the sale of goods or services should be well versed in the terminology and theory of marketing. One of the key concepts that all entrepreneurs need to learn to successful business Is a "sales funnel".

1. What is a sales funnel - concept, terms, where it is applied

In English, this term sounds like "purchase funnel", "sales funnel" or "sales pipeline": the concept can be called conceptual in marketing.

Sales funnel- this is the path that the average consumer of a product or service goes from attracting his attention to the offer to the moment of purchase.

In the English-language Wikipedia, a sales funnel is defined as a marketing model that, in theory, illustrates the journey through all stages of a purchase: from acquaintance with an offer (first touch) to completing a deal.

For entrepreneurs and businessmen, knowing what a sales funnel is will help to multiply their profits. It does not matter whether it is built in Internet commerce or in the process of "offline" sale of goods in a store - the model works in both cases.

In a modern situation, when the supply of goods often exceeds demand, it is more and more difficult to attract customers directly, which is called "head-on", the use and competent analysis of the sales funnel will allow us to act on potential customers in a more subtle and unobtrusive way, imperceptibly adjusting to their needs.

The acquisition funnel concept, which describes the psychology of the client, was proposed by the American lawyer Elias Lewis in 1898.

Three decades later, this concept was successfully combined with another well-known trading concept - AIDA:

• attention (attention);
• interest (interest);
• desire (desire);
• action.

Since then, the concept of a sales funnel in marketing has become one of the basic ones.

This means that the sale itself is preceded by 4 stages of customer readiness:

• first, his attention is captured (for example, by advertising tools);
• then, interest is aroused (by the content of the advertising message);
• further, the potential buyer wants to take advantage of the offer;
• finally, our client acts (calls the company, enters a store or website).

This is already a “warmed up” potential buyer, it remains to take him “warm” and close the deal.

How to build a working sales funnel - that is, one into which the client "falls through" and is guaranteed to hit the bottom - in other words, makes an acquisition?

This is the art of marketing. The number of potential consumers of services and products is influenced by many factors:

• ways to promote goods (advertising, information reliability, visual demonstration);
• the ability to find the right audience;
• pricing and marketing policy (availability of discounts, promotions, additional benefits).

In a word, the consumer must understand why it is more profitable and better to buy a product from you.

The AIDA model is described in one of his books by a world-renowned business consultant, a leading sales expert.

This model reveals the main stages of sales and shows how they consistently complement each other.

Despite this, a certain part of managers perceives the sales funnel too narrowly - only as a reporting term, forgetting or not knowing that, first of all, purchase funnel is a functional tool with great capabilities.

2. Conversion and CPM of sales funnels - how to calculate and increase them

The sales funnel is the ideal technique for analyzing productivity as individual workers, and the entire trade department or site.

One of the newest methods of increasing conversions is called "A / B testing".

This is a comparison of 2 (or more) options for the resource in order to find out which way leads to maximum income.

As you can see, any little things can affect the transformation of an offer into a specific purchase - right up to the location of the "order product" button on the page.

You can not talk about the meaning of text and graphic content: the importance of these components is clear to everyone.

4. Analysis of the sales funnel using a real example

When consultants and experts in the field of increasing sales start their work with a certain company, the first thing that is affected in one way or another is the funnel.

Example:

You, and now you need to make sure that in a certain period, for example, a month, this trade point brought the maximum profit.

What will you do? - The answer is simple! You need to find out the current performance of your business and understand what exactly affects them.

These indicators are:

• the number of people who found out about the store (cold contacts);
• the number of people who entered the store from among the recognized (interested people);
• the number of people who made a purchase from among those who entered the store (real customers);
• the average amount that a customer leaves in your store at a time (the amount of the average check).

Separately, it is necessary to analyze the product range and find out which categories of goods in most cases are preferred by your customers.

As a result, ALL YOUR BUSINESS ACTIVITY comes down to 2 points:

1. Increase in the number of purchases;
2. Increase in revenue per purchase.

It doesn't matter what exactly you are selling, it is important that as many people as possible buy from you and as expensively as possible from period to period.

Example:

If 1000 people bought something from you in the first month of the store's operation and each customer left 1000 rubles in the store on average, then you need to increase these indicators from month to month.

This means that if 1100 people buy something from you next month and the average purchase price per person rises to 1200 rubles, then your business is progressing.

Average check is the amount of revenue per purchase (per customer).

The formula for calculating the average check:

Average check= revenue for a period (for example, a day) / number of purchases in the same period.

So, if 3 people entered your store in five minutes and one bought on 50 rubles, the other on 370 rubles, third on 1000 rubles, the average check for this period is (50 + 370 + 1000) / 3 = 473 rubles 33 kopecks.

The sales funnel of a website or store allows you not only to study the results of trade, but also to actually manage them.

In business practice, this concept is widely used in foreign companies, but in the Russian Federation the tool is only gaining widespread acceptance.

This means that by being able to build an effective sales funnel, you will gain a colossal advantage over competitors, and your business will receive a cosmic acceleration!

5. Lead and lead generation - building a customer acquisition system

The process of establishing a stream of interested buyers is lead generation.

Leads are people who have visited a specific site (store), are interested in purchasing a product, left their application or at least contact information.

A lead is not really a buyer yet, just a potential stakeholder.

In internet marketing, lead generation is one of the methods of generating profit for sites that are not engaged in direct sales.

Such resources collect user contacts (phone numbers, mail data, social media pages) and deliver them to the customer.

Payment for each lead is discussed in advance. It can be 10 rubles or several thousand, depending on the industry and the average bill.

For example, leads in a plush toy business can cost 30 rubles (0.5 $), and in the business of selling drilling rigs or tower cranes - 5000 rubles (80 $).

Any business needs leads because specific customers bring specific profits. There is even a special position - lead manager: the person responsible for contacting leads.

6. Sales scripts - a powerful tool to grow your sales + a real example

The use of sales scripts can significantly increase the conversion of the funnel at all stages of interaction with the client.

Sales scripts- this is a pre-developed scenario of interaction with a client, starting from the moment of greeting and ending with the execution of the deal.

Successful sellers develop their own effective schemes, but there are basic rules that can significantly increase the success of any contact with a potential buyer.

If we are talking about sales scripts, for example, for a call center manager, then there are two main types of conversational scripts:

• incoming call script;
• outgoing call script.

Also, in the case of selling through text, for example, on one-page sites or in presentations, sales scripts are used only in text form.

If you are building a sales force, make sure you have good scripts for your negotiators ahead of time.

7. Conclusion

Now you know how marketing tools and the sales funnel work in practice. By improving conversion at every stage, you can increase the net profit in your business several times.

Welcome readers of the "site"! This article will focus on a sales funnel - what it is in simple terms and how it works, how to build it yourself and increase the profitability of your business.

Many advanced entrepreneurs introduce modern business tools into their activities. If you did not know what it is up to this point, then this article will be very useful to you.

After reading it, you will also learn:

• what is the algorithm for building a sales funnel;
• what methods of analyzing and increasing conversion exist;
• what is a sales funnel for;
• how CRM differs from CPM.

1. What is a sales funnel: definition and meaning of the term in simple words 📋

The sales funnel concept was first proposed at the end 19 19th century American E. Lewis... On English language it sounds like "Purchase funnel" .

Sales funnel Is a set of stages that a potential buyer goes through in the process of making a purchase decision: from the initial acquaintance with the product (service) to his (her) purchase.

Understanding the essence and mechanism of the funnel gives the seller an understanding of how to raise turnover and, accordingly, profit ... At the same time, it does not matter where the sales are made - on the Internet or offline.

In conditions of overproduction of goods, when the supply on the market significantly exceeds demand, the use of this instrument allows you to attract buyers unobtrusively, without the use of aggressive advertising, adapting to their needs.

It remains to figure out how to build such a sales funnel, once in which, a buyer from the category « potential» will go to category « real » .

This can be influenced by various factors:

• Well-formed target audience;
• Selected methods of product promotion;
• Customer loyalty ( system of discounts, additional bonuses);
• Price policy ( seasonal sales, promotions and etc.)

In addition, the sales funnel is very informative, so it can be easily represented as tables in MS Excel ... As a result, even the most uninteresting reports, saturated with digital data, will be easy to make visual and understandable.

You can download an example sales funnel template in excel format from the link below:

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2. Additional sales funnel tools 🛠

Tool 1. Model AIDA

Sales funnel ideas are successfully complemented by model AIDA developed by a renowned sales specialist B. Tracy... This model describes the stages of consumer behavior in the purchasing decision-making process.

AIDA stands for:

• Attention - attention (awareness - awareness);
• Interest - interest;
• Desire - a wish;
• Action - action.

Speaking in Russian, in order for a customer to make a purchase, you need:

1. Attract his attention (possibly with targeted advertising);
2. Arouse interest (by text, visual design or other characteristics of the advertising message);
3. After that, the client has a desire to buy what you offer him;
4. The buyer acts - calls the store / opens the website ("clicking" on the advertisement) / places an order (adds a product / service to the cart).

After a potential buyer has passed all 4 stage, he is ready to make a purchase. Therefore, the salesperson should aim from the very beginning to ensure that the initial curiosity of the customer grows into a genuine interest in the product.

Tool 2.CRM system

Customer Relationship Management System (CRM system) Is a customer-driven business concept.

All the company's actions are aimed at satisfying its needs by building effective marketing, organizing sales and after-sales services.

Tool 3. Conversion

Conversion means degree of effectiveness each stage of the sales funnel. It is measured in relative terms (percent).

For example, consider the stages of the sales funnel and the corresponding conversion:

1. Shop advertising in social networks saw 100 000 human;
2. Of these, they followed the link 10 000 human;
3. Of them 1 000 human started looking at products on the page;
4. But only 100 human eventually bought the product.

We hope that if you still did not understand what a sales funnel is, the example explained this clearly.

Now, with the help of the same introductory, let's figure out the concept of conversion:

• Let's calculate the conversion of the first stage. To do this, you need to divide the number of people who followed the link by the number of people who saw it. It turns out 10 % (10 000 /100 000 *100 %).
• Second stage conversion= number of viewed products / number of people who followed the link = 1 000 /10 000 *100 % = 10 % .
• Stage three conversion= number of people who bought products / number of viewed products = 100 /1 000 *100 % = 10 % .
• Final conversion = number of people who bought products / number of people who saw ads = 100 /100 000 *100 % = 0,1 % .

With a properly configured table in CRM system or in Exel you will have an automatic sales funnel in your hands, which will calculate the percentages itself after entering the initial data.

Implementing a sales funnel into a CRM system allows you to find answers to the following questions:

• Where is the biggest churn of potential buyers occurring?
• Who is the target audience of the company (who has an interest in the product)?
• How does the conversion change when changing different parameters?
• How to optimize your sales chain?
• How effective is the company?

4. CPM tool

CPM is calculated as the ratio of the cost of advertising to the number of potential views.

Let's consider an example:

CPM in this case will be: 5 000 /100 000 *1 000 = 50 rubles per thousand impressions .

Thus, in order to build an effective sales funnel, it is necessary to take CRM system, increase sales conversion, including due to growth CPM indicator.

4. How to build a sales funnel 📈 - 7 steps (stages) of modeling a funnel

In this section you will find a detailed description sales funnel modeling instructions , which will allow the reorganization of the company's activities and to raise business profitability.

Step 1. We compose the USP

These letters mean Unique selling proposition ... You need to work out a product in great detail, formulating what is its uniqueness in comparison with competitors.

V USP the advantages for the buyer, the benefits that he will receive by purchasing a product from you, are described in detail. Phrases about "great quality", "low prices", "Fast delivery" unsuitable. It is necessary to find exactly the unique differences that meet the needs of the customers.

Let's consider specific examples:

• Uniqueness of the price. If you find the same refrigerator cheaper, we will offer you a price for 10 % smaller! In the evening, the whole showcase of the pastry shop with 21 before 22 with discount 30 %!
• The uniqueness of the timing. Delivery at our expense during the day to any address. If the courier is late for 1 minute - sushi or pizza at our expense.
• Uniqueness of quality. If you don’t like how we put together the kitchen set, we will give you a sink and a cooker hood! If you find expired products in our store, we will replace them for free with fresh products!

And only after the unique differences of your product are formulated, it is worth moving on to modeling the sales funnel.

Step 2. Collecting cold contacts

In marketing, this is what leads are called.

According to the sales funnel, the more cold contacts at the entrance, the higher the likelihood of them making a purchase at the exit.

And this rule works in the same way both in offline trade and in the activities of an online store. Finding cold contacts is just as difficult as putting together a smart unique selling proposition.

Real-life communication methods can also be applied to online trading. If your sellers have learned to communicate with cold clients offline, then online this experience will greatly simplify their task.

Step 3. Arouse interest

Once you've identified your potential customers, you need to figure out how to get them interested in your product. This is a very important stage on which the conversion of the entire sales funnel depends..

There are many ways to get potential buyers interested. The choice depends on what kind of product you are promoting, who is the target audience, where the sale of the product is planned.

Step 4. Dealing with objections

After the client is interested in your product, he may still have doubts about the appropriateness of the purchase, the properties of your product ( quality, value for money etc).

Therefore, in order to increase conversion at this stage, you need to learn how to work with the client's objections and easily convince them of the correctness of their choice. To do this, you need to compose list of possible objections .

For this purpose, you can carry out social poll and identify the most pressing doubts among potential consumers. Based on their analysis, it is necessary to compile list of ready answers , reasonably explaining why you need to buy from you.

So-called F.A.Q. (frequently asked questions – list of frequently asked questions) will allow you to neutralize all doubts from an indecisive client and complete the transaction.

Step 5. Sell the product

So, your cold client, without realizing it, got into the sales funnel and approached its neck. It's time to close the deal with the sale of the product.

Do you remember that the conversion will depend exactly on how many deals with potential customers you close. All work in the previous stages will be meaningless if at the end the client changes his mind and refuses to purchase.

Step 6. Summing up

The performance of an individual salesperson or store is calculated based on conversion rates. You need to conduct analysis at every stage of the funnel, paying special attention to drastic changes in conversion rates. They shouldn't be in a properly configured funnel.

At the end it is calculated final conversion rate sales funnels, which will need to be increased in the future.

Step 7. Looking for ways to increase conversions

There are several ways to bring the number of real buyers closer to the initial number of cold contacts at the entrance of the funnel.

If we consider the online sales funnel, then the following factors can be distinguished that increase ⇑ conversion:

• option of delivery of goods at the expense of the seller (as a rule, when buying for a certain amount) - this will not only increase the conversion, but also increase the size of the average check;
• function "we will call you back" - the client leaves his phone number, the store employee calls him back and answers the questions;
• communication with a potential buyer by name / first name and patronymic ;
• use of online counseling to help buyers.

Its useful to note, what's in online trading height website traffic is not always indicative of a change in sales conversion. This is due to the fact that net profit from sales may not cover all the costs of attracting new customers to the online store.

Another way to influence conversion is extension target audience online store ... It is worth going back to the first step and reworking your unique selling proposition specifically for your target audience. Analyze methods of attracting it, abandon ineffective ones.

The most popular modern conversion tools include the so-called "A / B testing" ... This is a comparison of several possible scenarios for a store in order to find the most profitable one.

Let's consider an example: The company has a landing page where you tell you how to increase income in online trading. You have placed several banners on the site. Then spend A / B testing for each banner separately, while the rest do not change.

Banner 1. Would you like to know how to ensure the growth of your company's profitability in 1,5 times?

Banner 2. Do you want to make money on 150 % more profit from your business?

After the number of new clicks on banners is more than 100 , you can begin to analyze the situation. Most likely it will turn out that the second banner will be more effective.

Thus, when building a sales funnel and analyzing its effectiveness, it is worthwhile to understand that many factors, sometimes even insignificant at first glance ( for example, the location of the icon "buy" On the page).

5. How many levels are there in the sales funnel and how does it work in practice - a real example of using a sales funnel 💸

So, let's look at an example of how to apply the methods described above to improve business efficiency.

Let's say you have a store. You want the next quarter to bring maximum arrived. First of all, you need to understand what you are dealing with at the moment.

• number of cold contacts;
• the number of interested people from among the cold contacts;
• the number of real buyers from among those interested;
• the size of the average check.

Thus, your work is in 2 main directions:

1. Turnover growth ( number of transactions);
2. Growth in revenue per transaction ( average check).

It doesn't matter what and to whom you are selling. The main thing is to increase the number of real buyers and the volume of trade.

For example, for the first quarter of your company's work with you 250 real buyers, each of whom bought on average 1 500 rubles... Therefore, you need to work on these indicators in the future, strive to increase them.

That is, if in the next quarter you already have 300 concluded deals, and the average check will increase to 2 000 rubles then you are working in the right direction.

5.1. Average check

Average check Is the monetary value of the proceeds per customer. Calculated as follows: revenue for a certain period (for example, for a quarter) / number of transactions for the same period.

So, if your restaurant for 1 hour gone 3 person (while the first one ate on 1 000 rubles, second on 3 000 rubles and the third on 1 500 rubles), then average check will: ( 1 000 + 3 000 + 1 500 ) / 3 = 1833, 3 rubles .

5.2. Lead generation

Expanding the target audience by increasing the number of new interested customers is called lead generation ... It includes all the tools for searching and attracting buyers on the Internet: how through search engines and through thematic sites.

Respectively, leads - interested customers who got into your sales funnel. But you need to understand that the lead is not a real buyer yet, he has not reached the neck of the funnel to complete the deal.

In online commerce, lead generation is a popular revenue-raising tool for companies that don't use direct selling. Such sites consolidate user data ( mobile numbers, email addresses and pages in social networks) and sell them to interested companies.

Price 1 Lead varies depending on the business of the company and the average revenue per customer. For example, flower bouquets industry leads can cost 1$ , and in the field of car sales - 30$ .

5.3. Sales script

Script Is a script for communicating with a potential buyer, in which everything is spelled out: from greeting to working with objections, concluding a deal and saying goodbye to the client.

At the same time, it is worth distinguishing between scripts for incoming and outgoing calls.

Experienced sales managers are able to compose working scripts, using their own, accumulated over the years, "Chips"... But there are also universal rules for scripting that everyone applies.

The scripts are written in text form and distributed to all account managers.

6. Conclusion + useful video 📺

According to experts, sales funnel is an excellent tool for assessing the performance of not only a specific employee, but the entire department or the company as a whole. Using it, you can determine when a significant number of customers are being screened out, and, accordingly, prevent this.

The goal of each commercial organization - turn a sales funnel with a narrow neck at the outlet into a wide pipe, ideally equating the number of possible and real buyers!

We wish the readers of the site "site" to increase the efficiency of their business thanks to the sales funnel. Share your personal stories and experiences in the comments to the article. Until next time on the site!

The author of the financial magazine "Businessmen.com", in the past the head of a well-known smm-agency. In the present, a coach, internet entrepreneur and marketer, investor. I tell you: how to effectively manage personal finances, it is profitable to increase them and earn more.

On the pages of the site you will find a lot of useful information for yourself.

Intuit was able to increase the average check by 43% by adding an online consultant to the site. Marketing agency Performable just changed the color of the target action button and got + 21% in conversion. Such ideas are not born from scratch - they arise in the course of work. How to build a sales funnel, what to measure and how to improve - we have revealed all the secrets in this article.

Sales funnel: what is it and what is it for

A sales funnel is a customer journey from the first contact with you to a purchase. Each step that he goes through is called a stage of the funnel: sending an application, discussing an order with a manager, payment, delivery, etc. A properly built sales funnel itself leads to buyers, and if it is correctly analyzed, it will allow:

• control the sales process, "turning" a potential customer into a loyal one;
• calculate the conversion of each stage and, on its basis, set plans for managers responsible for different parts of the funnel: from marketing to after-sales service;
• predict the volume of sales: knowing the conversion, you can understand how long to wait for sales with the current incoming traffic;
• analyze the efficiency of a manager's work, especially if there is a CRM system at hand that provides detailed reports on the funnel and transactions.

What are the stages of the sales funnel

First you need to decide what stages your customer goes through. There is no universal answer: the sales mechanism in each company is different, which means that the stages are different. For example, here's what the sales funnel looks like for an online store that makes portraits from photos:

The number of stages also varies: there can be 4, maybe 12. Take the typical version described marketing expert, director of the In-scale agency Egor Chemyakin(left column), and next we will consider it, only on the example of a company engaged in the supply of building materials (right column).

Obviously, at each stage of the funnel, the n-th number of customers is eliminated. Actually, that's why the funnel is called a funnel - it narrows. For example, in the case of construction company the manager will have to make about 50 calls to organize 5 presentations; at the stage of the commercial proposal, someone else will "merge". As a result, the funnel will look something like this:

6 main rules of how to build a sales funnel

Although all funnels are unique and inimitable, there are still universal rules for their construction. They were brought out by Vitaly Katranzhi, business coach, founder of Salers.ru - one of the leaders in Russia and the CIS in the field of sales development.

- There are no identical sales funnels, for each company it has its own, and only experience will help to build it. I will say more, even in one company, the funnel can periodically change, as there are changes in business processes. It is impossible to sit down and come up with a really working funnel, it must be honed and changed over the course of 2-3 months, and having found the optimal configuration, it must be constantly updated in accordance with new realities.

So, 6 mandatory points on how to create a sales funnel:

1. Different ways to attract customers require the creation of individual funnels, while the "body" of these funnels will contain the same stages.
2. The stages of the sales funnel can completely or as much as possible coincide with the stages of the sales business process. Several steps of a business process can be combined into one stage of the funnel. For example, the accounting department issues an invoice and the manager sends it to the client - in the sales funnel this will be one stage “Invoice”.
3. There should be clear boundaries for the transition from stage to stage: they are confirmed by an action, a change in status (client or transaction) or a document.
4. The same action can be placed at different stages only if its purpose changes. For example, a manager sends a commercial offer twice: first, a "cold" one with a list of products that will interest a potential client, and after communicating with him and identifying needs, a "hot" one with a specific offer of goods and prices. It turns out that the action is one, but the stages of the funnel are different.
5. The customer can move through the funnel both forward and backward.
6. Working with a sales funnel is most effective in a CRM system.

Vitaly Katranzhi, business coach:
- You can run a sales funnel in Excel, but then we cannot see reports in all the sections we need, analyze the selected period and see the dynamics of relationships. Therefore, you should not save on CRM, this is one of the essential tools effective work with a sales funnel.

How to get the most out of your sales funnel

When your sales funnel is ready, it's time to add some magic - improve it to increase conversions. For this become a client of your company and walk his way from getting to know the product to buying.

Is all the necessary information on the site? Do managers correctly answer customer questions over the phone? Is it easy to fill out the order form on the website? Answer these questions and you will understand what needs to be changed.

Thus, a company producing plastic windows was puzzled by the growth of backorders: already warm customers “merged” due to the fact that they had to wait for a team of installers for 7-9 hours. Then the company added another stage to its sales process - sending a voice message to the client before the departure of the team. Thanks to this, it was possible to reduce the number of backorders from 11 to 3 per month.

As said, Mike Wolp, Director of Marketing at HubSpot“Don't stop your customers from buying. Better give them what they want. " Collecting feedback from your customers regularly is the best source of advice on how to make your sales funnel better. Experiment, add and subtract milestones, and then take metrics to gauge the outcome and continue your quest for the ideal.

CRM system: a must-have in working with a sales funnel

You can keep records on paper, but the effectiveness of such work is questionable, because you will not be able to record every call from managers, every customer click on contextual advertising, every click on the "place an order" button. And even if you can use different services, then you certainly won't be able to trace the path of each customer to the purchase. This means that you will never know which source the most converting leads come from, at what stage the most customers are "stuck", how the sales dynamics differ depending on the consumer's region, and so on.

Today, there is not a single less well-known business coach who would not advise clients to implement a CRM system. Among other things, it makes the sales funnel visual and helps improve it. Good CRM system:

• records the entire history of interaction with the client;
• knows how to draw a sales funnel: displays all transactions on a convenient board, where sales are grouped by stages;
• shows statistics in real time: the amount and number of orders and deals, their distribution across the sales funnel - and all this in the context of sources, managers, regions, amounts, etc .;
• helps to find weak points: at what stages the most transactions fail, how many cold calls and meetings each manager held, etc.;
• helps managers to guide the client through the funnel, automatically sets tasks for them: call the client, send a quote, remind of payment, get feedback. As a result, customers become more loyal and make a purchase faster.

The main thing that CRM gives is the ability to adjust the process and immediately see the result in numbers. No need to wait a quarter, manually compile reports in Excel and collect planning meetings. Just enter data into CRM, record sales in deal cards and immediately see the result - this is the magic of increasing conversion.

Try building a sales funnel in CRM right now, for free in the cloud-based SalesapCRM system, and you will see how simple and effective it is.

In the companies that are in our consulting, we constantly count numbers. Or rather, not even so.

Practice shows that quite often people's behavior diverges from expectations, which means that only numbers will help to see the true picture of “Everything is good”, “Everything is bad” or “You can live”.

Just for counting numbers among many tools, building a sales funnel helps us.

In this article, we will analyze what stages of the sales funnel should be, by what criteria to determine them, and what this will give you in the end.

what is a sales funnel

The term sales funnel has been around for at least 100 years. It was invented and put into use by Elias St. Elmo Lewis (a very complicated name). He deduced the path by which each customer comes to a purchase:

1. Acquaintance;
2. Interest;
3. A wish;
4. Action.

That is, this is the classic principle of trading and making a purchase decision by the buyer. Such a thought funnel, or, in marketing terms, a “consumer funnel”.

As you may have noticed, in these stages there is a very large similarity with for the correct compilation of advertising. Therefore, it is also often called the "marketing funnel".

We are still interested in how the sales funnel works in reality, and why is everyone talking about it so much?

Sales funnel - this is the path that the client goes from the first contact with the product / service to the conclusion of the deal, that is, the purchase. And all this is divided into stages.

In the literature, and on the Internet, I have come across different sales funnel schemes. Among them were classic 4 stages, and very long ones, consisting of more than 12.

I will tell you general guidelines on how to make a sales funnel, and give examples. After studying the article, you yourself will understand what the correct structure of the sales funnel should be in your company, which stages to include and in what sequence. Go.

WE ARE ALREADY MORE THAN 29,000 people.
TURN ON

I do not want and I will not

We constantly encounter a riot on the ship among the sellers when we announce that now we need to work with the funnel.

And this is normal, because with her everything hidden immediately becomes apparent. Do any of you just want to show skeletons in your closet?

Now I'm talking more about cases when a sales funnel is being implemented in a wholesale or retail... With the introduction of a funnel on the Internet, there is almost no such rebellion. Everything is easily tracked there, and most often without the participation of sellers. It's different offline.

Employees count everything manually (who entered, bought, passed, etc.). For this they will hate us and you, although part of the process can now be easily automated.

But all this negative comes from a misunderstanding of what a sales funnel is for. From a misunderstanding that in business it is necessary not only to count sales, profits, margins, but also indicators from the stages of the sales funnel.

After all, this way you can see the weaknesses in your company and understand what needs to be emphasized at a given time. And, as a rule, sales managers do not need an analysis of the sales funnel, they “have no time for it”.

Important. Now a small part of the theory will begin, during the reading of which, it will seem to you that this is not for you. But, don't go away. Read to the end. This was not done by chance. First - the basics, and then the examples.

Classics of the genre

If you ask me about the universal stages of sales in marketing (bypassing), then you can depict them as levels, namely in the form of 8 classic sequential levels:

1. Learning about the offer. Your first contact with a client;
2. Definition with a choice. Convincing the client to choose your product;
3. Purchase Intention. Buying task formation;
4. Make a deal. Registration of the transaction;
5. The intention to make a payment. Everything is clear here;
6. Receiving the product. Including assessment of the success of your purchase;
7. Re-purchase. Provided that you liked everything;
8. Making purchases on an ongoing basis. Provided that everything was VERY pleasant.

Looks complicated, right? Agree. While studying this methodology (5 years ago) I wondered how all this “nonsense” could be implemented in an ordinary business. Therefore, in simple terms, using the example of b2b business:

1. Making cold calls (finding out about the offer);
2. (definition with a choice);
3. Dispatch (purchase intent);
4. Signing a contract and issuing an invoice (closing a deal);
5. Payment (intent to pay);
6. Shipment of goods (receipt of the product);
7. Repeat purchase;
8. Making purchases on an ongoing basis.

Or here's another example, for a more typical situation, the stages of retail store sales:

1. The client saw an advertisement (learning about the offer);
2. I went to the store (definition with a choice);
3. Tried on a thing (intention to acquire);
4. Made a decision to purchase it (making a deal);
5. Paid for it (intent to pay);
6. Received / started using (receiving the product);
7. Returned for another purchase (repeat purchase);
8. Became a regular customer (making purchases on a regular basis).

Assessment of each stage

A simple and logical question arises, how to calculate a sales funnel? How to calculate each step? As a percentage, in pieces, or as in that ad: "How much to hang in grams?"

Let's take a look at the assessment of each stage using the example of the b2b sector, where the initial contact begins with the Internet funnel, and then goes to the sales department.

The period of time for which you determine these indicators is most often measured either “per day”, or in “month”, or “per quarter”.

For example, we measure “Orders” every day, but we measure “Repeat purchases” once a month.

HOW TO MAKE A SALES FUNNEL

Well, you have passed the most boring, but important part of this article. Now let's summarize, consider what to do with this miracle, and how to create a sales funnel for yourself.

Now you probably have a logical question, but what does the sales funnel look like in the end? So, if you fill in, calculate and draw everything, then the visualization of the sales funnel will be like this:

Sales funnel

It turns out that at each stage the number of actions is less and less, that is, the funnel principle is applied, hence the concept.

People get lost, leave, change their minds at every stage when moving to a purchase (top-down). And already here it is clear what are the weakest points in your company. Well, now, let's move on to the main thing - how to make a sales funnel step by step.

Step 1. Define your milestones

The funnel above is built on the example of the stages that we looked at earlier.

In your case, the structure of the sales funnel may differ, the stages may be different or there may be more. It all depends on the number of touches with a potential client and on how loyal he is to your product / service.

It is not difficult to define them. Just think about which ones are most important to you.

Usually these are the ones on which customers make their decisions - to buy or not. Or, if you need the maximum program, then write down all the possible stages at which customers are lost. For this you need to know.

Step 2. Measure indicators

This is where the hardest part of the job begins. Not building, but systematic filling of all stages of the funnel.

The key word is systemic (read constant). Indeed, in practice, it is at this point that failures most often occur, since the owner is not up to this, and managers and marketers do not want to recycle, believing that they already see everything perfectly (there are exceptions).

In such a case, if you and your colleagues are “philonite”, you can implement the most primitive funnel of 2-4 stages.

It will not be difficult to compose and fill in this. Here's an offline example for modeling:

Step 3. Improve and increase

It is of course all good that you have numbers on your hands, but don't you just look at them ?! You need to work with them, namely to improve and increase.

This is the whole point of the sales funnel - to show weaknesses. Let's look at an example for each of these actions.

Example 1. Zoom in

And now the magic. Imagine a situation that you have 360,750 impressions of your contextual advertising per month.

At the exit, after going through all the stages, clients bring 280,303 rubles. Now let's imagine that we just went and increased our ad spend by 60%. Thus, we increased the number of impressions, which, as a result, gave us 354,545 rubles. And this is 26% more than the previous figure.

Please note that by increasing each stage of the funnel by the n-th number of percent, you can not only increase sales figures, but explode them.

And this does not always require such a large increase in the form of 60%, somewhere out of 1% it will be enough to make 1.2%, and your sales will grow one and a half to two times.

And here's another scary picture of what another sales funnel on the site might look like:

Example 2. Improve

Let's imagine that your employee makes 30 cold calls every day. Of these, only 10 are successful, and it reaches the decision maker.

Everyone else gets stuck in the “Secretary Pass” stage. This means that the conversion from a call to a communication with a decision maker is 33% (1o out of 30). In this case, the right strategy is not to increase the number of calls, but rather to improve the conversion rate.

So that out of 30 calls we get 66% secretaries (20 out of 30). This kind of improvement will give us a doubling of our sales.

Another example from this process. Managers issue 100 invoices per month for a total of 1 million rubles (with an average check of 10,000 rubles), of which only 50% is paid.

This means that we take and do everything possible to increase the number of payments to 60%. And most likely, there is not much to do for this. As a result, we will get 100,000 rubles more, simply by increasing one stage by 10%.

Briefly about the main

So, summing up, I will say that the main advice of this article is not that you need to know what the stages of the sales funnel are. It's not even that you need to paint it individually for your business.

The main thing is that many companies in vain neglect this tool, when it can give much more than it seems at first glance.

Otherwise, it turns out that there is no difference: whether you invest in new advertising or not, whether you invest time in training managers or not.

Understand that everything was done in vain, if you do not analyze the indicators, and do not know how much the profit increased after that or how much the conversion from stage to stage has increased. Business is numbers that you need to constantly work with, not just profit with marginality.