Sales Funnel
The Sales Funnel follows prospects as they narrow from first awareness to purchase, so you can see where you are losing them and fix that stage.
Prospects pour in at the top and narrow through each stage down to a purchase.
Reach for this when…
- Leads come in but few convert, and you cannot see where they drop.
- Sales and marketing are blaming each other for the same numbers.
- You want to forecast revenue from activity, not hope.
How to run it
- Define each stage in your own terms and the action that moves someone to the next.
- Count how many sit at each stage and the conversion rate between them.
- Find the biggest leak - the stage with the steepest drop - and fix that one first.
- Re-measure. A funnel is only useful if you watch it move.
A worked example
Situation. Marcus Bell ran sales at Klado, a Chicago B2B software firm with plenty of leads but a target it kept missing.
Applied. The funnel showed the leak plainly: strong interest, then a collapse between consideration and intent as prospects went quiet after the demo.
Result. He added a structured follow-up at exactly that step. The close rate climbed without a single extra lead.
The catch
The funnel assumes a tidy one-way journey, but real buyers loop back, drop out and return, and buy in groups. It only measures the stages you named, so a badly drawn funnel hides the real problem. Good for finding leaks; weak as a model of how people actually decide.