Sales funnels are an essential marketing concept that traces the journey of a customer when making a purchase. It is a funnel-shaped model that starts with a large number of potential customers and ends with a fraction of them making a purchase. There are three main stages in a sales funnel, namely the top, middle, and bottom. According to Salesforce, 68% of companies have not identified or measured their sales funnel, and 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales.
A sales funnel helps you understand your potential customers and what they think, do, and are looking for at every stage of their journey. It is important to align your content marketing efforts with the stages of the sales funnel in order to close more deals. Additionally, different niches have different sales funnels. For example, the affiliate marketing niche is very different from that of social media marketing.
Tracking the level of behavior and engagement at each stage can help you determine how well they're performing and where potential customers are in the sales funnel. In the middle of the sales funnel, they are often called prospects and at the bottom, when they make a purchase, they are called customers or customers.