The sales funnel might be the most notorious, fundamental, straightforward model detailing the process by which prospects become customers.
The old school sales funnel is typically divided into three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. The funnel gets narrower with each transition to a new stage. Not every prospect makes it from awareness to consideration — the same goes for the shifts from consideration to decision and decision to purchase.
The term "sales funnel software" generally refers to platforms and resources that facilitate that process by helping businesses automate or create assets such as landing pages, follow-up emails, and payment gateways. In short, they provide tools and features to help turn interested prospects into paying customers.
Each of the sales funnel stages has an impact on consumer behavior. You need to know them intimately. By knowing each step, you can use tactics to improve the number of people that go from one step to the next.
This can have a crazy impact on your business. Let’s say you double the number of people at 2 steps of your funnel. You double leads and you double the percentage of closed customers. That gives you 4X the number of new customers every month.
Defining and managing your sales funnel is one of the most powerful concepts in business.
Let’s dive in.
What is a Sales Funnel?
The sales funnel is each step that someone has to take in order to become your customer.
Let’s look at a brick-and-mortar sales funnel. The people at the top of the sales funnel walk by your store. A certain percentage of them decide to walk in, that’s the next next of the funnel.
A customer sees a rack of T-shirts on clearance. He or she thumbs through the rack, now they’re at the next step of the funnel. Then the customer selects four t-shirts and walks to the check-out. They’re at the last step. If all goes well, they finish the purchase and reach the bottom of the funnel.
This same process plays out for every business in one way or the other. Your sales funnel could exist as:
Retail store
Sales team
Website
Email
Personal consultation
Any marketing channel can be part of your sales funnel. And your funnel might be spread across several channels.
Why is sales funnel important?
Your sales funnel illustrates the path prospects take. Understanding your funnel can helps you find the holes in the funnel — the places where prospects drop out and never convert.
If you don’t understand your sales funnel, you can’t optimize it. We’ll go into the specifics of how the funnel works below, but for now, understand that you can influence how visitors move through the funnel and whether they eventually convert.
Sales Funnel: GoHighLevel
If you’re looking into sales funnel software, first of all, well done. You might be one step ahead of your competitors. As any marketer knows, if you’re going to make it in the modern climate, you’re going to need an intelligent digital marketing strategy, and sales funnels could very well help you with that.
GoHighLevel actually markets itself to agencies like myself rather than direct-to-customers. The focus is having myself add clients to it and help them build funnels, landing pages, and forms, but also integrate a CRM/contact management system to drive leads to more actions.
Unique features include call management, voice mails, calendar scheduling, and texting. I’m trained on this platform. As an advocate of inbound marketing, the idea of subtly guiding a user through a series of steps, offering rich content along the way, makes me think that sales funnels could be the perfect match for an inbound strategy.
But I wanted to look into exactly how they work and how easy the software is to use before I made my mind up. It’s worth pointing out from the get go that, though some tools market themselves as sales funnel builders, they might be missing the crucial features that you need.
For example, email marketing or webinar hosting isn’t always included. You might also find that other more modest (and cheaper) software might be enough for you.