You already know how a sales funnel works: your potential customers become aware of your company, use search engines and social media to do some research, check out social proof like reviews or comparison shopping sites, call your sales team with questions, and then buy what you’re selling (or not).
That entire customer journey from prospect to customer is the sales process and can be visualized as a sales funnel.
But how can we optimize that? There must be a way, right?
Turns out, there is. This post will explain how the sales funnel has evolved from a basic view to multiple phases. We’ll look at how different businesses use sales funnels to drive revenue by closing deals left and right and how you can use the sales funnel model to increase your team’s effectiveness and revenue.
Pssst... Want to know how to optimize your B2B Sales Funnel for maximum conversions? Check out our article.
What is a Sales Funnel and How Does it Work?
We use a funnel shape for two reasons. First, the sales funnel works like a regular funnel. Liquid poured into the wide end moves down a gravity-driven path to the narrow exit and is not meant to go back up, the same way prospects move through the sales pipeline.
Second, the top of the funnel is full of leads, but as the leads move through the sales process, many are lost along the way. Very rarely will all your leads turn into closed sales, and there is attrition at each stage of the journey.
This is not always the salesperson's fault, as there may have been unwanted or low-quality leads that fall away. This is all part of refining your audience and converting the right ones to the funnel's bottom stage.
The sales process has evolved significantly over the years. Today, customer-centricity is the backbone of successful businesses. Companies have realized that customers should be at the heart of everything they do. As a result, they have expanded the traditional “AIDA” model (awareness, interest, desire, and action) to add a phase on customer retention and loyalty.
Sales and marketing teams work to push prospects through the customer journey and down the funnel, establishing clear calls to action (CTA) for moving from stage to stage.
Different sales funnel models will have different names for some of these phases, and some may tie in the potential customer's phase, from lead to qualified lead to prospective, etc.
Tools like the Close Sales Funnel Calculator can be incredibly useful for optimizing sales funnels effectively. It helps visualize your sales pipeline, showing exactly where potential leaks might be and how many leads you need to grow your revenue more efficiently. With such tools, you can gain actionable insights to refine each stage of your sales funnel.
Stages of the Sales Funnel
Different organizations may have slightly different approaches or different names within the funnel. Let’s start with a broader view of the funnel’s three key sections.
Top of the Funnel (TOFU)
The top of the funnel (TOFU) is the first key section of the funnel. This section covers the beginning of the customer journey when customers become aware of the need and discover your business while looking for answers. The top of the funnel is typically broken into two stages: awareness and interest.
- The Awareness Stage is called such because it’s when the potential buyer becomes aware of the need for a certain product/service or determines there is a problem that needs to be solved. During the awareness stage, buyers are looking for lots of information, so that’s where search engines, social media, and marketing come into play. Content types such as deep-dive blog posts, ebooks, whitepapers, checklists, industry reports, and educational webinars can be great lead magnets for the awareness stage.
- In the Interest Stage, your prospects have become aware of your business and have provided their contact information to you. They are now referred to as leads. During this part of the sales process, they look for different solutions and try to figure out what is the right one for their needs. This is the stage where your prospect is reading expert guides, watching how-to videos, requesting demos, or booking meetings. At this point, the lead’s biggest concern is collecting the right information to make an informed decision. At the end of the interest stage, your lead may lose interest and drop out. This is normal in the process.
Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)
The middle of the funnel (MOFU) is the phase in which prospects know their needs and research different solutions. It can be divided into consideration and intent stages.
- The Consideration Stage happens when the customer has identified the features they need to ease their pain points and is ready to consider the different products or services that include such features. They’re immersed in product demos, training videos, product reviews, free trials, vendor comparison charts, case studies, and more. Concurrently, the salesperson should consider whether the prospect is a good fit. This is done by asking qualifying questions and determining if the prospect is a qualified lead.
- A lead can be identified as being in the Intent Stage when they fit your ideal customer profile and become highly engaged in the sales process. A salesperson’s top priority is keeping high-intent leads engaged, showing them high value and a great experience. This stage is later in the process, so it’s also the time when leads have lots of questions, relay any previously unspoken objections, and address remaining pain points.
Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU)
The bottom of the funnel (BOFU) phase is at the end of the sales funnel where customers are equipped with all the information they need to make an educated decision and choose the right solution for their needs. The two prominent phases here include the purchase and loyalty stages.
- The Purchase Stage happens when all your marketing and sales efforts pay off. All previous stages are paving the way from awareness to action, and this is when it finally happens: you convert your prospect to a customer.
- In the Retention and Loyalty Stage, customers have, in effect, exited the funnel and landed in an exclusive club with fabulous benefits. An account manager teaches them how to maximize their new purchase while the club’s restaurant offers fresh content and general training to nourish them.
- In this stage, your customers feel so good about their experience that they can’t imagine leaving the exclusive club that is being your customer. They even become brand advocates, giving reviews, sharing their impressions on social media, and recommending your businesses to their network, which adds new prospects to your sales funnel, and the sales cycle starts again!
Suppose you’re using a good CRM system. In that case, you’ll see various statistics like your sales funnel conversion rate, the points where prospects leave the funnel without buying (also known as funnel leaks), and lead qualification data. This data can benefit companies of all sizes, from small businesses to giant corporations.
Have you seen our guide to effective lead conversion with MQL vs. SQL? It's a must-read.
11 Top Examples of Effective Sales Funnels
Let’s look at eleven of the best examples of sales funnels in action.
1. Close
Close is a high-performance CRM that gives sales teams the tools to record opportunities and effectively manage their leads.
Their headline draws the prospect in and gives a nice overview of what Close is about. A clean pay layout, meanwhile, makes it super easy for a prospect to enter their sales funnel. The prospect must press "start a free trial," and their service can begin. Once they do this, they’re part of Close’s sales funnel.
With Close automation software, leads are scored in real time based on thousands of data points. Prospects are then directed to either the self-serve funnel or if their lead score is high enough, an Account Executive will reach out to consult them on how to get the most out of Close.
The benefit here is that sales reps aren’t tied down to responding to every lead that walks through the door. Prioritization through lead scoring allows reps to focus on the biggest deals with the most complicated use cases, spending their time answering questions and showing the prospect how effective the platform can be.
For smaller deals or those with standardized use cases, prospects can investigate the software, see how it solves their problems, and even start a free trial themselves. (Yes, that trial eventually ends—but only after showing the user how incredible our platform is!)
The result? The sales team spends more time selling and closing high-value contracts while the less complicated deals roll right in. That, my friend, is a win-win.
How to use this in your sales funnel: Don’t overcomplicate your homepage with too much detail. Instead, focus on encouraging trials, demos, and sign-ups or getting bottom—and mid-funnel prospects the information they need to convert. Then, use lead scoring to prioritize the leads, allowing your team to focus on the biggest and best deals possible.
2. Brevo (previously Sendinblue)
Brevo is a SaaS company offering a cloud-based marketing communication software suite with many tools to help you learn digital marketing and improve your company’s standing within your industry.
When someone enters the Brevo website, they are met with several options to sign up for a free trial. A user can click the "Sign Up Free" button on the top right of the screen or click the "Take a Free Test Drive."
If the prospect isn't ready to sign up immediately, they can scroll down the page and read more about Brevo's offerings.
The Brevo homepage is laid out according to the AIDA model mentioned above. The standout words "Prepare for takeoff" grab the user's attention at the top of the page before building interest with information about the different tools Brevo offers.
Underneath the product offerings, users can navigate through the customer testimonials page, which builds their desire for the product before again being offered the chance to take action by signing up for a free trial at the bottom.
Consider incorporating video testimonials on the page instead of the usual text-based version. Video testimonials can be highly effective in building desire for the product, as they allow potential customers to see and hear real-life examples of the product in action.
However, ensuring that these video testimonials are professionally produced is essential to maintain high authenticity. Companies may want to consider investing in professional video testimonial production apps to achieve this.
When users click on one of three CTAs (Calls to action), they are brought to a simple landing page where they can enter their contact details. Then, Brevo can nurture the prospect through targeted email marketing and move the prospect down the funnel.
By taking up the free trial, the prospect also gets to try out the product for free and under no financial pressure; if they have a positive experience, they’re much more likely to become a paying customer.
How to use this in your sales funnel: Capture your site visitors’ interest immediately with an interesting visual or headline. Keep it short and intriguing. Then, draw users in with exciting details that frame your product as the solution to their problems. Include current customer testimonials and social proof, then drive the whole thing home with a solid yet simple CTA.
3. Aura
Like Brevo's homepage, AI company Aura draws the user in with a bold headline. At the same time, one of the main benefits of their service is put right under the headline.
This hooks the reader and entices them to click the "Learn more" button if they need to know more before signing up for a free trial.
Companies offer free trials to allow users to try their service for free, usually for a limited period. This allows users to try out the software, learn its features, and experience how it can solve the issue they’re trying to solve.
Free trials are a lead generation method aimed at hooking prospects into converting them over time to paying customers; while free trials may not make sense for all SaaS companies, they can be powerful when used correctly.
Peter Cohen, the author of ’Practical Advice on SaaS Marketing,’ points out that a "Free trial without a well-constructed follow-up effort isn’t worth much." While free trials have their upsides, it’s important to note that they can still cost the company money in terms of any ongoing customer support required and any customer setup fees.
It’s important to note that the percentage of prospects who sign up for a free trial but don’t convert will be higher if a company doesn’t have a follow-up strategy. Those who don’t convert after follow-up can be added to a retargeting campaign for future contact.
How to use this in your sales funnel: Offer users an option to try your product before buying in one of two ways. First, users can add a credit card signup when creating their trial account, which is later charged after the trial period, allowing users to continue using your product. A second option is to provide a free trial with no credit card required, where access to your product is cut off for that user once their trial period ends.
4. Cobloom
A free consultation offer is often a great addition to your sales funnel if your business provides services rather than products.
The free consultation sales funnel is used in slightly different circumstances to the free trial funnel. Free trial funnels are commonplace in the SaaS industry, while "free consultations" are used more frequently for high-end services, like business growth consultants.
Take, for example, Cobloom, a consultancy that advises SaaS businesses on addressing their audiences, developing targeted creative strategies, setting and aligning goals, and adjusting their pricing models.
Cobloom’s site encourages users to learn about its different services. At the end of every informational page, there is a CTA to request a free consultation.
Using a free consultation works well, especially in knowledge-based services, as it offers potential clients peace of mind and relevant information they'll need if they need to hire a consultant without committing to an upfront spend.
If a prospect is interested in booking a free consultation, they need only press the "free consultation," fill out the contact form, describe their company, and book the consultation.
At the end of the consultation, providing the business is in a good place for growth; the Cobloom team can ask the lead if they’d like to move forward and become a client. This situation takes the pressure off the prospect, particularly if their budget is tight or they want to save money.
How to use this in your sales funnel: Adding a Free Consultation CTA to your website is as easy as adding a form. Make contact fields like name, email, and phone number required information, but also include an option for your leads to tell you more about their situation so you have a leg up on your research before contacting them.
5. Jumio
Jumio helps ensure your customers are exactly who they say they are—and that your business remains free of fraud and financial crime. With offices around the globe, Jumio has processed over a billion web and mobile transactions.
So, what makes Jumio’s sales funnel special? In addition to well-placed CTAs across their homepage, they offer live chat to serve your needs.
Upon landing on their homepage, a chat window opens asking if you’re looking for product info, need support, would like to chat with the sales team, or are just browsing. Before being connected to your resource of choice, you’re asked to share your email address in case you get disconnected.
Those who select "Chat with Sales" are instantly matched with a live sales rep to help answer questions, introduce product features, and build rapport. If no sales reps are available, users are presented with an entire calendar of times and dates to set an appointment with a sales rep. How’s that convenient?
How to use this in your sales funnel: Chatbots are handy, but live chat instills a sense of transparency and personalized attention that a bot can’t provide. If your team has the capacity, consider adding a live chat window to your homepage and setting your sales reps up to converse with curious leads who come in. After all, who could be better at answering questions about your product and encouraging new sign-ups?
6. OptinMonster
OptinMonster is the king of "catch-all" marketing funnels. The moment you land on the home page, you will see why. They have limited-time deals, exit intent pop-ups, lowered pricing, and great CTAs. But how do all of these sales funnel puzzle pieces fit together?
- Limited-Time Deals: Nothing drives urgency more than a deal about to expire. Encourage leads to strike while the iron is hot and before that deal expires.
- Exit Intent Pop-Ups: OptinMonster serves a pop-up showing that “70% of your visitors do what you just did and never come back.” How’s that for awareness? The pop-up then provides a link to a 35% discount to encourage you to return to the site.
- Strong, Repeated CTAs: No one needs to guess what OptinMonster wants you to do. With four CTAs to “Get OptinMonster Now,” one “Get Started,” and one “Get Started Now”—all of which land on their pricing page—it seems like OptinMonster wants site visitors to select a plan and get started.
- Lowered Pricing: Speaking of pricing, once users land on that pricing page, they’re presented with four options, each with a red strike through the normal cost and a significantly lower current price on display.
These four tactics are great examples of how you can include multiple methods to trigger urgency as part of your conversion technique.
How to use this in your sales funnel: These examples are easy to implement and can usually be done in a day or two. Work with your web team to add promotional language, repeated CTAs, lowered prices, and a pop-up banner to your site. While some of those elements may require some design work, most can be accomplished with simple text updates.
7. SmartPassive Income
SmartPassive Income’s free webinar sales funnel allows them to build a personal connection with their prospects. This is particularly beneficial as many of their marketing states that they’ll work alongside prospects when they want to start their own business or earn passive income.
Webinars can feel more personal for the prospect, particularly if they want to know more about the solution, the pain points it solves, and a plethora of FAQs.
With 72 percent of consumers preferring to watch a video over reading an article, it’s not uncommon for webinars to generate more leads than free downloadable resources like ebooks or white papers. Keep in mind that you should always test what works for your own audience. The best-performing lead generation assets in Close's free sales resource depository, for example, are ebooks.
ClickFunnels suggests that, on average, 20 percent to 40 percent of webinar attendees turn into qualified leads, while about five percent of attendees will purchase at the end. That’s a pretty good conversion rate. If we apply these stats to the SmartPassive Income example above, two will become paying clients for every 50 attendees they attract to a webinar.
How to use this in your sales funnel: A great starting point for building a webinar series is to list the most common questions your sales team gets about your product and then turn each question into its own webinar.
Schedule topics throughout the year, ideally with at least one each month, and start promoting your series on your website, email blasts, and social media. Have interested users register on your website to collect their information and send them a link for the Zoom call and calendar invite. Look at that; now you have their contact info and an opportunity to show how your product solves their problems!
8. Semrush
Meet Semrush, a global leader in search engine optimization — or, in layman’s terms, getting your website to appear at the top of your users’ Google searches.
Semrush is best-in-class for a couple of reasons: First, and unsurprisingly, they know how to get new leads to their website. But what do they do with them from there? Well, they convert them.
Being at the forefront of SEO, Semrush has a wealth of knowledge that many seek to tap into. While they previously offered an extensive ebook library, they continue to provide valuable insights and resources in other formats, ensuring that their expertise remains accessible to a global audience eager to learn from the best.
Of course, each of those titles is a lead magnet in its own right, requiring your name, email address, and phone number to download. After entering their email address, the prospect has entered the company's sales funnel, and the company can then nurture the prospect down their sales funnel.
A lead magnet acts as an incentive for prospects to enter their details to receive a piece of content (e.g., an ebook, a report, a training guide, or a video) that either educates them or solves a particular problem.
Lead magnets work well to increase the number of subscribers to an email list or blog and help transition prospects from the 'awareness' stage to the 'interest' stage of a sales funnel.
How to use this in your sales funnel: Pub how-to guides, best practices, and other relevant industry knowledge your company excels in. After all, you’re the expert in your arena, and others want to learn from you.
Save your documents as PDFs, then create a simple form with the required fields for name and contact information. After submitting the form, documents can be automatically emailed to the email address provided, or users can be directed to a landing page with the document download.
9. Netflix
A sales funnel we’ve all probably entered at one time or another is Netflix’s.
Netflix attracts new customers by offering them 30 days of free service before payment. As shown in the two screenshots above, Netflix places a large CTA button that tells the prospect that they get 30 days of free service.
Netflix utilizes a 7-stage sales funnel model that has proved extremely successful in attracting millions of subscribers worldwide.
The seven-stage of Netflix’s funnel are:
- Sales funnel landing page
- Plan introduction page
- Plan pricing page showing different upsell and cross-sell options
- Create an account introduction page
- Create an account sign-up page
- Payment method page
- Payment details page
The Sales Funnel guides the user step by step, from entering their contact information to providing payment information at the end. Once the payment details are inputted, users can enjoy 30 days of free service before their paid service begins.
When users sign up for Netflix, their billing will auto-renew every month until they cancel. Interestingly, a study by Fintech Startup Hiatus found that almost 62 percent of consumers have unintentionally paid for subscriptions because of an auto-renew feature. This means there are probably quite a few Netflix subscribers who have meant to cancel their subscriptions but haven’t.
How to use this in your sales funnel: Require users to input their credit card details when they sign up for your trial, and have them agree to auto-renewed monthly subscriptions that begin immediately after the trial period. Alternatively, you can give users the option of selecting one-time payment subscriptions or slightly discounted auto-renew subscriptions.
10. Dropbox
One of the things Dropbox does best is to provide an incredibly personalized experience on its website.
Anyone who lands on their homepage will first be greeted by an incredibly hard-to-miss “Start for free” call to action. But if the user isn’t ready for that, they can scroll down the page, where they’ll see questions that work to create a choose-your-own-adventure type of experience.
For instance, the first question asks users, "What can Dropbox help you do?” Clickable answers span getting free cloud storage, accessing online storage for the whole family, and simplifying work processes. Each of these options, of course, leads the user to a dedicated landing page with pricing and sign-up forms for each respective area of interest.
Additional actions down the homepage encourage users to learn about using Dropbox for work or personal use, investigate partner integrations, view customer stories, and explore pricing options. No matter what the user is interested in, Dropbox makes sure they can find a solution that fits their needs and validates Dropbox as the solution.
Of course, Dropbox is no stranger to lead conversion. They’re well-remembered for an incredibly successful explainer video that earned the company $48,000,000 in revenue from new users in 2009. And it turns out video is just as effective today, too. A 2024 report by explainer video company Wyzowl found that 89 percent of video marketers say video gives them a good ROI, while 80 percent of video marketers reported that video has directly helped increase sales.
How to use this in your sales funnel: When building or refreshing your website design, consider your target audience and their needs. Develop clear paths for each audience type and create targeted landing pages specific to that user.
11. HelpScout
The final sales funnel example we’ll examine is HelpScout. HelpScout provides an all-in-one customer service platform to over 11,000 businesses in 140 countries.
In this example, the user can start a free 15-day trial of the platform or book a demo to see the platform in action. If prospects sign up for a demo, they are now in HelpScout’s sales funnel.
From here, HelpScout can utilize an email marketing service to send the prospect information before their scheduled demo.
Their home page layout is clear and concise; there’s no messy background, a clear CTA, and lots of social proof, making it easy for a prospect to start a free trial or book a demo.
The ‘book a demo’ sales funnel is normally used when a company wants to target customers who need personalized help or advice. Demos are usually necessary for software services with a higher price point and can be a great opportunity for a sales rep to show off the software's features and benefits.
How to use this in your sales funnel: Create a clean experience on your website—especially your homepage—with one, or a maximum of two, clear calls to action front and center. These should be your highest-value calls to action. Two CTAs we’d recommend including are signing up for a trial, where leads can explore your product at their own pace, or booking a demo, allowing your engaging sales team to start building a relationship.
Why is a Sales Funnel so Important?
For most of us, a visual representation of even the simplest concept helps form a deeper understanding. Using the sales funnel concept with your team illustrates the path that a prospect needs to take to conversion. The sales funnel is important to ensure the sales team is properly screening for ideal customers from the lead sources that marketing efforts generate, such as website visitors, trade show attendees, etc.
When salespeople and managers understand each part of their sales funnel, they can identify issues and work to fix them quickly.
A sales funnel needs to be monitored and improved consistently. This means identifying funnel leaks and patching them with better attention, sales training, marketing collateral development, and product improvements.
Sales managers and company executives can use your company’s CRM software to view where each contact is in the buying process, review each salesperson’s own sales funnel and look for leaks or clogs to see where they may need coaching or resources, and evaluate factors along the sales process that affect customer retention and loyalty — all using the sales funnel model.
How to Measure the Success of a Sales Funnel
During each sales funnel stage, there are factors that indicate success and metrics to look at regularly, including some of my tips to take your measurements to the next level.
Leads
Track beyond the total number of leads to include qualified leads.
Take this to the next level: Work with your marketing team on SEO optimization, google search analytics, and marketing campaign improvement. Then, analyze if the percentage of qualified leads increases each month.
Conversion Rate
Measure your closed-won sales conversion rate across the company and for each salesperson.
Take this to the next level: Track conversion rates from stage to stage of the sales funnel. You may discover that leads leak out of the funnel at the purchase stage because your competitor’s contract language is easier to understand. Use the feedback from your sales team to make changes to fix any issues that are losing sales staff.
Acquisition Costs
Calculating the total cost spent on customer acquisition is an important variable. This cost includes all the marketing and sales costs you pay to acquire a new customer.
Take this to the next level: Measure both acquisition costs for leads and customers. Then, calculate how long it will take you to recoup those costs from the customer’s revenue.
Lifetime Customer Value
Calculate the LTV to help determine how effectively your business model performs over time. Determine each customer’s base revenue and the value added from upsells and cross-selling. The LTV is equal to the customer’s actual (or projected) annual value times the number of years in an average lifespan.
Take this to the next level: Find your LTV, then implement a strategy to increase retention and promote more upselling, thus increasing LTV. Be sure to start tracking LTV over time to measure your strategy's success.
Sales Cycle Length
This tracks how long it takes to advance along the funnel from one phase to the next. It will give you a picture of slow spots in the sales process.
Take this to the next level: Find slow spots and work to bring them up to speed with training, resources, or other tweaks.
Referral Rate
The referral rate shows the number of referrals you receive from existing customers and the number of existing customers who send you referrals.
Take this to the next level: Find exactly how these referrals happen. Industry leaders could share at trade shows, customer evangelists could sing praise during podcasts, people could endorse your company on LinkedIn and social media, or forward your content marketing materials to their peers.
What About eCommerce?
Suppose your company’s primary revenue stream is eCommerce. In that case, you might not have an individual sales team. You can still apply these principles to website design, SEO strategy, digital advertising, social media, and other tools like live chat, customer service systems, etc. Yes, the marketing strategies involved in e-commerce are a little different, but the customer journey is the same.
How to Use These Sales Funnel Examples on Your Sales Team
Understanding and visualizing the sales funnel stages helps close more deals. While there are quite a few sales funnel models, most focus on moving a prospect from the awareness stage to the interest stage.
Once a prospect has entered the sales funnel, companies can engage in targeted follow-up campaigns to move them further down the funnel toward a conversion. Nurtured leads make 47 percent larger purchases than non-nurtured leads, so take the time to set up your sales funnel using templates, case studies, and phone follow-ups appropriate for the prospect’s location in the funnel.
We’re pretty proud of the sales funnel tools built into Close, and we think you will be, too. You can try Close free for two weeks (you don’t even need to enter your credit card info). You can also find over a dozen free resources on the Close Resources page. These tools will have you putting the fun in sales funnels in no time.
