Last updated on August 3rd, 2023
In this guide, we’ll tell you what a B2B sales funnel is, why they’re still effective, and how to build one.
If you want to maximize your B2B sales — you can’t just go fumbling around in the dark without a gameplan.
You need a strategy to take your ideal client from complete stranger to a loyal client.
And that’s where the B2B sales funnel comes in.
A good one will help you create leads, qualify those leads, convert them into paying clients, and hopefully keep them coming back for more business.
Having a fine-tuned sales funnel will help you build a loyal client base and an army of referrals along the way.
In fact, once you have the funnel up and running, it’ll be a consistent source of new clients and revenue for a long time to come.
But do it wrong, and you’ll be missing out on massive amounts of revenue…
So, let’s start with the basics.
- What is a B2B sales funnel?
- Syncing your sales funnel to your sales process
- How to build a B2B sales funnel
- How to take a sales funnel from good to great
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What is a B2B Sales Funnel?
In short, it’s a straightforward but insightful way of describing and applying the foundation of your sales and marketing process.
You bring leads into the funnel top of your funnel, nurture those leads down the funnel, and hopefully, they come out as loyal customers on the other side.
There are 5 main sections of a B2B sales funnel:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Evaluation
- Engagement
- Closed Sale (Purchase)
Let’s start with the first:
Like the physical funnel that you’d use to change your oil, it starts wide at the top. This is where there will be the most volume of leads.
In the classic 5-stage sales funnel, this is called the “Awareness” stage. The “Awareness” stage marks the point where potential leads first learn about your business or brand.
But don’t get too excited…
After just learning about your brand, they won’t want to buy just yet. They might not even be interested in (or know they have the pain for) what you’re selling.
For instance, most people know what Coca-Cola and Nike are, even if they don’t drink soda or wear sneakers.
Next, as we move down into a slightly narrower section of the funnel, we come to the “Interest” stage.
This is where leads start poking around, start researching your business a bit. We’re getting a little warmer here, though they’re still not ready to buy.
“Evaluation” is where your prospect really starts weighing the pros and cons of what your product or service has to offer.
And if the good outweighs the bad, it’s time for “Engagement”. Here, they’re actually communicating with your team directly, whether it’s over email, on the phone, or in person.
And then comes the fifth and final stage in the classic funnel. That’s right, the “Purchase” (where your lead finally converts). If you’re a sales rep, this is where your prospect has been nurtured enough to be closed.
Of course, things aren’t always quite as streamlined in real life. Leads and prospects can’t always be nurtured and closed the same.
And in recent years, critics of the classic funnel have started to pop up, with their own competing methods and alternatives to share.
Is the Sales Funnel Dead? A Look at Different B2B Sales Models
The “classic” sales funnel described above was first developed over a hundred years ago.
Needless to say, the sales and marketing world has changed quite a lot since then. Print to radio, radio to TV, and finally TV to internet (probably the biggest game-changer of them all).
This shift in the way people do business — and how buyers find, research, and purchase products and services — has led to some serious critiques of the old-school sales funnel model.
Some critics would argue, it’s simply too rigid, too formulaic to account for the world of internet marketing and sales.
And they’re not totally wrong.
In today’s world of social media use and ever-present online reviews, you can’t pinpoint precisely when the Awareness stage started or when the Interest stage became Evaluation.
Was it when they scrolled past your Facebook ad? Or when they found your company in search engines? A sales funnel, especially for B2B sales, isn’t so cut and dry.
Plus, you can’t really control how and when a potential buyer approaches or moves through these stages.
Maybe they go from not knowing your business exists to Evaluation in the span of a few hours – and by the time you find out, they’re already ready to buy.
Or maybe the leads play out entirely differently.
The point is, today’s consumers have more choices and more ways to research those choices than ever.
And they may not want to follow the process that you layout for them, especially not at your pace.
So, let’s take a look at some of the alternative models.
Forrester Model
One of the most notable is the Forrester Model, which revolves around a cycle of Discover, Explore, Buy, and Engage.
The biggest difference?
It stresses the more disorganized and circular nature of the modern buyer’s approach. The various stages they pass through aren’t so organized or delineated as the classic funnel would suggest.
The Forrester Model also places less emphasis on more traditional marketing channels. Instead, they claim, prospects are influenced by a combination of peer reviews, recommendations from friends, and user-generated content, not so much ads or sales materials.
And there’s certainly a lot of truth to that.
McKinsey Loyalty Loop
Then there’s McKinsey & Company’s take, which is a cyclical model that stresses the importance of, you guessed it, customer loyalty. (Hence, the “Loyalty Loop”.)
While the classic funnel is more of a straight line, the pre-purchase and post-purchase cycle is continuously repeating. If the buyer has a positive experience, they’ll keep coming back. But they still keep going through the pre-purchase phases, where other brands can slip in as they become aware of them.
Buyer’s Journey
The concept of the “buyer’s journey” is possibly the most popular alternative to the classic sales funnel.
It’s a little less defined since not everyone agrees on what path the buyer’s journey takes.
At its core, it has some major similarities to the classic funnel, with the buyer moving from awareness to consideration to decision.
But here, the emphasis is placed on the fact that it’s the buyer that controls this process, not the business.
Sales skills are great, but it all comes down to the psychology of helping a prospect choose to buy.
It’s their journey to plan and take, not yours. They’re in control of when a stage starts or ends and how they approach it.
The Best B2B Sales Funnel is the One Tailored to Your Industry, Dream Clients, and Your Business’s Structure
Of course, we could sit here all day talking about the dozen or so other notable sales funnel models. But you probably get the picture.
And with all that said, the “death” of the classic sales funnel has been much exaggerated.
Sure, if you insist on applying it rigidly, you may not be satisfied with the results. But there’s nothing that says you have to be so dogmatic in your approach.
Instead, one should realize that the modern sales world is a little messier and more free-flowing. Even if you’re selling to businesses, at the end of the day, you’re still selling to decision-makers — who are humans.
But with that being said, a well-planned B2B sales funnel can still help provide a useful framework to base your efforts on.
Your Sales Funnel vs. Your Sales Process — Connect Them
Now, let’s get one thing straight:
“Sales funnel” and “sales process” might sound similar enough that you think they’re the same thing, but they’re really not.
And the difference matters because it puts things in perspective.
The key difference here is that a sales funnel tackles the sale from the client’s (buyer’s) perspective. It deals with how they perceive and relate to your business over time, from that initial awareness to the final purchase.
On the other hand…
A B2B sales process operates from the seller’s perspective. It’s how you – or your sales team – look at potential buyers, tracing the progression from unknown prospect to successful deal.
Like the funnel, there’s some disagreement on the specific steps involved, but the core elements are the qualification, discovery meeting, proposal, and close.
Both Need to Be in Sync & Working Together
Here’s the deal:
B2B businesses need to be using both whiles making sure they’re working together.
A planned out sales funnel that has already nurtured leads will make selling a lot easier.
After all, companies that excel at nurturing leads generate 50% more ready-to-buy leads at less than 33% of the cost compared to companies not properly nurturing leads.
But you can’t expect a high-value account to close itself in your sales funnel — which is why having a squared-away sales process becomes crucial.
A sales funnel could be nearly perfect, and you’d still need human interaction, meetings, custom proposals, and sales reps to help prospects pull the trigger on buying.
How to Build a B2B Sales Funnel in 5 Steps
Now that we’ve tackled the “what” of sales funnels, let’s get down to the real nitty-gritty — the “how.”
After all, theoretical knowledge isn’t worth a thing if you can’t put it into practice.
Here’s how to build a killer B2B funnel in just five easy steps.
#1: Create Awareness By Choosing a Marketing Channel
The top of your funnel, as the analogy goes, is wide.
You start with a lot of leads, which then filter down into a smaller number of actual sales.
However, you don’t want to cast too broad of a net.
Sure, having a billion prospects would be excellent, but not if those prospects have no potential to buy what you’re selling. You’d be wasting your time and resources – and theirs.
So, as you begin your efforts to create awareness for your brand, make sure you’re doing so in a targeted way.
It might be tempting to try to go “viral” by appealing to a more mass audience. Still, a generic, trending post on social media won’t necessarily move the needle much, especially not in the B2B space.
You’re trying to reach professionals and executives, not every random person on Twitter.
So what are some actual methods for building awareness?
Things like ads, SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, and ads can go a long way when getting eyes on your brand.
Regardless of your marketing channel of choice, you want to establish yourself as an authority in your field.
Angle yourself as someone uniquely capable of soothing those pesky pain points that high-level decision-makers are struggling with.
Part of creating awareness can be helping people realize that they have a problem in the first place.
In short, make providing value and giving the primary goal of your awareness campaign.
#2: Inspire Consideration with Thought Leadership
However, merely making people aware of your brand and what you do doesn’t help much if they never move down the funnel.
Your goal is to quickly transition qualified prospects to the next stage in the process. That is, you want them to begin considering what you have to offer.
A great way to do this?
During your education-based marketing campaigns, bring up your product or service as a solution to a pain point. But don’t be too salesy.
A well-crafted landing page is a great way to get the ball rolling here. Link to it from your posts, ads, profiles, and other content that you post so that anyone who’s even a little enticed by what you say ends up there.
The name of the game here is authority. Establish that you know your stuff and have a solution to a major pain point.
#3: Earn Preference By Providing Value
Now, if you’re in a competitive industry, chances are there are multiple businesses that offer the same things that you offer.
So you need to convince the prospect of that, not us.
And if your capabilities are roughly equal to the competition, you need to find some other way to differentiate yourself.
You can win over the competition with a superior sales pitch, a killer customer experience, or just going the extra mile in your interactions with leads.
You’ve earned their interest. But they’re probably interested in a few other businesses too.
This an awesome stage to start your value ladder.
To give an example, you could offer free value in the form of a free consultation, ebook, or free trial — then upsell after you make them satisfied.
#4: Close the Sale with a Custom Proposal
Alright, so, hopefully by now, the client is interested in what you have to offer – and you’re currently their top choice.
However, that doesn’t always mean that the sale is a done deal.
Some get cold feet. Some get distracted or tangled up in bureaucracy and put the purchase off.
Others simply aren’t convinced of the specific terms of your offer.
But you’ve done all this work. And you can’t let that fish off the hook without a fight.
It’s time to convert.
Whether that’s through crafting a proposal they can’t pass up, addressing and easing last minute doubts, or just following up at the right moment.
What you need to do in this stage is to create desire and pain. Make sure to communicate the value of your offering and what it’ll do for the prospect.
And if they’re getting cold feet, create some pain by asking them things like:
What’s going to end up happening if you don’t solve this pain point in X time?
This is where sales skills come into play. Practice makes perfect.
#5: Competence X Customer Service = Loyalty
If you want to build a truly successful, long-term business, you’re not done when you make the sale.
Nope, there’s still more to do. You want to build loyalty.
Why?
Because by building loyalty, you make this whole marketing thing a lot easier and less intensive — while padding your revenue in the process.
Not only will those satisfied customers keep coming back, but they’ll also tell their friends — and even total strangers — who you’ll then be able to convert with minimal investment.
But how do you build that loyalty?
Well, there are two main facets to your gameplan. First, you want to deliver the product or service that you promised. Ideally, you’ll even over-deliver. Really knock their socks off.
Client management will be key to keeping your clients happy, which means that you’ll also need to keep clients happy with excellent communication, expectation-setting, and reporting.
Once you win over your clients’ loyalty, you can leverage those happy clients to ask for referrals in the future.
Continue to sell them. And get them to sell for you.
Crucial for Any B2B Sales Funnel Design — Organization & Automation
Your sales funnel needs to sync up to your sales pipeline.
But to do this, you need to be keeping contacts organized and score (a measurement of how warmed up a lead is).
Proper lead management will keep your sales funnel from falling apart and prevent qualified leads from slipping through the cracks.
You might be already doing this with a homemade CRM in spreadsheets. But spreadsheets are lacking a lot of time-saving features that CRM software has.
With a CRM like VipeCloud, you get an all-in-one CRM, sales platform, and marketing suite.
Put these key 3 things together, and you can easily create an automated sales funnel that will free up your time while handing off your sales team pre-qualified leads.
If you want to see what VipeCloud can do for you, sign-up for a 15-day free trial or schedule a demo — no credit card required.
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