The Sales Funnel
Last week we discussed the importance of getting prospective customer’s attention, attracting them to your products or services, and positioning your products/services to help solve their problems.
How does this actually happen? How do your customers learn about your company and products or services? What differentiates you? How do you help guide customers as they make their purchasing decisions? At which point do customers ultimately take action and buy from you?
All of these are vital steps in an effective sales funnel, a tool that maps out how prospective customers are identified, educated, engaged, and ultimately converted into paying customers. The sales funnel integrates sales goals, available marketing tools, and an effective sales process to generate qualified leads and convert them into customers. The funnel can do a good job in organizing your marketing investments to make sure that they are working together to logically bring you more customers.
There are 4 key steps in the sales funnel:
Awareness - How do you get the customer aware of your product, service, or company, so that you can solve their problem?
Interest - Once customers are aware of what you offer, how do you keep them continually educated and reminded about it?
Decision - Once a customer identifies a need for your company, how do you help them solve a problem, and why is your product or service the best suited to solve this problem?
Action - A customer has purchased your product or service. Stay engaged with the customer to get repeat business or referrals.
Here are the steps in the funnel, alongside the customer actions for each step, and marketing tools that can assist in moving customers through this stage and into the next level of the sales funnel.
Next week we will discuss the differences in the above mediums to drive awareness, the first step in the sales funnel. We’ll look at the best situations to use social media, billboards, radio/tv, online ads, the differences between them, and how they can potentially work together.
Sources:
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/296526
https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2019/04/what-is-a-sales-funnel.html