How Can I Create A Sales Funnel?

Before answering this question, let me show you the most common mistakes. The biggest one is using AIDA as a universal method for developing the sales funnel.

The AIDA Model

1. Awareness – This is a stage when the prospect becomes aware of his problem or need and seeks possible ways to solve it. He can find your ad, blog post or social media post, and visit your website for the first time.
2. Interest – This is a stage when the prospect clearly understands his problem and looks for solutions. This is when he might download your white paper, subscribe to a newsletter, etc. He expresses interest in your products.
3. Decision – At this stage, the prospect is choosing between solutions and is sales-ready. He can book a free consultation with you, sign up for trial, or download a white paper with product comparisons.
4. Action – At this stage, the prospect becomes a customer, signs a contract with you and transfers money to your bank account.

What’s wrong with this model?

On a global scale, AIDA is still functioning, but this is a bad model for creating a b2b sales funnel.
The model doesn’t show:

• Why and where exactly we lost a prospect 
• Which channel generated non-targeted traffic 
• Precisely which part of the sales funnel must be fixed.

As well, AIDA relies on an old, outbound process, means we should drive leads to the sales team immediately at the decision stage.

What’s wrong with this?

Here are some stats from Hubspot:

• 63% of people requesting information on your company will not purchase for at least three months – and 20% will take more than 12 months to buy. 
• 50% of leads are qualified, but not yet ready to buy. 
• 57% of the buyer’s journey is completed before the buyer talks to sales. 
• 61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to Sales; however, only 27% of those leads will be qualified 
• Only 25% of leads are legitimate and should advance to sales. 
• 91% of customers say they’d give referrals. Only 11% of salespeople ask for referrals. But 83% of consumers are comfortable making a referral after a positive experience. 

This means if you’ll still use the old AIDA model for your sales funnel, you’ll lose almost 75% of your leads.

The next mistake is a “rid” leads

By default, AIDA means that we should contact every lead. So if a marketing campaign generated leads at a suitable rate, it counts as effective.

Correct?
No!

Not all leads are equal. If the lead doesn’t fit your customer avatar (that means he will never buy from you), your marketing campaign is unsuccessful, and you should stop it.

If you don’t, your company will definitely join the famous “marketing sales war” when sales folks spend time on unqualified leads. Meanwhile, the marketers will retort that the sales team has low sales skills and doesn’t know how to sell.

The last mistake is skipping lead nurturing and lead scoring

As I wrote earlier, the old outbound process drives leads to the sales team. But not all leads are sales-ready.

As you saw in the Hubspot statistics, 83% of leads aren’t ready to negotiate with you in the first 3 months. That means they need more information about your company and products. They need to “sell themselves” on your company as a safe choice and have a clear vision of the benefits they’ll get.

That’s why avoiding lead nurturing and lead scoring leads to low close-deal ratio.

So, back to the question.

Let’s reveal sales funnel stages

The first stage of the sales funnel is lead nurturing.

When we know for sure that a lead fits our customer avatar and we can put him into the appropriate segment, lead nurturing starts.

What is lead nurturing

Marketo describes it as the process of developing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel and through every step of the buyer’s journey. It focuses marketing and communication efforts on listening to the needs of prospects and providing the information and answers they need.

Lead nurturing is important because the major part of your leads aren’t sales-ready. They need more information about your product, and they have a lot of questions and objections which must be overcome before you drive the lead to the sales team.

Just look at these facts, which underscore the importance of lead nurturing:

• On average, 50% of the leads in every market are not yet ready to buy (Marketo). 
• Almost 80% of new leads never become sales (MarketingSherpa). 
• Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost (Marketo). 
• Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads (The Annuitas Group).

So, in short, the main goals of lead nurturing are to:

• Demonstrate the benefits of your product 
• Overcome objections 
• Build a relationship and credibility 
• Gather additional information about the lead for sales qualification 
• Drive the lead through the microstages of the sales funnel to sales qualification.

But there is still one question you’ll be asking: how will I know exactly which segment I should put my lead into?

There are so many criteria I must know for proper segmentation, and I can’t apply them during marketing qualification because nobody will fill out the long lead-generation forms.

That’s true. Nobody will fill in this web form.

Your lead-generation forms shouldn’t be very long because your conversions will be nearly 0%. Instead, you should choose 2-4 criteria which will help you to segment a lead and qualify him.

Other qualification work will be done by progressive profiling.

Progressive Profiling

Progressive profiling is a process of gathering information about a lead during a lead- nurturing campaign for future sales qualification.

Here is an example from Unbounce:

1. A prospect visits your website and downloads a whitepaper. They submit their name, email address and company name through your web form.
2. After receiving a few drip emails, the same person clicks a CTA to register for a webinar. A dynamic web form, for now, asks for their industry, company size and a custom question about their software needs. Dynamic web forms present unique fields to each prospect based on the information you already have (or don’t have) in your database.
3. Not long after the webinar, the lead requests a video demo of your product. You now ask them to specify a budget range and implementation time frame.

Sales qualification

As I mentioned, the last goal of lead nurturing is to drive qualified, sales-ready leads to the sales team.

A question you might have: how will we know that the lead is hot and sales-ready?
To know this, you should apply lead scoring to your lead-nurturing campaigns.

Lead scoring is a process of applying values from 0 to 100 to a lead’s data and behavior. That means you can set up a level (e.g., 80 points) that indicates when the lead is hot and sales-ready.

Lead Scoring

How does lead scoring actually work?

The first step is marketing qualification. The more the lead fits our customer avatar, the more points he receives in the beginning.

For example, we have 3 criteria for marketing qualification:

• Job title
• Company size
• Industry

Our ideal customer is the CEO of mid-sized (50-100) law firm.

For each criterion our lead matches our customer avatar, he gains a point.

The second step in lead scoring is deciding which of the lead’s actions should tell us about his growing interest in our products.

Here are some examples:

• Visited a pricing page – 8 points 
• Registered for the webinar – 10 points 
• Clicked a link to a product-related article in an email – 3 points

But not all actions are equal and should be scored!

As well, you should also add negative scores to your lead-scoring process.

That means you take away points from actions that are non-targeted (e.g., unsubscribes from newsletters, negative social media comments or no website activity for the last 3 months).

The last step in the lead-scoring process is to set up a level (e.g., 75 points) which will signal that the lead is sales-ready and should be driven to sales qualification.

Sales Qualification

The sales qualification is the last stage in the sales funnel.

At this stage, we gather additional information about the lead and decide which products, at which price packages, we should offer them.

For this purpose, we can use discovery calls or events like webinars, demonstrations applying BANT methodology (or others like ANUM, MEDDIC or CHAMPS, depending on your business).

The BANT method helps us to identify whether:

• The lead is a decision-maker, 
• he has a budget, 
• he has a problem our product can solve, 
• he needs the solution quickly.

If the lead fits the sales-qualification criteria, he is driven to the sales team, who will be responsible for further negotiations and deal closure.

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