🕵🏻‍♂️ B2B sales funnel

Hey ,

Today I'm revealing everything you need to know about B2B sales funnels.

First things first, a sales funnel (or sales pipeline) is a visualization of your sales process and a set of steps your company takes from sales prospecting to closing deals.

The core purpose of the sales funnel is to divide the sales process into micro stages in order to figure out where exactly you are losing leads and what part of the sales process needs to be improved.

A regular analysis of the sales funnel helps B2B organizations increase their close deal ratio, shorten the sales cycle, accelerate sales, and hit their revenue quota.

Although it sounds simple and obvious, many B2B companies get it wrong. In the next section, I'll show you one of the most common mistakes these companies make.

Common B2B sales funnel mistake

1898: Elias St. Elmo Lewis invented the AIDA model to describe a simple 4-step B2B lead generation and sales process:

1. Awareness. Prospects become aware of your product via advertising or word-of-mouth (e.g., top-of-the-funnel marketing or demand generation campaigns)

2. Interest. Prospects perceive the value of the product and express their interest in it, thus becoming leads (e.g., incoming inquiries or responses to the awareness campaign).

3. Desire. Leads then turn to salespeople for answers to the questions they have. In turn, salespeople answer questions, demonstrate product benefits to increase the urge to buy, and make a pitch. (for example, discovery or demo calls).

4. Action - Leads finally buy the product and become customers.

Simple?

You bet. But there's a caveat: simplifying a sales process was cool a hundred years ago. A lot has changed nowadays.

In a modern B2B world, you deal with multiple competitors, longer sales cycles, and not-sales-ready leads. Leads that aren’t actively seeking your product.

That's why simplifying your lead generation and sales processes with the AIDA model is likely to undermine their effectiveness.

What’s wrong with AIDA?

Here are a few reasons why the AIDA model isn't entirely reliable.

1. AIDA combines lead generation and sales processes

By default, AIDA means that you need to reach maximum prospects from your target addressable market and generate leads.

It makes sense for small, simple B2B businesses (e.g., cleaning services) that can rely solely on local SEO and AdWords.

For SMBs and enterprises, it's almost impossible to run a simple AdWords campaign to generate leads.

Why? Because you're dealing with a buying committee that needs to be warmed up and nurtured. What's more, you need to set up a lead scoring program and agree with the sales department on the criteria for passing on a lead to the sales team.

Your sales team should prospect and only talk to the leads who have been warmed up and fit the ideal customer profile. Otherwise, the sales and marketing teams may engage in a never-ending war of blaming each other for missing the revenue quota.

This leads us to the second reason why the AIDA model isn’t entirely reliable.

2. AIDA prompts B2B companies to prospect only sales-ready leads.

As mentioned above, AIDA only shows you leads that have replied to your direct campaign (e.g. retargeting or outreach). And unfortunately, this could mislead many companies.

How so? They could mistakenly think that this is the only channel that works.

Whereas, in the real modern B2B world, it takes multiple marketing and sales touches to generate a lead. And as such, the last contact is only part of the nurturing program.

So, if you rely solely on this last point of contact, you risk excluding other channels from your marketing programs. And consequently, your entire campaign could be adversely affected.

Not all leads are sales-ready.

According to Hubspot, only 3% of any given B2B market is actively buying at the moment. When you cut the top and middle of the funnel marketing programs, you miss 97% of your target addressable market.

Another issue with focusing on sales-ready leads is that marketing tends to transfer leads to sales without qualification.

According to Hubspot, 61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to sales without any prior screening, while only 27% of these leads are actually qualified. Result? I'll just let you guess.

3. AIDA doesn’t show where exactly you missed the lead.

If your sales funnel consists of these 4 simple stages: Reaching out, Booking A Call, Sending a proposal, Won/Lost, you’ll never understand where exactly you lost a deal and what you need to fix.

4. AIDA can’t replace the buyer journey.

Unfortunately, in B2B, we deal with a complicated buying process and long sales cycles. That’s why you need to understand the full funnel and address the entire buyer’s journey.

The full-funnel consists of demand generation and awareness programs, marketing qualification, lead nurturing, sales process, onboarding, customer satisfaction, and expansion processes.

To track the efficiency of the full funnel and all of these processes, I suggest creating three different funnels.

3 funnels every B2B organization needs

Here is a list of three core funnels you need to create and track separately.

1. Marketing funnel

The marketing funnel gives you a clear overview of generated sales pipeline value and the number of prospects on different customer journey stages. It helps you predict how many sales-qualified leads your sales team can expect in the next month or quarter and forecast the revenue quota.

2. Sales funnel

The sales funnel shows the efficiency of the sales process, revenue generated, and sales team productivity. In a sales funnel, we track successfully closed and lost deals.

3. Client success funnel

I rarely see a customer success funnel in B2B organizations, because they usually stop after sales. The reason is that many B2B companies have a "happy by default" mindset.

These companies rarely track customer satisfaction beyond generic NPS. They try to expand overnight instead of identifying opportunities to scale up their business. They don't do in-depth customer interviews, thinking that all customers are satisfied if they don't contact them, which is obviously not true.

You need a structured process for onboarding customers, tracking their satisfaction, preventing potential conflicts, generating case studies and referrals, and finally helping you identify opportunities to develop your business in collaboration with your customers.

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Adechina D. ODJO