Understanding the B2B Sales Funnel
When it comes to B2B marketing, qualifying your sales leads is not an easy job. Given the several steps involved in a B2B customer journey, visualizing each one as a funnel can be insightful (and actionable). It identifies what’s helping and hurting conversion rates along a prospect’s journey to becoming a customer. Which in turn, helps optimize the journey and improve conversion rates.
What is a B2B Sales Funnel?
A B2B sales funnel is a visual model that illustrates a prospect’s journey. The funnel graphically represents the proportion of prospects present in all stages. It can also represent customer engagement and break down each interaction from first-touch to deal-won. Here’s why a B2B funnel differs from a B2C funnel:
* Unlike in B2C, a B2B prospect is composed of several decision-makers who would have to greenlight an investment.
* The sales cycle in B2B is considerably longer than a B2C one. This is not only because of the layers of approval required but also the meticulous research, review, and demos, and larger contract values.
* In a B2B endeavor, customer retention and the need to build a long-term relationship with clients are critical for long term success. Hence, brand building is placed on a pedestal for B2B customer engagement.
Breaking Down the Stages of the Funnel
Several terms exist for the different stages of the funnels. Functionally, however, most of them are relatively synonyms. For the sake of simplicity, a B2B sales funnel can be divided into 3 levels:
1. Top of Funnel (ToFu)
2. Middle of Funnel (MoFu)
3. Bottom of Funnel (BoFu)
Picture of funnel broken in three parts; top middle bottom. On the left of the funnel write down what is buyer intent?
On the right side of the funnel; list down the marketing efforts commonly used at that stage; like top stage is content marketing and blogs.
When guiding your users through the funnel, there are several you can use to assess whether you’re doing it successfully. These metrics can help you evaluate past performance, predict future trends and optimize your current efforts. Some of these are click- through- rate, conversion, content shares and SEO metrics. Analytics software like Factors and Google Analytics can be used according to your campaign goals, content channels and campaigns.
Top of sales funnel
The top of funnel level deals with the awareness and interest stage in a prospect’s journey. The objective of this stage is to consistently bring in fresh, new traffic. At this stage, prospects may not be entirely aware of the problem you’re solving. From a B2B standpoint, this not only involves your advertising, but is heavily centered around content marketing, educational content creation, & building a strong organic presence.
B2B prospects commonly require significant nurturing before going further down the funnel. For example, a company like Salesforce revolves their content strategy around CRM among other things educating prospects on all things CRM related and more.
Common top-of-the-funnel marketing touchpoints include:
- Blogs
- Podcasts
- E-Books
- Webinars
And key top-of-the-funnel metrics to track include:
- Number of site visits
- Web session duration
- Bounce rate
- Keyword rankings
- CTR
- Mail open rate
Middle of Sales Funnel
"This level of the funnel corresponds with the engagement stage of a prospect’s journey. After creating awareness and defining the problem, prospects would now evaluate their solutions. At this stage, you would need to build your brand authority and elucidate how your solution is the superior option." - says Milosz Krasinski, Managing Director at Chilli Fruit Web Consulting.
The approach to marketing changes at this level. Here, content becomes increasingly brand-oriented and employs lead magnets or gated content to bolster your brand authority. This can also be ensured by hosting webinars, events, and live-demos. MoFu blogs also tend to be more product heavy as opposed to industry-specific.
Common middle-of-the-funnel touchpoints include:
- Comparison articles
- Retargeted ads
- Product reviews
- Trial sign-ups
Bottom of Sales Funnel
Not to be confused with the expression “being at the bottom of the barrel”. The bottom of the funnel is a crucial stage in the buyer’s journey. It’s where you would ultimately want to guide all your prospects towards. It is known as the conversion stage because at this stage prospects make a purchasing decision and possibly convert into customers.
It must be noted that bottom of funnel prospects can vary depending on your conversion goal. It could even include prospects that sign up for a demo, make an account, mail a product query, or anything that expresses high engagement with the brand or product. Based on historical trends, you could identify which conversion goal is conducive to a prospect becoming an MQL, an SAL, or an SQL.
At this level, the sales team starts to get involved. It’s the combined effort of sales and marketing that ultimately onboard customers through promotional offers and strategies. Considering the B2B sales cycle, this is still a long, arduous process. The bottom of the funnel also helps form the ideal client profile which serves in identifying target accounts with ABM (account-based marketing).
How to Guide Users through the Sales Funnel
The core objective of the funnel is to help guide potential B2B customers through the process, without spending too much or overdoing it and driving them away from making a purchase. However, once you have identified what stage your customers are at- what next? It is important to take advantage of this new information to adapt your content to target your customers better.
Along each stage of the sales funnel, content must be curated to drive up customer engagement. And the type of content that customers expect differs at different stages of the funnel. Let’s look at how buyer intent differs across the three stages of the funnel:
1. Top of the funnel: The customer has arrived at your ad because there is a problem that they are facing. Present your content in a way that recognises their problem through educational webinars, blog posts and social media.
2. Middle of the funnel: Remember that at this point, your customer is still looking for a solution. This is when you build trust through content marketing campaigns, blog posts. You want them to be assured of the quality of your product and have faith in you.
3. Bottom of the funnel: In this last stage, make them aware that others before them have achieved the same goal with their products. Use testimonials, product USPs and case studies to drive your point home.
Flipping the Funnel: An Alternate Way
Instead of using the conventional B2B funnel, Binnet and Field suggest flipping the funnel. This means to think of the funnel as ‘in market’ and ‘out market’ buyers. Instead of looking at your B2B customer journey as a funnel that has a narrower customer base at each stage, focus on different aspects like ‘activation’ or ‘branding’ at the in market and out market stages respectively. Find out more about this alternate perspective here.
In Conclusion…
The stages of a B2B marketing funnel are diverse. Each stage adopts different types of content strategy, tactics, interactions, and analytics. This makes it all the more essential to compartmentalize efforts into an organized funnel, making the process disciplined.
The funnel not only keeps track of your prospects at each level but also identifies different pain points that limit prospects from moving down the funnel. Measuring your funnel helps distinguish your leads better too, which can be quite useful given that 79% of MQL are never converted to sales.
From a B2B angle, the funnel highlights the importance of efforts like SEO, building domain authority for TOFU and long-form product heavy blogs for MOFU, etc. Given the nature of B2B prospects, all these factors contribute to the movement down the funnel.
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