Sales Funnel Stages Explained For Beginners

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With more freelance businesses appearing online. You need to stand out from the crowd more than ever. Therefore, to generate leads and sales, you need a sales funnel.

In this blog post, we’ll uncover what a sales funnel is and the different sales funnel stages.

Sales Funnel Meaning

Before we can go further into how to create a sales funnel, you need to understand what one is. Here’s a definition for you from Keap.

“A sales funnel is the marketing term for the journey potential customers goes through on the way to purchase. There are several steps to a sales funnel, usually known as the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel, although these steps may vary depending on a company’s sales model.”

Keap.com

Do you even need a sales funnel?

You need a sales funnel, which will let you upsell and retain buyers, so you can continue to sell to them for years to come.

With an effective sales funnel, you can significantly increase the lifetime value of your customers.

Do sales funnels really work?

Savvy marketers use online sales funnels to grow their freelance businesses. Generating leads and sales while they sleep.

Yet, some people still don’t believe they actually work. In fact, they’re actually the best tool in a marketer’s tool belt.

How much does a sales funnel cost?

Cost of a sales funnel depends upon the complexity. Although, generally it can cost anything between $1000 – $100,000.

Costs generally come from

  • Graphic Design
  • Copywriting
  • Paid Advertising
  • Marketing Team (Social Media and Content)

Stages Of A Sales Funnel Explained

There are 4 different sales funnel stages, commonly using the acronym AIDA

There are 4 sales funnel stages

  1. Awareness
  2. Interest
  3. Decision
  4. Action

Awareness

At the top of the funnel is the first sales funnel stage, the awareness stage. At the awareness stage, you’re driving cold leads to the top of the funnel.

Content released at this stage is typically blogs, social media posts, and videos.

The purpose of the content at this stage is to make you target market aware of a problem that they didn’t know they have. For example, someone who is starting a business isn’t aware of everything to grow the business.

Therefore, you’d provide content that shows them they are missing out on business growth by not doing something specific.

social media content planner

Interest

Create interest in you by leading them through the funnel with various email sequences and landing pages promoting different offers.

Decision and Action

Different offers that are taking them to the top of the funnel where your core offer is. This is truly the pinnacle moment when the lead choose to buy your core offer.

What are the important parts of the sales funnel process?

These four stages represent your prospective customer’s mindset.

Each stage requires a different approach from you, the marketer because you don’t want to send the wrong message at the wrong time.

Ensure you send the right message at the right time by looking at your marketing software’s analytics.

5 Part Sales Funnel Template

Sales funnel template will help you to get a clearer picture of how you can generate more leads and sales for your freelance business.

  1. Generate Targeted Traffic
  2. Drive Traffic To Your Landing Page
  3. Convert Your Traffic
  4. Turn Subscribers Into Customers and Raving Fans
  5. Close The Sales

Generate Targeted Traffic

Traffic is easy to generate. You market your business and people click on the link and visit your business.

Here comes the problem!

This type of traffic doesn’t convert. What you need is targeted traffic. Targeted traffic that is customers who have a genuine interest in your product.

To gain the interest of targeted you need to create awareness of your product and how it will help them solve their problem.

To reach your targeted traffic, you need to start hanging out where your target audience is. If your audience is on Facebook, hang out there.

Wherever your audience is you need to be there.

Don’t know where your target market hangs out? Start researching them and where they do hang out the most.

Read here your 5 step social selling strategy

Drive Traffic To Your Landing Page

If you’re unaware of what a landing page is. A landing page is a sales page specifically designed to capture email addresses. Aiming to convert traffic into leads.

Read here how to create a landing page that converts

Convert Your Traffic

Convert your traffic by answering on your landing page these questions

  • Is the offer going to give me the solution I’m looking for?
  • Does this look like a scam?
  • Should I just exit this page?

Therefore it’s vital in your landing page that you can confidently answer these questions.

Confidently answer the questions with strong copy and social proof that your offer works.

Turn Subscribers Into Customers and Raving Fans

Now that you’ve captured that email address and have a subscriber, you need to turn them into a raving fan.

To turn subscribers into raving fans you need to consistently deliver email messages. Messages that truly connects with them and what they need to take the next step. Next step in buying your next offer.

Close The Sales

Your end goal in the sales funnel is to get the subscriber buying your core offer.

This takes real copywriting skills and understanding of your subscriber.

Easiest way to do this is by creating a customer journey. Customer journey where you map out as to what they need at each stage of the funnel.

The simplest way to create a customer journey is by starting with the end goal.

If your end goal is to get clients buying a monthly or quarterly SEO service. Then here’s how your sales may work.

End sales funnel – monthly SEO services

Middle of the funnel – an SEO service providing a quick result and related to the monthly SEO services

Start of the funnel – an SEO audit and advice as to what the customer can do

This is a really simplistic sales funnel that’s typical for freelancers. The more complex your business model the more complex your sales funnel becomes.

In A Nutshell,

Take you freelance business online with a sales funnel. Applying the different sales funnel stages using the map of your customer journey, you can gain leads and sales quicker. Build your sales funnel with the One Funnel Away 30-day challenge.

About Post Author

Alison Wolf

Helping you to build an online business so you have an extra stream of income or quit the day job. Don't forget to follow me on social media using the handle @heyalisonwolf