What is a lead generation funnel?

Lead generation funnel is a common term used by many marketers from all over the world. You will hear them speak about the sales funnel. If this term is new to you, then don’t think it is the funnel object that we use for different purposes 9in our daily lives. It is given the name funnel given the structure it takes from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel. So, what is lead generation funnel?

A lead generation funnel can be thought of as a systematic way of generating leads and turning them to paying customers. The name funnel comes in because the number of leads gradually reduces at every stage until you end up with the least number as the converted customers.

As we have mentioned, sales funnel is systematic. This method has been deployed by many different marketing teams to increase sales by winning quality leads. In summary, a sales generation funnel consists of the following stages: driving traffic to your site, converting the traffic to leads, scoring leads, and converting them into customers. We are going to discuss this in three phases or stages as follows:

Top of the funnel

This is the very first stage where you use a lead magnet to attract people to your website. That is to say that you will be looking for ways of creating awareness about your project that will drive traffic to your website. The traffic is the beginning of everything and it is the stage with the highest number of people.

Here, you will see how you can convert the site visitors into leads. And since it is practically impossible to convert all the visitors into leads, you will just end up with a percentage of the visitors as leads. The captured leads are then allowed to move down to the middle level of the funnel.

Middle of the funnel

This is the second stage, and it involves many activities. Now that you have a contact list or mailing list, you need to start knowing your leads in detail. You may need more information about them such as what they do, where they come from, their profession or businesses, their age bracket, etc.

Armed with the needed information, you start the long journey of nurturing and scoring your leads. You need to build a good relationship with your leads and learn them better. You will be able to score them as either marketing quality leads (MQL) or sales quality leads (SQL) at the end of the lead nurturing phase. SQLs proceed to the bottom of the funnel while MQLs are recycled in the middle of the funnel.

Bottom of the funnel

This is the third and the last stage. You again receive a fraction of leads from the middle stage. This fraction is what is named sales qualified leads. Now you will need to start working on your sales leads and try to convert them into paying customers. At this stage, you start sending incentives and good discounts that will lure them into buying from you when their time for buying comes.

Again, you will only end up with a percentage of SQLs as the paying customers. The success rate will depend on how good you are at closing the sale deals. You and your team probably have an idea of how to best deal with this final group of your leads. This is where your money is and should be given all the considerations that it deserves.

 Lead generation funnel tracking

Tracking your funnel becomes easy when you are good at record-keeping or if you used automatic lead generation software that does this tracking automatically. By just a press of a button, you can have all the information that you need about the performance of your sales funnel.

The most important parameters that you need include the following:

• The number of visitors to your site or landing page
• The number of leads captured, that is, the size of the mailing list that you end up with
• The number of sales qualified leads and marketing qualified leads
• The number of SQLs that actually purchased from you
• The number of SQLs that just booked an appointment and did not proceed to purchase anything

All these parameters are needed to determine what needs to be changed or improved before you can start all over again. For instance, a high bouncing rate can indicate a problem with the landing page. So, a fix for it will be made.