Prospecting funnel

Today, we’re not here to discuss cooking 👩🍳 even if a prospecting funnel makes you want to get behind the stove. Come on, we’ll explain it all to you right now.

What is the prospecting funnel?

We’re not going to mess with your mind 🧠 right away. We’re going to let you understand what it is first, and giving you the definition of prospecting funnel.

In fact, you should know that the prospecting funnel method (also called marketing funnel) is a marketing method that will allow you to analyze the effectiveness of your prospecting methods.

It is called a prospecting funnel because of the shape it takes at each step. Indeed, at each step, the number of visitors will decrease as not all visitors will convert.

It will define the path that will allow you to transform the simple visitor into a promoter. It’s a tool 🔨 integral part of marketing automation, and it allows you to drive marketing campaigns, fine-tune your prospecting tactics and, most importantly, set up strategic conversions.

With the prospecting funnel, you will be able to evaluate the quality of the journey you have set up and identify your weak points. This method comes from the AIDA marketing concept and is also coupled with Inbound Marketing.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing aims to attract the customer to you rather than trying to go and get it back by yourself.

So how does it work? Well, you need to create engaging and useful content for a specific audience, your target.

Unlike television 📺 or even print, you’re going to have to let the customer come to you.

The main idea is to bring content through blogging, your website or even your social networks with the aim of building a relationship of trust ❤️ with your audience. By creating engagement and building trust with your audience, you will be able to increase your potential results.

You get the idea, if you decide to create engaging content, it’s because you’ve defined your target audience first.

It’s imperative to know your core target audience so you don’t sell a watch to a cobbler 👞 …

The more information you gather about your persona, the easier it will be for you to provide solutions to their pain points, and to build a prospecting funnel that converts.

You need to be able to bring him the right content at the right time at the right place. The point, to remind you, is that your visitor goes from leads then to customers ✨.

Don’t hesitate to maintain the customer relationship with the help of a CRM (Customer Relationship management), a powerful customer relationship management tool (it seemed logical) that will help you daily to manage your customer data.

The AIDA method

In digital marketing, the acronym AIDA method is widely used. It is a model that will allow the prospect to take action.

As you may have understood, taking action means buying a product or a service, stands for :

• A stands for “attention”: you need to capture your prospect’s attention by informing them about your products or services.
• I stand for “interest”: you will interest the prospect by potentially meeting his need.
• D stands for “desire”: you give your prospect the solutions that your product will provide.
• A stands for “action”: you make your prospect take action through a CTA (call-to-action). This can be to push him to buy, to download a white paper or to subscribe to your newsletter for example.

These are the 4 phases your prospects go through once they are interested in a product or service 🚀.

Why use the prospecting funnel method?

Are you a salesperson? The prospecting funnel will serve you well. And for good reason, thanks to this one, you will be able to know your conversion rate. 🤑

Especially in B2B, the whole issue is to be able to convert a lead into a customer or even a loyal customer.

Besides, this KPI will become one of your main elements to follow. Without this marketing strategy, you have little chance of seeing your marketing campaigns take off.

For each step, you need to be able to offer content that is relevant to your future customers. In fact, a prospecting funnel allows you to continually engage your targets 🎯 at each stage of their journey.

When you’re just starting out in your business, it’s important to go through this step. It will save you a lot of heartache. By integrating the prospecting funnel into your digital content strategy, you’ll avoid missing out on requests from your potential customers.

How to prospect?

Prospecting takes time ⌛ that’s not something we can teach you. On the other hand, using the right tools can save you precious time.

To get a good position, you can use various means such as:

• Social networks: you create your community and target the people who seem to be most interested in your products or services.
• Phone calls.
• SEO = reverse prospecting, by creating content, you allow your potential customers to come directly to you.
• Cold emails (or cold mailing) can also be part of your acquisition strategy and an integral part of your prospecting funnel.

To reiterate, a visitor is said to become a lead when they encounter your product for the first time and show interest ✨ to move on to the next (conversion type) steps.

The notion of the prospecting funnel is closely linked with inbound marketing. Indeed, through inbound marketing, you make the customer come to you by sharing who is likely to be interested in the right time and place.

How to calculate the conversion ratio of the prospecting funnel?

You don’t need to be good at math to measure your actions. We explain how to do the calculation.

Let’s say that during one of your prospecting campaigns that you carried out thanks to Waalaxy, you brought 150 leads from LinkedIn.

That’s 150 POTENTIAL buyers (we insist on this word). Here’s the prospecting funnel formula:

• Among these 150 prospects : 100 of them have decided to respond and show interest in your product or service.
• Out of these 100 leads : 10 were not interested, 25 ended up zapping and 15 were fake accounts.
• Finally, out of those 50 potential buyers you have left : 20 decide to test ✔️ the trial version and finally 8 decide to invest in your product or service.

At each stage, you simply divide the population of stage N by the population of stage N-1. This will allow you to both measure 📏 your prospecting funnel performance but also your entire pitch (the better it is, the more likely you are to convert).

Also, note that the Number of Leads / Converted Prospects’ ratio will need to be closer to 1. The closer it is, the more effective your prospecting funnel is.

Some important ratios

Calculating the performance of your different campaigns is crucial ⚡ when you want to implement prospecting actions. The main ratios you can focus on are:

• The conversion rate is the number of sales made / number of visitors who came to your site during a given period.
• Redemption rate: it is the percentage of the ratio between the number of returns of coupon codes (for example) entered in your e-commerce site and the total number of usable coupon codes.
• The contact rate is an important element if you are in the digital prospecting business. Indeed, it will help you to determine if your actions are efficient. It is measured by the number of contacts obtained on 100 opportunities.

The steps of the prospecting funnel or how to create your own

Before you start selling your products, you’re going to have to put strategies in place 🤓 to convert a visitor into a promoter of your brand.

The first thing you’ll need to do is attract your visitors through your content.

But through what means? You can of course use:

• The SEO which, although it is long to implement, will bring you sustainability in your strategy. You create content to bring visitors to your site.
• Google Ads or SEA will allow you to bid on keywords that you have selected and will allow your visitors to find you among the ads on Google.
• Social networks: implement your acquisition strategy on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram or even LinkedIn and prospect those who are most likely to buy your products.

Then you will have to convert 💸 this visitor into a qualified lead: this is the moment to give confidence to this visitor so that he leaves you key information such as email address or phone number. From there, you will have to maintain the relationship with this visitor. This is commonly known as lead nurturing.

The next phase, and the last of your prospecting funnel, is to convert the prospect into a customer: this is the decisive phase.

You must offer this prospect a solution to his problem and respond in a way that is adapted to his needs by simplifying the journey and eliminating the friction points.

Case study: examples of the prospecting funnel

Waalaxy’s prospecting funnel

Right away, let’s tell you about us, we know we’re not the navel of the world but who is better placed than Waalaxy 🌌 to talk about Waalaxy?

We’re going to reveal a little bit about how our prospecting funnel works. You should know that we mainly use 3 customer acquisition channels:

• Google Ads will allow us to see results immediately. The goal is simple: bid on keywords to appear in the top search ads on the queries you have targeted.
• SEO: We write content to teach you how to use Waalaxy, to help you understand some marketing terms… When you type in a keyword and click on our link, it means we have succeeded in answering your query. That’s the whole point of SEO, to put up content that serves to draw you to us 😈.
• LinkedIn: If you hang out a bit on this professional social network, chances are you’ve seen some of our posts go by ✍️. When we post, we are also giving our product visibility and, although it’s not measurable at this point, some of our leads come from there.

Once we’ve managed to get your attention, you’ll drop by our site and, driven by curiosity, some of you will go test this little Chrome extension. So we become a qualified lead.

Once the test period is over, the most interested will take a subscription. They will become customers. Once they have renewed this subscription, they will become loyal customers.

The Holy Grail 🏆 is reached when one of our loyal customers becomes a promoter. He is satisfied, so he talks about it and allows us to win new customers.

The Netflix prospecting funnel

If you’re into Netflix and Chill parties 👹 well, you should know that we don’t offer that here. However, we will explain how their prospecting funnel works.

Their marketing message is well-defined, and when a user goes on their platform, he knows what he will find: movies, series (and why not documentaries).

Once the visitor arrives at the page, the CTA invites us to try it for a little while. Netflix catches you in its nets 🕸️, you become a qualified prospect. Once your trial period is over, you take out a subscription (which, moreover, is cancelable at any time, so it reassures the user).

The prospect thus officially becomes a customer. By not cancelling your subscription, you become a loyal customer since it is automatically renewed every month.

Concerning the promoters, we don’t tell you, the simple fact of hearing: “Have you seen the Netflix adaptation of this last movie? ” is enough to create hundreds of thousands.

The limits of the prospecting funnel

As you grow, you’ll quickly perceive that the prospecting funnel isn’t the only thing to consider in your lead generation.

If you don’t spend some time on it, it will cost you money 💸 because you won’t have optimized it well.

To make this prospecting funnel effective, you need to define a marketing content strategy that will allow you to build your brand reputation and thus build a community.

The prospecting funnel is mainly used to map out your prospecting funnel and essentially understand your strengths and weaknesses.

And thanks to this, you will be able to adjust your prospecting strategy to better optimize your results.

Use Waalaxy as a prospecting tool

You can totally use the great Waalaxy tool 🔥 in your prospecting efforts. We even advise you to do so because on LinkedIn, you can generate 80% of B2B leads, it would be a shame to go without.

With our automation tool, it becomes easier to prospect. Indeed, you can run campaigns on thousands of prospects at the same time and this, in a personalized way.

Ribbon 🎀 on the giveaway, you can very well also do A/B testing at a lower cost to find out what works best with your prospects.

Moreover, the software comes with a dashboard that will allow you to track all your actions in real time.

Conclusion – Know everything about the prospecting funnel

In short, the prospecting funnel is the key to sustainable business growth. 🔑 It’s also a crucial strategic lever to maximize the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

📍 By segmenting the customer journey into different stages—from attraction to retention—you not only optimize the conversion of prospects into customers, but also enhance the quality of the experience at every interaction.

Each stage of the funnel requires tailored techniques, as previously explained, to nurture and qualify leads. 💎

Mastering this tool allows you to refine your strategy, increase conversion rates, and build long-term loyalty, all while reducing acquisition costs.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Why use the prospecting funnel?

By making use of this marketing tool 💡 you will be able to know the sticking points regarding the sale of your product or service. With the prospecting funnel, you will have the ability to get quantifiable results at each stage of the funnel, namely:

• The number of potential leads.
• Interested potential customers.
• Prospects who have already been in contact with your product or service.
• The number of customers who have requested a quote from you.
• The number of customers who have purchased your product.

Note that these steps may vary depending on your type of prospecting. Thanks to the prospecting funnel you will be able to calculate the percentage of prospects who have passed through each stage.

When you know these numbers, it becomes easier to readjust your strategy according to the landing stages.

How to create your prospecting funnel?

A quick recap of how to create your prospecting funnel:

• Choose the means by which you will attract the visitor:
  • SEO: make the customer come to you by writing quality content.
  • Social networks: build your community.
  • SEA: buy the keywords you want to rank on so your users can find you.
  • Cold email: contact your prospects through their email inbox by promoting your products or services.
• Make your visitor become a lead by getting as much information as possible, such as:
  • Phone number 📱.
  • Emails.
  • Mailing address.
• Convert 🔥 your lead into a customer: this is the step we all wait for. The visitor was interested, and he buys a product from you.
• The customer becomes a promoter: the goal is for your customer to recommend your product or service through referrals or word of mouth.

What are the limits of the prospecting funnel?

The prospecting funnel is a tool that will help you increase your results. If you don’t pair it with an acquisition strategy or if from the start you make the mistake of not targeting 🎯 the right audience, then your business won’t take off.

Remember, you need to strategize at each stage of the pyramid and calculate your ROI to know if you are on the right path or if you need to adjust your strategy.

You now know everything about the prospecting funnel. On your marks, get set, prospect 🚀!