How to Develop Your Sales Funnel

As we've seen in our previous post describing lead generation, the first step to identifying leads and later converting them into prospects and then finally customers is to develop your sales funnel (in some contexts, also known as sales pipeline).

A sales funnel can be visually illustrated as an inverted pyramid where the biggest portion lies at the top of the aptly-named funnel. Like water pouring through, the current gets ever smaller and smaller until it peters out at the bottom.

In a similar way, a large quantity of general consumers in a market form the head of the funnel. It is up to the marketer to successfully guide the general consumer from awareness of the businesses product/service all the way down to the final purchase and staying with the business (customer loyalty/retention). In between, there are a number of steps that need to be taken prior to purchase including discovery of the product, evaluation of the product, intent to buy the product. 

More traditional marketing studies refer to the AIDA model. AIDA is an acronym standing for "Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action." It uses the same funnel shape as the diagram shown above with the main difference being that it is simpler to understand and contains fewer details. Also, there is no interlinking with the sales pipeline that can also be run parellel to the funnel.

How to develop an effective lead generation strategy

Lead generation is essentially all the activities relating to the identification and development of potential customers. Businesses use a range of tools through sales and marketing functions in order to generate leads and increase revenue for their enterprises. Without leads, businesses could not survive as their sales pipelines would eventually dry up. 

There exist distinct differences between B2C (business to consumer/retail marketing) and B2B (business to business/corporate marketing) lead generation. The most tangible difference is that B2C markets generally tend to be broad-based whereas B2B markets are more carefully segmented, with customers and competition tending to be more advanced and knowledgeable about products and services.

Lead generation encompasses a variety of different tactics include conducting detailed market research, developing the sales funnel (more on this in our next post), carefully managing your social media channels (through effective social media management), maintaining your website and pages (namely your landing page, product pages and call to action) and keeping your viewers hooked and wanting more through effective content marketing through blogs, social media snippets and e-mail newsletters.

In order to develop an effective lead generation strategy, you will have to have a keen understanding of how the sales funnel works and how to convert a general consumer in your target segment into a lead who steadily converts from a 'cold' lead to a 'hot' lead and eventually a customer of your business.