7 Sales Funnel Templates You Can Use in Your Marketing

Through a sales funnel, you and your sales team guide potential customers through the buying process. The more effective your sales funnel, the higher your conversion rate and the more sales you make.

Sales funnels vary from business to business and industry to industry. The steps involved to optimize each funnel stage and to generate revenue may change, too. Fortunately for you, there are sales funnel templates that have been proven to bring results.

In this article, I want to share some sales funnel templates you could use for your business.

What Is A Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is a visual representation of your customer’s buying journey. The buyers’ journey starts when a person first encounters your company and ends with some people making a purchase and becoming repeat customers.

Rather logically, the funnel is wide at the top and narrower at the bottom. Some inevitably end up leaking out along the way. Others, however, are gradually filtered down as qualified leads.

The goal of each sales team is to push leads through the funnel.

Every sales funnel has three basic stages:

• Awareness Stage: the potential customer discovers your company when they research your niche. Potential customers might encounter your company through blog posts, case studies, infographics, or videos. When they find your company, you want to capture their details. For example, get them on your email list or an advertising retargeting list. Pro tip: use the right email ID finder & verification to ensure your prospects receive all your communications!
• Qualification Stage: During the qualification stage, the potential customer learns more about your company and the products or services you offer. E-books, whitepapers, and articles where you compare your service against a competitor are useful at this stage.
• Closing Stage: In the closing stage, the person decides to make a purchase. You want to convince them to purchase your product or service. Assuming they purchase through your company, you want to retain their custom. Your sales team’s activities and your sales material are especially crucial during the funnel’s closing stages.

While you might associate a sales funnel with digital marketing, the idea dates back to the 1890s. Fundamentally, a sales funnel is just a codified process of turning prospects into leads. The underlying idea is that if you can track the steps in a sales funnel and monitor the results, you can generate more sales.

7 Sales Funnel Templates

The way you push people down the funnel, from awareness through to becoming a customer, will depend on your niche that you operate in and your goals. A sales funnel for an online store selling $5 boxes of candy, for example, would be very different from the steps a broker might use to acquire a new client.

In the remainder of this guide, I’ll share seven sales funnel templates. Each sales funnel template is designed to optimize the customer journey. Hopefully, you can directly apply one of these sales funnels to your business. If not, use them as inspiration to craft your own sales funnel for your next campaign.

#1. SaaS Sales Funnel Template

This sales funnel template was designed to thrive in a highly competitive industry. It focuses on two things: reducing customer acquisition cost and expanding customer lifetime value. The first, it does by focusing on leads that drive high-quality sign-ups, separating them from the unqualified ones who will only end up wasting your time. The second, it does by ensuring quality engagement.

At the awareness stage, your sales team should collaborate with the marketing department to come up with the collaterals your reps will need for lead generation. You can use SaaS content marketing services, pay-per-click advertising, and social media marketing to get more traffic to your landing page.

It’s important for you to track relevant metrics such as your sign-up ratio and total acquisition conversions. This is so you can know what works and what doesn’t, and make adjustments to your messaging and strategies if needed.

Once your leads have been qualified, your sales team should continue to track metrics such as the lead’s visit frequency and the length of time they interact with your service or product. They can use the results of this tracking to determine how to nudge the lead further along the sales funnel. For example, how-to videos and webinars can increase product knowledge and engagement.

At the final stage, sales reps should guide qualified leads into making the right purchasing decision. Instead of pressuring them to get the most expensive plan, reps should suggest the plan that best solves the relevant pain points. If there is a free trial, they should promote this, too. Reps can then remind customers later on to upgrade their plan so they can access premium features.

Once a customer makes a purchase, customer representatives should be ready to answer any additional queries. Sales reps should also check in once a while to look for opportunities to cross-sell or upsell, as well as ensuring the customer remains satisfied.

#2. Agency/Consultancy Sales Funnel Template

This sales funnel template is for service-based businesses. Since you’re offering services and not products, your focus should not be on offering free trials but on building trust and increasing your credibility.

To get leads, the sales and marketing departments can collaborate on creating high-quality content on your website to drive visitors to your value offer. You can use social media and paid advertising for this. Use a survey or a contact form to get email addresses, names, and phone numbers, too.

Add questions to your opt-in form that will help you separate the qualified leads from the unqualified ones. For instance, you can ask what the lead’s job title is. This will automatically separate the industry professional from the student who is just looking around. Lead magnets such as ebooks and whitepapers will also help you get the contact details you need.

Once you have your qualified leads, you need to nurture them so they will move down the sales funnel and convert. You can call them or set up meetings with them. If you’re a web design agency, for example, you might offer to give a free consultation and give the prospect suggestions on how to improve their website.

#3. Sales Funnel Template For Enterprises

There are more steps in this sales funnel template because it involves more complex products. As with the other sales funnel templates, you need to drive leads to your value proposition. You can leverage influencer marketing, paid to advertise, and social media to help generate leads.

During the introductory call, your sales reps should qualify the leads. There are a couple of things they should ask themselves to do:

• Is the lead a decision-maker in their company? A large budget is needed to purchase an enterprise product, which means the approval for the purchase should be given by a decisionmaker in the company.
• Budget: Does the lead or the lead’s company have the budget to purchase the product?

During the call, the sales representatives should identify the lead’s pain points and determine if the enterprise product will be able to resolve these.

If the lead is qualified, then it’s time to give that sales pitch or demo. Since your sales reps have already identified the lead’s pain points, during the pitch or the demo they’ll need to demonstrate how the enterprise product can specifically address those pain points. The reps should ask as many questions as they can to uncover other pain points that may not have been discussed, too. They can then show the lead the product can address several problems at once:

Let’s imagine the lead decides to move forward and sends you a request for a proposal (RFP). Your sales team can then put together a proposal that meets the customer’s particular needs.

If your target customer accepts your proposal it’s time to close the deal. If they reject it, however, don’t give up. Continue to nurture the lead through email marketing and regular communication. Who knows? In the future, you might just get another chance.

#4. Product Launch Funnel Template

If you’re planning a product launch, you might want to use this sales funnel template.

You can start with a video-based sales letter that includes an opt-in form. In the sales letter, you promise something of value to your leads. That something should be related to what you’re offering. So if you’re offering a new email marketing software, for example, you can offer valuable training on email marketing.

After this, you should send additional videos to build rapport with your target customers. However, don’t talk directly about the product in each video. Instead, build on the first video and give more actionable advice and useful tips that your prospects can use.

Again, the content of the videos needs to be aligned with what you’re selling. Remember: give them tips, but don’t give them the entire solution to their problems for free. The ultimate fix, after all, is that product you’re selling.

#5. Automated Sales Webinar Funnel Template

You can get those conversions through webinars, too. The good thing about webinars is that they can be pre-recorded. And thanks to sales funnel software, you can also automate your sales funnel.

Once leads sign up for the free webinar, they are taken to a Thank You page. To get them to sign up, offer the webinar for free and emphasize that there’s very limited seating (and that X people have already signed up). This will create that fear of missing out that will prompt your lead to take action.

On the Thank You page, you should have the link to the webinar. But take the opportunity to upsell, too. For example, you can have a timer that says stocks of your flagship product are fast-depleting.

#6. Lead Magnet Funnel Template

The lead magnet funnel template involves only four steps.

The first step involves offering the lead magnet. To get leads interested, the lead magnet should be something of value to your leads. This can be in the form of a whitepaper, an ebook, or an exhaustive industry report.

In exchange for the lead magnet, you should ask for your leads’ contact information. Once you get their email addresses and have verified them, you can send them marketing emails to nurture the relationship.

From there, you can identify the right point to make the sales pitch to your prospect.

#7. Live Demo Funnel Template

The live demo funnel template leverages live demos to get potential customers interested in what you have to offer. You’ll need to record your live Q&A demos and include those on your Live Demo page.

Link your Live Demo page to your Subscription Upgrade page. Those who stayed until the end of your video are most likely to convert. So to prompt them into action, generate a sense of urgency by running a limited-time offer. For example, give them 20% off if they purchase your product now.

Don’t forget to use contact forms to get the contact details of all your leads. So if some of them don’t watch until the end of your video, you can still send them marketing materials to nurture them and hopefully convert them in the future.

Bottomline

Sales funnels help sales and marketing teams strategize. Without sales funnels, there would be no organized approach to generating leads and converting leads into customers. Businesses would be losing money because, without a process to follow, it’s far harder to entice customers to make a purchase.

Since sales funnels are crucial to conversions, businesses will find it much harder to succeed without them. The good news is that there are now tried and tested sales funnel templates that sales teams can use. The key is to determine the best fit for your industry and this particular campaign. With the right sales funnel template, rest assured that those conversions will keep rolling in.