Introduction: What Is A Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is a series of stages that a potential customer (called “lead” or “prospect”) goes through before buying a product or service.

The values – the number of prospects at each stage of the buying process – reduce as we go deeper into the process, and this takes the shape of a funnel. This is why the customer journey, or shape of the journey, is called a “sales funnel”

Here is an example of a hypothetical sales funnel:

Why Does A Company Need A Sales Funnel?

Customers today are increasingly digital and consume content, shop, and watch movies online. Therefore, it has become mandatory for most companies to build a website that matches the actions taken by the prospect before becoming a customer.

Whether a company has 10 customers or hundreds and thousands, a well-designed sales funnel helps the company’s sales team guide potential customers through the entire buying journey and gives valuable data and insights about buyer behavior.

Cost and charges for a sales funnel

A sales funnel can be a simple or complex funnel depending on the company’s business, its customer journey, and the levels of interaction between the sales, marketing, and CRM departments of the company. A basic sales funnel which includes a lead magnet, an offer page, an upselling offer, and a follow-up process could cost anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000.

These are upfront costs. Factor in the monthly or annual maintenance costs, costs of maintaining a team to manage the funnel and upgrade charges, and the costs of running a functional sales funnel can be high.

Not all companies are willing or able to invest this much in a sales funnel. A start-up or small enterprise may not even have the resources or funds to implement an off-the-shelf sales funnel template or design its sales funnel.

Excel spreadsheets – a low-cost solution for sales funnels

So, how can a company get around the constraint of limited budgets to build the sales funnel? A simple way is to use a sales pipeline excel spreadsheet. There are several excellent, and free, templates in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, and other apps which use a spreadsheet to track prospects and customers through the customer journey.

Sales funnels using spreadsheets can be built manually or with a built-in template which is found in the above-mentioned software. The starting point for such a sales funnel is the raw data that the company collects, from leads to conversion and sales:

How To Make A Funnel In Excel

The process for making a sales funnel using an existing Excel template is very simple. We can use the above raw data example here:

1. Select the cells containing the stages and values (A1:B6)
2. Click on “Insert”
3. Select “Insert Waterfall, Funnel, Stock, Surface, or Radar Chart.”
4. Choose “Funnel.”

Visually, these steps can be presented as under:

This process gives a simple and basic sales funnel chart, which looks like this:

We can do further enhancements such as changing the color of each data series, changing font colors, adding data labels, and removing unwanted chart elements.

This sales funnel method can be used by small businesses as an alternative to expensive CRM software and customized funnel software that can be expensive to buy and maintain.

This format can be modified to present and track contacts, sales estimates, deal status, and any other information required to give the company management a snapshot of the status of each stage of the sales funnel. 

 Excel Sales Funnel Templates

As companies become more complex in their operations and build a larger customer base, they might have to go beyond a manually-built sales funnel, which requires intensive data management and adaptation to changes in forecasts, to a readily-available sales funnel template.

Companies can still stay within the “excel spreadsheet” format but can use one of several excellent templates to automate the sales funnel design, development, and reports.

As we mentioned earlier, sales funnel spreadsheet templates can be found in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, and several apps. Let us look at some of the key templates that companies use. The templates can be classified under the following categories:

1. Excel templates
2. Google Sheets templates
3. Native app templates

Excel spreadsheet templates

1. Microsoft Excel
   1. The most popular spreadsheet template
   2. Preloaded with Microsoft 365 on millions of computers worldwide
   3. Offers a detailed forecasting tool with calculations and graphic visualizations
2. Tipsographic
   1. This template is good for companies just starting out and have a few sales deals
   2. It can be easily customized
   3. It also has options for additional information such as sales forecasts and expected deal closure
3. Smartsheet
   1. This is a very detailed template
   2. It is organized by quarters
   3. It includes space for additional information like sales forecasts, contact details, probable deal closure timelines and forecast earnings for each quarter
4. Salesmate
   1. This format has a very clean design
   2. It also has several options for easy customization
   3. It allows modification of the sales probability formula to give more accurate forecasts

Google Sheets templates

The advantage of using Google Sheets is that the templates and sales funnels are available online so that they can be accessed from anywhere. Google Sheets can also be linked to automation software such as Zapier to add information from other sources and present a more detailed sales funnel.

The templates available in Google Sheets include:

1. Indzara tracker
   1. This is an extremely visual template
   2. It presents data in various visual formats, making it easy to understand the data and information given
   3. It also has a graph generator to present complex data sets easily
   4. A key benefit is the ability to identify sales funnel leakage so that the company can take appropriate action to reduce the leakage
2. Sales Hacker
   1. This format can be modified to present sales data by quarter
   2. It also allows slightly more complex calculations such as deal probability, funnel stage, weighted forecasts and other information
   3. This template also has space for including macro data such as market economics and opportunity analysis
3. SalesTable
   1. Gives visibility on open, closed and probable sales deals
   2. Can be easily customized
   3. Has a highly visual format

Native app templates

Many productivity apps in use today have in-built templates for building a spreadsheet-based sales funnel. Most apps have a basic template that is free and more complex templates that can be purchased for a monthly fee or through a one-time annual payment.

The five app templates most used include:

1. Trello
   1. This template is based on the “Kanban” workflow management and team collaboration principle
   2. This format allows the tagging of the most promising prospects
   3. This template also allows adding more users, checklists for tracking progress and a collaboration feature to connect with colleagues in real-time
2. Airtable
   1. This is an intuitive and somewhat more advance template
   2. It allows easy team interaction to allow for smooth information flows
   3. It has a good visualization functionality and can also be modified to include charts, maps and other visual information
3. Monday.com
   1. This is one of the best productivity apps available today
   2. This template works best for a company with sales teams and customers in multiple countries
   3. The template gives good visuals, task updates, time zone management and a star rating for deal prioritization
4. Asana
   1. This is the best app-based sales funnel spreadsheet template for small companies which plan to scale up its operations and sales goals
   2. This is an intuitive app that also includes a forecasting functionality
   3. The app allows visualization of active opportunities with values, prioritization of prospects and other forecast and tracking options
5. Todoist
   1. This is a simple sales funnel template
   2. This template is ideal for solo entrepreneurs and freelancers with limited deals at any given time
   3. The template can also be used as a task checklist and helps the user keep track of all leads, their status and the probability of conversion

Conclusion

Sales funnels are extremely important tools for a company to optimize its customer journey at scale and with minimum wastage.

The objective of a robust sales funnel is to yield maximum conversions of leads to customers, by improving the prospect’s engagement with the brand at each stage of the funnel, reducing friction during the process, and offering content that is relevant and helps make the purchase decision.

However, a start-up or small organization may not be able to arrange funds or resources to run a full-scale sales funnel solution. The spreadsheet format is therefore ideal for such companies and for those companies that have few customers or leads at any given time.

All the templates presented above can be customized to the requirements of the company’s sales process and the probable customer journey.

However, these templates are difficult to scale and are not always able to keep pace with the growth of the company. The risks of using such templates over a longer period are:

1. Difficulty in collating information from a growing sales team
2. Loss of information about potential deals, leading to loss of sales
3. Engagement with the same prospects by different people from the sales team due to lack of an adequate information flow

Therefore, companies should eventually either build their sales funnel or invest in a CRM+sales funnel software that can keep up with the opportunities and challenges that the company will face as it grows.