Understanding the lead generation funnel is critical.
It allows you to have a bird’s eye view of your overall sales operations and it helps you determine which stages of your funnel need work.
The more you understand your funnel the more you understand the journey that your customer has to take.
In turn, you can create sales journeys that gently guide and nudge a prospect into a conversion.
Without further adieu, let’s jump right in!
The Importance of Lead Generation
We all know that organizations – for profit or not – need to constantly be bringing in leads.
This creates a continuous cycle of “business”.
Among increasing the bottom line, lead generation equates to market expansion, growing a following, generating new business opportunities, boosting one’s revenue, and establishing a better image towards their customers.
Why Do Other People Show Different Funnels?
What we’ll be showing you right now is the basic funnel.
But each funnel is going to be different.
There are 7-step funnels, 10-step funnels, you name it.
The only difference is how other people split the different stages into more applicable groups for their organization.
Before you do intense funnel splits with remarketing, MQLs, and SQLs, you need to first be familiar with the basics.
Bringing in a prospect and getting them to convert.
1. Awareness
This is the stage where your possible lead or target consumer becomes aware of your product or service.
Information about your brand can reach them in a variety of ways, from traditional advertisements on various mediums to word-of-mouth to a video or photo on social media that goes viral, a feature in a magazine, or through a telemarketer, to mention a few.
This can be considered a critical phase as it will either catch their attention or not.
What will make your brand catchy? It is all about creating superior content that is relatable, simple, relevant, and attractive.
What You Need: Launch your marketing efforts on social media, do paid advertisements, and go big on public relations initiatives.
2. Interest
The next stage in the lead generation funnel is interest – the part where your lead becomes inclined to buy or try out your product.
In this phase, they are highly likely to read more about your brand, search for reviews, check out the pricing, and look for benefits. Knowing these things will allow people to weigh their options so that they can proceed to the next stage which is making a decision.
Here you want to nurture.
This means gently nudging a prospect toward the decision-making process.
Some funnels even break this stage down into two, creating an interest stage and an evaluation stage.
So what’s the difference?
Creating interest is a natural part of nurturing your prospects through your funnel, you send them communication or expose them to your messaging for them to start considering your product.
Evaluation is when your product becomes a contender for a solution to their needs.
What You Need: Provide a landing page that your leads can check out, provide free trials, e-books, newsletters, or use studies that could potentially fuel their interest.
What’s critical in this stage is that you give them enough resources for them to do their research and decide that you are the best choice.
Read more: 10 Customer Retention Strategies that Work
3. Decision
In this stage, the client will decide whether to buy or not. The goal is to make people buy your brand. Their decision will be strongly influenced by what they saw, what they have heard, and how it makes them feel.
As can be expected, people tend to be careful about putting out money to try out your product or service, but if you do it right, there is also the likelihood that they will skip all the questions and jump right into buying it.
Be truthful about the features and benefits of the product or service.
Offer them a fresh experience, a new vibe, or something they have never thought would ever be possible.
When you successfully do these things, people will most likely go for it.
What You Need: This necessitates the active participation of your sales team. Provide sales pages, offer free consultation, give out a newsletter, do promotions, give free trials, demos, and e-mail marketing.
4. Action
This is the part where your prospect makes a decision.
It is important that you have a system in place to ensure that they will have a smooth shopping experience. Make it easy, simple, and fast so they can brag about how efficient your system is.
Will the action be a message through your inbox? A shopping cart addition? Two positive discovery calls?
How do you get them to say, “yes”.
What You Need: In this stage, you will need an efficient and highly reliable way for consumers to communicate with you. Make sure that they enjoy the process.
Takeaways of the Lead Generation Funnel
This is not the be-all and end-all of funnels.
But this should give you the quick guide that you need to start looking at your sales process and breaking it down into parts that you can easily work with.
What’s your next step?
Breaking down your process and examining each aspect of it.
Once you’ve done that, you can start going after the more complicated funnels depending on your needs.
