Customers do not always buy as soon as they find a product on a company’s website or elsewhere. When it comes to complex and expensive products, consumers take the time to compare and study. For this reason, companies try not to be intrusive and help users go through all stages of decision making step by step.

It is a sales funnel that is used to make the process transparent and simplify analytics. A sales funnel is a concept that describes all the steps a customer takes on the way to a conversion. There are several funnel models: the classic five-step buying scheme, the AIDA model, the SPIN method, and others. The company chooses a model and adapts it to its needs or creates its own version.

GPT tells me there are the following parts of a sales funnel:

• top: customer sees a marketing message on insta, or anywhere else (awareness)
• middle: They click into your website, or otherwise show (interest)
• bottom: they are considering buying, and are looking at reviews, pricing, guarantees (desire)
• action: the actual purchase
• retention, loyalty, post-purchase upselling (optional)

The last one is, as gpt puts it, optional but powerful. So the sales funnel goes through three steps all the way to action. The steps are (1) an impression, ie being visible to the customer at all, (2) an expression of interest, which can be as simple as a single click, (3) further expression of interest, and (4) decision and purchase, which I'd treat as the same: the decision is the purchase. And then you can continue further. See the _TODO: Sales & Marketing Funnel for more info on this concept.

Sales funnel stages

The classic sales funnel is the AIDA model, which consists of four stages.

Another option is the SPIN method. Its author, Neil Rackham, said that classic five-step sales models are not effective for large and complex deals, such as B2B. According to SPIN, at each stage managers work with different types of questions that identify the customer’s problem, clarify and lead to a purchase:

How to create a sales funnel

Here is one example of a sales funnel:

When creating a sales funnel, you may think of the following:

• collect data
• define a goal for the funnel
• define the steps of the funnel
• create content for each step
• automate each step
• setup analytics 

After that's done, the last thing to do is to execute the sales funnel! Then, monitor each stage carefully to see where prospects drop off and optimize it for better results.