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