Do you want to convert online traffic to paying customers? Do you want to boost your handmade business’ sales? You need to learn about the sales funnel.
What is a Sales Funnel?
Let’s begin by going over the basics of a sales funnel. So, there are three types of people that you will interact with during the sales process, these are:
- Leads
- Prospects
- Customers
Leads are people who will become aware of your company or could be someone whom you decide to pursue for a sale – even if they haven’t discovered your business yet. Usually, this includes everyone in a large group, however, you can break this down further and only look at qualified leads, – these are leads which meet specific criteria to become customers.
For example, if you were selling organic handmade soaps, a qualified lead is someone who loves organic products and actually uses them, versus someone who likes the pictures on your Instagram page- meaning they will never buy anything from you.
Prospect is a term that’s used differently depending on the business. In most cases, it is used interchangeably with a qualified lead, but generally, a prospect is someone who has previously had some kind of contact with your business and are still interested.
Remember, all prospects are leads, but not all leads are prospects.
Then there’s customers! We all know what these are. These are people who’ve made a purchase. These can be separated even further into those who just make one purpose and those who make several which are known as repeat customers.
These are all the people that fit into your sales funnel.
Sales funnel marketing will work for both B2B (this is generally a larger buying group) as well as B2C. Ultimately both will generate leads, which will turn into conversions and will turbo-charge any business into increasing its turnover.
A sales funnel looks like an inverted pyramid, illustrated below is an example:
You can see that at the very top of the sales funnel, you have the leads – this is where the large net is cast and where you try and bring in as many leads into the funnel.
Only a small percentage of the leads will be prospects – these are people who are actually interested in your service or produce, and who are ‘qualified’ to buy.
It’s really a numbers games, so the more good leads that are brought into the sales funnel, the more prospects there will be which then means the potential for more customers!!
The last piece that makes up the sales funnel is the CUSTOMER. A small percentage of leads will make purchases and then move onto becoming customers.
So, it’s important to remember that when working on your sales funnel, there are two goals:
Find as many good leads as possible, to funnel larger numbers of people into the process
Increase the percentage of people moving down the pipeline. When you take this basic information and apply to your business, you will notice more sales than ever.
Check this video by Grumomedia to learn more about the sales funnel:
Are you ready to apply it to your business? Do you have questions or tips? Please share it in the comments.
- DIY Chicken Wire Jewelry Holder - June 27, 2022
- Jewelry Designer Manager Alternative - December 8, 2019
- 3 Tips To Immediately Boost Your Sales Today - May 12, 2019