List Building Basics | What is a Sales Funnel?

What is a Sales Funnel?

Starting at the beginning... by highlighting the basics of what a sales funnel is, will be where we will begin. It is important to determine the What, before we start talking about why to use them and how to improve yours. First, a little terminology. There are basically three types of people you’ll interact with during the sales process:

Leads

Prospects

Customers

A lead: someone who becomes aware of you or your company, someone who you decide to pursue for a sale, even if they don’t know about you or your company yet.. Typically, this includes everyone in one big group, but you could also break this down further to only look at qualified leads, which are leads that meet certain qualifications to becoming customers. This would be a "Target Audience"... For example, if you’re selling pet products, a qualified lead is someone who has a pet, versus someone who simply likes the cute animal pictures on your blog, but will never buy anything from you. In other words... people who are more likely to be interested in and potentially buy your product, or service.  

Prospect: is a term that’s used differently based on the company. In many cases, it is used interchangeably with qualified lead, but typically, a prospect is someone who has had some kind of contact with you or your company and they are still interested. All prospects are leads, but not all leads are prospects. 

Customer: Next, ...we all know what customers are! These are people who have made a decision and a purchase. You can further separate out people who have made just one purchase and people who have made several purchases, or repeat customers. 

 All of these people fit into your sales funnel! 

 To imagine a sales funnel, think of an inverted pyramid, or the shape of a kitchen funnel (hence the name). Here’s an example of a very simply sales funnel:
















Now, this is a very simplified version of the sales funnel. Next... Let’s next take a look at the general sales process and how this fits into the sales funnel.

Sales Funnel Basics with Susan on zolemia.com
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