For the last fifty years, companies would live or die by the strength of their sales funnel. The premise was simple enough — fill up the top with prospects and convert those who reach the bottom.
But here‘s the rub — the sales landscape is constantly evolving, but the sales funnel hasn’t. The buyer’s journey no longer follows a straight highway from awareness to consideration to purchase. In reality, people take a lot of detours.
- It helped quantify the value of future sales.
- It helped quantify the value of future sales.
- It helped quantify the value of future sales.
Now, it’s up to sales leaders to reinvent the funnel — or find an alternative. In this article, I’ll take a closer look at the sales funnel, see how it differs from a flywheel, and suggest which model is right for your business.
A sales funnel starts with a large number of potential buyers at the top. Based on certain criteria, this pool of potential buyers is reduced to a smaller number of prospects.
Towards the middle of the customer journey, the number of prospects reduces to a handful of opportunities — and after the decision-making stage, the sales funnel process ends with a closed-won or closed-lost deal.
During my sales career, I’ve seen the sales funnel solve several problems for sales leadership:
- It was a clearly defined process to model how to close more deals.
- It helped quantify the value of future sales.
- It allowed sales teams to build statistics around the size and the number of deals required to mathematically exceed quota.
Sales Funnel Examples
1.Audible
Audible is an Amazon-owned producer of audiobooks and spoken-word entertainment. This platform brings potential subscribers into their sales funnel by promoting a free one-month trial for the service. When I sign up, I get 30 days to use the service before being automatically enrolled in a monthly subscription.
