Marketing and sales are inseparable, and they complement each other. These two functions often ferment officious confusions and doubts. Isolating one from another is a formidable task because these two are closely integrated and entangled. Besides this, marketing has a broad aspect that embraces various commercial functionalities and is internally associated with the sales pipeline from the core of the marketing structure.
This article will give you detailed information about the most controversial and discussable topic: marketing funnel vs. sales funnel. This concept will help you define marketing and sales individually, the terms, the differences between them, and the importance of communication.
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Idea About Funnel System
Before going deep into the above-said topic, we should look into the definition of the funnel. A funnel is a journey that a customer goes through being a prospect to a buyer. It is an organized pipeline or a set of programs before selling or purchasing a product. So, the public may raise one question: is there any difference between a marketing funnel and a sales funnel? Before going on this topic, we have to clarify some points about the marketing funnel, and sales funnel individually from their perspectives.
What Is A Marketing Funnel?
Marketing is a fundamental approach of every business and enhances a brand’s visibility and recognition and gains a prominent place among other marketers. For this reason, a marketing funnel strategy approaches with a guideline to a potential customer from start to end.
This approach helps customers interact with sales teams about a product or brand and make their way up to the final stage. They can finalize their choice of products by purchasing.
The marketing funnel helps visitors to get familiar with the services and offerings. It also facilitates their business by demonstrating the customer’s experience through the entire journey from a visit to purchase. Through this stage, the company also devises sales support through business strategies.
Three components are the pillar of the marketing funnel. They are; creating awareness, enhancing interest, and evaluating a sales prospect.
The marketing funnel consists of two phases, they are:
1. Lead generation
This section comprises the strategy of promotion and campaigning to spread products awareness. This awareness includes; inbound and outbound marketing, content representation, online adverts, viral advertisements, email, chatting, etc.
This phase holds two statuses, one is the landing page, and another is website navigation. These two involve customers to know more about services and offerings.
2. Lead nurturing
When a prospect shows interest in offered products, the subsequent action should be nurturing the lead for retention and converting them into repeated buyers via Funnel Conversion Rate. This time, a business begins to maintain a special relationship with customers and assist them with tailor-made content in their purchasing decisions. This phase enhances trust by communicating through email, ebooks, newsletters, and chats.
Stages of The Marketing Funnel
● Top of the Funnel (ToFu) Awareness
The top of the funnel shows the interest of the individual customer in content and moving forward to enter into the journey. In this stage, marketers take some oaths toward business growth by educating customers, campaigning products, raising awareness about their services, showing the difference between them and other marketers, and contributing valuable information.
In this stage, an issue might get raised regarding collected data as they may not include every customer’s name and contact details. But suppose customers fill out the form and provide consent for communication. In that case, you can move them into another marketing funnel stage.
● Middle of the Funnel (MoFu) Consideration
The sales team will discuss the problem and how their products solve the raised issues in this stage. They do this task by presenting testimonials from other companies who have used their products and are satisfied with the well-built and high quality.
A prospect goes with the flow from top to middle, and here, the company shows the contents in white papers or case studies. The SDR parameter has an essential duty of lead responsibility for communication purposes.
● Bottom Of The Funnel (Bofu) Conversion
Bofu is the closing stage, where a sales representative has done the entire homework and is ready to present and close the deal successfully. This deal holds demonstration and feedback from customers’ sides.
When the team has reached the last stage with leads, the entire system can determine the buyer’s journey from top to bottom and the effective services to engage audiences.
What is a Sales Funnel?
When the marketing funnel detects the prospects and interest in specific brands and services, the entire system enters the sales funnel. From here onwards sales pipeline starts its journey from top-level to bottom level.
The sales funnel describes converting a sales prospect from the marketing stage to a loyal buyer. This funnel starts its flow from the narrowest point of the marketing funnel that is conical in shape.
Since the sales team has built up the awareness already, the next step will be to convince the customer about your better services than others. And this helps push slightly towards purchasing the products. This creates an impression, and customers make the next move that fulfills the purpose.
Finally, customers are determined to purchase, sometimes through free trials.
It is not the end because, at present, customer retention is crucial for a company, and they should look into the follow-up process.
Some benefits that a sales funnel serves are:
● Triggering selling by increasing the number of purchases and gaining trust.
● Identifying issues by identifying and addressing them
● Application of automation by saving time and giving more input.
Details About The Sales Funnel’s Stages
The sales funnel is a component of the marketing funnel. The bottom of the sales funnel consists of more prospects for buying products.
The term sales pipeline describes the prospect of the sales funnel through selling and buying products. The sales funnel levels represent the percentage of conversion that team members have done from one stage to another. This flow of sales gives an open opportunity to the members to sell products by generating more leads.
Product dealing strategies have distinguished the stages of the sales pipeline. Salesforce makes customers move with this flow by taking some necessary actions and establishing a business around the sales funnel stages.
Companies have created their own sales pipelines keeping four points in mind. That four essential components are prospect, evaluation, promise, and closed-enclosed-lost. The below-mentioned points will describe a successful marketing approach:
● Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)
A business prospect must include contact details before they get qualified by the international business standard chart. The company members can do this essential step by filling up a form, downloading data, or some other way to provide communication details.
● Sales Accepted Lead (SAL)
Here, a sales team determines whether a lead fits their products. Many leads in this stage become disqualified by the sales team. This issue denotes a poor communicative platform from the side of the company. They need to enhance the communication level between marketing and sales to qualify more leads.
● Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)
After qualifying a lead, a sales representative will speak to that customer about the structure like; deal size, time frame, and emergency. Those representatives become successful, work with customers closely, and know their demands in detail.
● Closed-Eclosed-Lost
When a sales team fails to convert a lead into a customer, they close the deal as a Lost or place it again in the market. Here, the prospect has the flexibility to choose options as per their desire. They either can go with another company or give it a second thought keeping the products’ pricing in mind.
Differences Between Sales Funnel And Marketing Funnel
These two terms, sales funnel and marketing funnel, are slightly different from each other, but neither can they be interchanged nor are they easy to break up. The most notice worthy dissimilarity between them is the purpose of application.
Sales and marketing are two specific functions with separate working structures to set out the growth and customers’ attention.
- The bottom level of the marketing funnel denotes the peak of the sales funnel. It implies that the marketing funnel motivates the sales to funnel to drive more customers to generate more products.
- The marketing funnel follows high-tech strategies that convert new customers to loyal and repeated buyers. On the other hand, the sales funnel has different functionalities. It influences customers to participate in actions like; logging into the page, buying products, or participating in events.
- The marketing funnel creates awareness until the end when unaware customers get converted into loyal customers. On the other side, the sales funnel is doing its job seamlessly by persuading a customer from survey to purchasing about their products.
The Final Thought
The sales funnel is a system that motivates new customers from the marketing level to the conversion stage. It aims generation of more products and services. On the other side, the marketing funnel is a process that works on the conversion of a lead or a prospective buyer into a customer and recognizing of brand image. Despite distinguishing between the two, both work together to attract the public to visit the pages and motivates consumers to become repeated buyers.