A sales funnel, or conversion funnel, is the step-by-step process that your customers follow from the point of getting to know about your products or services to paying and purchasing it on a website or online portal.

These are the 6 steps of a Sales Funnel:

1. Awareness
2. Interest
3. Consideration
4. Intent
5. Evaluation
6. Purchase

As such, marketers and sales analysts observe three key steps in your sales funnel, which are Awareness, Consideration and Purchase. These are the main areas a weak sales funnel would see leakage and if the problems that cause the leakage aren’t dealt with at an early stage, you may face significant issues resolving them later.

So how do you find out whether your sales funnel is leaking? As a small business owner, you can generate an in-depth, detailed report using Google Analytics, a free-to-use tool, which allows you to generate the following three reports:

1. Funnel visualization report - This report provides an overview of your sales funnel
2. Goal flow report - A slightly more in-depth report that allows you to compare day-to-day data and can provide other similar comparative analytics
3. Reverse goal path report Allows you to view which pages and methods your funnel is receiving traffic from.

Now since you know how to identify whether your sales funnel has a leak, let’s also take a look at three simple steps you can take to plug these leaks:

1. Solutions for Early-Stage Leaks

The earliest stage in any funnel is 'awareness', and a leak or problem at this stage would mean that your business is not able to attract your ideal customer base. To rectify this, you need to be using marketing and advertising strategies that appeal to the audience you hope to bring into your business.

Identifying that ideal audience and buyer is key before you start any marketing campaigns because if you haven’t identified who that ideal customer is, you would be spending a fortune in time, money, and effort in attracting the wrong audience or customer base. Once you know who your ideal customer is, use different channels such as your website, landing page, social media and other advertising platforms to get the word out and attract new customers to your business. Make sure to have clear call-to-actions in any collateral you send out, clearly and efficiently guiding customers to the right channels to get in touch with you.

2. Solutions for Middle-Stage Leaks

The mid or second stage where your sales funnel could have a leak is the Consideration stage, which is where your customer has been made aware of your product or service and is now in the process of deliberating whether they want to make the investment towards it.

To ensure you get this stage right, you could;

• Categorise your buyers according to their purchase patterns.
• Prepare all your marketing strategies and collaterals to suit each of these buyer categories
• Use different social and digital channels to advertise according to each category of potential buyers.

Another good investment at this stage would be a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software that allows you to collate and analyze any communication via your website lead generation forms, emailer campaigns, social media advertisements, etc. in one, organised dashboard.

3. Solution for End-Stage Leaks

The final or end-stage of your sales funnel is the most important, namely Purchase. If your customer has arrived at this stage, then they have gone through the other steps and stages and have come to the firm decision of purchasing your product and to make sure you convert this customer, a simple method of making a payment needs to be provided. Making your checkout process complicated and time-consuming is a great way to change the mind of a buyer, as is not having the option of making the payment in the method that the buyer prefers. A buyer you lose at this point is also quite unlikely to ever return and so, it is imperative that your checkout process is extremely simple, only asking the user to enter the details that you could not do without, and making sure that all common payment methods and any specific payment methods your target audience prefers are available on your sales portal, along with responsive and helpful technical support services and easy communication channels.

It doesn’t end here, however, and your sales funnels can be constantly upgraded and updated by doing testing of your platform, using different CTAs, and even doing A/B testing on social media and other channels for the marketing of your products and services.

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