5 tips to create Sales Funnels in Salesforce Lightning
5 min
What is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is a way to visualize the sequential stages in the customer journey, typically going from the first contact with a brand, up to the moment of the purchase. Tracking how prospects move down or drop out the funnel helps companies understand how their audience behaves, analyze how they can most efficiently lead them towards a purchase and strategize accordingly- focusing their marketing & sales efforts on actions that actually pay off.
Detecting what challenges conversion at each stage, as well as how you actually convert leads into customers will help your team get a better view of where they need to make changes and optimize their workflow, focusing on relevant leads, increasing win rates and shortening the sales cycle.
Stages of a Sales Funnel
The input for each funnel may come from multiple digital and traditional channels. Digital marketing, AI and the broad use of CRM software help companies increase input to their funnels, and ultimately generate more income. The different stages of each Sales Funnel will vary depending on the type of business and its sales model, but the four basic stages are:
- Awareness: This is basically the stage when you catch customers’ attention. For example, prospects may come across one of your digital ads and get hooked by its content. In that moment, they start becoming aware of the existence of your brand and probably relate it to a product or service category.
- Interest: Prospects start diving deeper and researching different options that can fulfill their need or want. As they start comparing your product or service with other options available in the market, they have entered the interest stage. This is the moment to serve leads with information to make their decision-making process easier, but don’t try to sell, you’ll just push them away.
- Decision: Once customers have done their research, they might be ready to start adding products to a cart, for example. At this point, it’s vital to drive the customer towards making the decision to purchase. Here’s where free shipping, discount codes or specific promotions might come in handy.
- Action: This is when the prospect decides to take action and make the purchase. After the first sale, your aim will be to turn one purchase into many more. In other words, your focus will reside on customer retention.
5 Tips to create a Sales funnel in Salesforce:
Salesforce is a leader in its field that has never left any stone unturned to provide its users the best. So looking at the importance of Sales funnels, Salesforce has included this feature for marketing and sales reps. Bear these tips in mind to make the best use of this feature:
- Couple marketing automation systems with Salesforce to automatically score and move your prospects through early sales stages, to then allocate Qualified Leads to sales reps.
- Implement Salesforce Standard Sales Process which includes leads, Contacts, Accounts, and Opportunities.
- Utilize Lead and Opportunity stages. Lead Statuses track your progress with potential customers. Plus, it’s rather easy to add, edit or delete stages to fit your Sales Process. Opportunity Stages track your deals-in-progress. You can give names to your stages along with a brief description. Statuses and Probability-to-close can be defined for each stage. These capabilities make it easier to prioritize and know where extra attention is needed.
Take a look at your current process. In case you don’t know what your current process is, then jot down the steps it normally takes for your team to sell your product to customers. Each step is a stage within an Opportunity.
- Once stages are defined, set up your team’s Sales Process.
- Use Reports and Dashboards to better analyze your Sales funnel.
Create a Sales Funnel using Reports and Dashboards
The steps below can be followed to create a Sales Funnel in Salesforce using Report and Dashboards features in Lightning Experience.
- Open the “Dashboard” or “Reports” tab.
- Create a new dashboard or report. Change the properties the way you want to display the data in the dashboard or report. For instance, you can group opportunities by stages.
- Using “View Report”, open the dashboard or report in “Edit” mode once it is created.
- Go to settings and click “Funnel”. This will show you a high-level visualization of your opportunities in the form of a funnel.
Create an Opportunities Report
To use filters, make sure that All Records are selected.
For better and updated reports, set Close Date as All Time so it can fetch all records to date.
Filter opportunities by Group Rows and Columns, and deselect the detailed row option to get the head count of leads. (Depends on user requirement)
Select a funnel chart while adding a dashboard component, the fully functioning sales funnel along with the dashboard component will make it easier to forecast sales.
Approach to keep your Salesforce Sales Funnel in shape:
- Keep a close look on your funnel’s evolution.
Sales Funnel strategies must be evaluated from time to time and adjusted to face the challenges that arise due to the constant changes in the business space. It’s always a good practice to identify why prospects are dropping out of the Sales Funnel and what is encouraging others to move on to the next stage. Once identified, issues should be resolved by making changes to the Sales Funnel.
- Keep your Sales Funnel Optimized.
Data is an essential component of Sales Funnel optimization, as its analysis will impact your conclusions. Make sure your data is complete, updated, and reliable. And remember surveys, reviews, testimonials, social media interactions and keeping contact with your audience will be great sources of information to drive major improvements.
- Use Spreadsheets in Salesforce for analysis.
There are lots and lots of data involved in the analysis of a Sales Funnel. Spreadsheets prove to be a helping hand, as well as offering reliable and straightforward features that help in organizing data with ease.
- Reduce your Response Time.
In an increasingly connected and automated world, response time plays a key role in catching and retaining a potential customer’s attention. Make the best use of tools available to cater prospects as soon as possible.
Hope you have great experience working on your Sales Funnel and take your business to success!
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