What are the Stages of a B2B Funnel?

A sales funnel is essential for building an efficient, optimized sales process. It helps you understand your customer’s journey from being a complete stranger to becoming a buyer. Tracking conversion rates is one of the best ways to measure the success of a sales funnel. It’s important to understand your sales funnel to identify the leaks in it or know why some prospects never convert.

There are different stages in a B2B sales funnel that a prospect needs to go through to convert into a paying customer. Here are the key B2B sales funnel stages you need to know. Let’s go!

Awareness

This is a top of the funnel (TOFU) stage where prospects realize they have a problem and are researching and looking for a solution to resolve it. Here, your job is to create awareness about your brand or product and let the prospect know that you exist. Use display ads, TOFU content, SEO, videos, and lead magnets to attract new audiences, tell them you have a solution to their problem, or show them that they have a problem to solve.

Interest

This is another TOFU stage where the prospect’s awareness converts into interest. Here, the prospect would want to learn more about your brand or solution. Nurture the prospect, build brand trust and authority, invite them to a webinar, share value-add content (ebook or whitepaper), and fuel their interest in you.

You can also use intent data to know who is showing high interest in you or researching you online. Then, combine that data with B2B contact data to reach interested prospects quicker and before your competitor. This data combination is commonly used by B2B companies to close deals faster. One of the examples of this combination is Bombora’s Company Surge Intent data + SalesIntel’s human-verified B2B contact data.

Consideration

This is a middle of the funnel (MOFU) stage where the prospect is evaluating your solution, how it fits their requirement, whether it will really solve their problem, and how it benefits them. At the same time, the prospect is examining a competitor’s product and comparing it with yours on different levels.

Put your best foot forward to give the prospect hard reasons to consider you over your competitor, share more informative content, create personalized experiences, give a demo, explain your product’s unique features, and highlight your value proposition.

Decision

This is a bottom of the funnel (BOFU) stage where the conversion from a prospect to a customer happens. The decision-makers at a prospect company finally decide to purchase your product or do business with you. There could be objections that need to be tackled with appropriate offers, content, and justification. You could also deal with negotiations at this stage.

Some prospects may need a push to make a purchase or take a purchase decision. That “push” could be a free trial, special offer, retargeting or remarketing ad, success story, live consultation, personalized demo, etc.

Retention

After you’ve won a deal, don’t lose focus on your new customers. Customer retention is as important as winning a new deal. Acquiring a new customer is more expensive than retaining an existing one. Keep nurturing your new customers to drive advocacy, referrals, and loyalty. The post-sales stage is critical to increasing customer lifetime value, product upgrades, and repeat business.

B2B data plays a crucial role in pushing prospects down the sales funnel and creating a targeted strategy that’s tailored to the specific stage they are in. Before using any data, ensure that it’s clean, updated, enriched, and relevant. Bad data is a deal-breaker and can affect your efforts to move prospects through the sales funnel.