While all sales funnels follow the same basic structure, consumer behavior varies depending on whether your company is business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-customer (B2C). Understanding your B2B sales funnel and its effectiveness gives your business a competitive advantage by providing insight into optimizing the sales process and converting more leads.
[Editor's note: this post was originally published in 2019 but has been updated for 2022]
Below, we'll explain what exactly B2B sales funnels are, the benefits of sales funnels, and how you can leverage your B2B sales funnel and the buyer's journey to gain revenue.
A B2B sales funnel is crucial to understanding the sales process from your company's point of view. While the buyer's journey captures how buyers move through the process from their point of view, the sales funnel gives businesses critical insight into how to market to particular consumers at each point of the sales process.
Going from the top to the bottom of the funnel, the B2B sales pipeline stages are:
The sales funnel has been a cornerstone of the sales and marketing strategy for over a century. It's a sequence of stages/phases in a single selling process. Elias St. Elmo Lewis invented it in 1898, making it widely regarded as the first formal theory of marketing. Ever since the humble sales funnel has been subjected to numerous revisions.
There's huge confusion in the difference between a marketing funnel and a sales funnel. Many people think marketing and sales funnels are two separate entities. There is only one funnel that marketing and sales share. However, the two teams are positioned differently. Marketing is focused more on the top of the funnel, whereas sales teams are focused mainly on the bottom.
Then why do we have two names for the same thing? Because the context of use is different. When the funnel is used in a marketing environment, it's called the marketing funnel. When it's used in a sales environment, it's called a sales funnel.
In other words, marketing builds interest, and the bottom of its funnel marks the top of the sales funnel. Consequently, marketing activities that generate awareness to create product demand power the sales funnel.
The marketing funnel is divided into two sections:
Continued interest eventually tips the lead into the sales funnel, where the sales team takes over. The sales funnel brings the lead (i.e., the MQL) from the takeover point from marketing up until the moment the sale is made.
There is a heated debate in the marketing and sales worlds over who exactly owns the whole funnel. As consumers have become more dependent on digital content to inform their purchasing decisions, marketers have taken on more responsibility for the funnel in the last few years. Review the diagram below to see how ownership of the funnel has changed.
However, some see the funnel split equally, with both sales and marketing ultimately owning the funnel. They argue that the salespeople are increasingly becoming thought leaders to drive awareness by doing sales outreach. That means marketing and sales would work together to nurture leads and prospects from awareness to purchase.
Both the B2C and B2B sales funnels share the awareness, consideration, and purchase stages. However, the sales funnels look different because of different customer intent. While B2B buyers buy products and services on behalf of their company, B2C buyers purchase products for themselves, friends, or family. B2B buyers contemplate products for a long time to determine which best solves a particular business need. On the other hand, consumers who purchase products for personal use may impulsively and independently make the decision to buy.
Because of different intent, the top of the B2B sales funnel is much narrower than for B2C businesses. Marketing departments must accurately target audiences by studying B2B sales funnel metrics, while B2C marketing is much more broad-based. Further, the sales cycle is much shorter for B2C companies compared to B2B.
Here are the differences between the two sales funnels at each stage:
The B2B sales funnel is a great sales and marketing tool to help you visualize, easily understand, and track the key steps involved in turning a total stranger into a paying customer. It provides visibility into the effectiveness of your sales and marketing efforts.
Benefits of using a sales funnel include:
Because B2B sales funnel conversion rates are much higher than those expecting leads to convert on their own, you should implement, monitor, and maintain a sales funnel to attract and nurture leads.
Consider the following when building the steps of your sales funnel:
After you've built your sales funnel, you should work to assess and improve your current model regularly. Keep the following guidelines in mind when analyzing your existing sales funnel:
The classic five-stage sales funnel model has been around for about 125 years. Most people claim that while the main phases of this approach are still relevant, the model is outdated overall. Is it really so?
Yes, it's true that the days of the linear sales funnel where everybody enters the sales process at the top of the funnel and follows a similar buyer experience are gone for most B2B industries.
Why? Because the B2B customer has changed. Today's customers go through a complex journey when they want to buy something. Unlike generations before them, they have thousands of results, reviews, and websites at their fingertips in seconds.
In today's marketplace, it's no longer your sales team that's in control — the buyer is. As the access to information has increased, customers conduct their own digital research to inform them about products. They prefer to do all the research with little to no interference from the salesperson. In fact, Gartner reports that B2B customers are traversing 57% of the funnel on their own before encountering a sales rep, entering the sales funnel at later stages.
Some people eagerly announced the death of the sales funnel, offering to replace it with the buyer's journey. Although these concepts are closely linked, they aren't an alternative to each other. While the buyer's journey maps out how close a buyer is to buy from the consumer's perspective, the sales funnel takes your company's perspective to understand the buyer's relationship with the company to best sell to them at any particular stage.
The buyer's journey is a detailed outline of every step a lead takes to become a paying customer, while the sales funnel is a model that businesses use to sell appropriately to leads at different stages. If you want to bring together your content marketing and sales efforts, you have to overlap your sales funnel and buyer's journey map and look at the buyer experience from a combined perspective.
As Sales Management Association concluded, how customers move along the sales funnel has changed. It used to be unidirectional, a direct path from the top to the bottom. Now, it's multi-directional.
Leads are coming into the funnel at various points in their buyer's journey. Sometimes, this happens because existing customers refer them. If they already know they want to buy your solution, they jump in at the intent stage to negotiate the price. It also might happen because they have pursued their own research and made product/service comparisons with different solution providers, jumping in at interest or consideration stages.
To make things more complex, where buyers enter the sales funnel might not indicate where they are at in their buyer journey. Just because a buyer requested pricing information doesn't mean they are in the negotiation phase of their buying journey. Conversely, a buyer that downloads a whitepaper might be further down the funnel than their action indicates.
So when you think about all these complex and non-linear moves, the sales funnel does not seem like a funnel anymore. It looks like a complex web of individual buyer paths intersecting at the various sales and marketing touchpoints.
For that reason, some experts claim that the sales funnel is no longer relevant and must be replaced with something else. However, just because buyers have a more complex journey than before doesn't mean the sales funnel is useless. First of all, keep in mind that the sales funnel looks at things from the seller's perspective, not the buyer's. And although the buyers can enter and exit the funnel at different stages in a non-linear fashion, the funnel still helps sales organizations simplify things.
The best thing to do is align the buyer's journey with your sales process and the sales funnel.
We've discovered how understanding your sales funnel can help you drive and nurture leads by recognizing consumer behavior differences in B2C and B2B sales funnels. You know a sales funnel enables you to engage and convert leads. Now that you've implemented a sales funnel in your business, you can identify where you can improve the sales process.
Optimize your sales funnel to increase sales with customer relationship management solutions from GetAccept. You'll build lasting relationships with leads on a foundation of trust.
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