Sales Funnel Stages: The Journey From Browser To Buyer

The Internet is growing. Expanding. Swelling. Billions of people are online, swarming across vast digital webs. Those numbers create fierce competition. And it makes it harder by the day to capture someone’s attention. But that’s the name of the game—attention. We’re hunting for a sliver of attention from our future buyers. So how do we capture that attention? And how do we take that attention, bottle it up, and convert it into credit-card-in-hand buyers ready to snatch up whatever it is that we’re peddling? We take them through four sales funnel stages to convert browsers into buyers like clockwork. That’s how.

Sales funnels are like whimsical virtual devices. They were created long ago as competition on the web heated up. Back then, organic traffic on search engines was booming. It was easy to rank your pages on Google, leading to a flood of traffic, leads and sales. But as things heated up and more people realized the amount of money being made, things shifted. Ad costs rose. Search engines clamped down. And it became harder to create profitable ad campaigns. But sales funnels changed all of that. They revolutionized our ability to make money online by taking potential customers on a journey. That journey spans across multiple stages inside of a sales funnel.

Sales funnels are not like websites. They’re different. Much different. Websites are just a mishmash of data. They’re useless portals for the most part. That’s because they have no direction. No focus. Sales funnels are different. They’re direct and to the point. Like a laser beam. If you don’t have a sales funnel, you must build one now. On average, they convert at 137% higher than websites. That’s a drastic difference. And it could mean the difference between profitability and bankruptcy for a business. And when you learn how to take prospects across four sales funnel stages, you can turn that attention into cold-hard cash, day in and day out.

How Do Sales Funnel Stages Work?

To understand how sales funnel stages work, you must understand the overall temperature of traffic. Traffic is defined as individuals on the internet. Some traffic is cold. Those are people who are completely unaware of you and what you offer. Cold traffic is sometimes aware of the problems they face. We call this problem-aware. That’s an important distinction in marketing because based on the level of awareness a prospect has, the communication should vary. That means that you can’t speak to cold traffic the same way you do to warm traffic.

Warm traffic is aware of you. They may also have already shown an interest in what you do. Meaning that there are variations of temperature even within warm traffic. Some warm traffic even has a desire in what you sell. Warm traffic is beyond problem-aware. They’re sometimes solution-aware or even product-aware. They might know that there is a solution out there for their problem. And they may even know that you’re selling a product that might also solve their problem. This distinction is important because it changes how you communicate with a prospect.

Sales funnels are important because they take prospects through stages from cold and completely unaware to buyer-ready hot traffic. Once someone purchases from you they move from warm traffic to hot traffic. They’re your buyers. That’s also important because we can often get warm traffic to purchase low-ticket products or services from us easily. Sometimes we can even get cold traffic to do the same. But hot traffic is important because we can ascend hot traffic higher and higher to get them to spend more money with us. As long as we deliver real value at every level, we can ascend the buyer higher and higher on the value ladder.

Traffic Types

The goal of any sales funnel is to convert traffic into leads and sales. That makes sense, right? It’s the foundational model that encompasses everything. After all, random people floating around the internet won’t make you money. What will make you money are the people who enter your sales funnels (aka marketing funnels). However, there’s a distinction between the traffic that’s outside of your sales funnels. It’s not just the temperature of the traffic. It’s the type of traffic.

Zooming out, there are three types of traffic. The first type is traffic that you don’t control. These are random people floating around out there who might at some point become aware of you. They might see a social media post, a YouTube video, read a blog post, listen to a podcast, or become aware some other way. This is traffic you don’t control because you have no say over when or how they become aware. The traffic we don’t control is the most random type of traffic. It gives us very little insight or ability to interact with these people.

Then there’s traffic we do control. This is far more clear. It’s traffic that reaches our sales funnels directly from ads. We control the flow by paying for ads on various platforms. But whether it’s traffic we control or don’t control, the goal is always to convert those into traffic we own. The traffic we own are the people who enter our funnels by raising their hands. They provide their contact details and show an interest. They’re on our email lists, allowing us to communicate with them. And that’s how we move people across the various sales funnel stages. Through communication.

Stage 1—Awareness

Whether you call it attention or awareness, it’s the same. The goal is to capture someone’s awareness. Picture it like this. You go fishing and want to catch certain types of fish. To do that you need specific kinds of bait. You’ll never catch certain kinds of fish with the wrong bait. They just won’t bite. The same thing applies to prospects. You’re going fishing for prospects by putting bait out there on the Internet. The type of bait you put out will impact the quality of prospects you catch. This might sound like some abstract concept but I assure you that it’s not.

Awareness is the first sales funnel stage because it’s where everything begins. Remember that awareness can come from traffic we control and don’t control. The only way to truly capture that traffic is through a sales funnel. When it’s traffic we don’t control, we have to ensure there’s a link of some kind into a lead generation funnel that has the right bait. The traffic you control and run ads to is more obvious. Not the traffic you don’t control. But every single platform you create content should have some type of lead generation funnel that provides the bait to catch the right kind of fish. That’s how it works.

Remember that cold traffic is often problem-aware. That’s why you must create bait that tackles the problem and provides a solution. And the right kind of bait attracts the right kind of prospect. Meaning that if you position your bait (aka lead magnet) the right way, you will attract the right kind of prospects. For example, if you sell a high-ticket coaching service, you don’t want to attract broke college students. That makes sense, right? They can’t afford a high-ticket coaching service. But entrepreneurs with established businesses likely can.

Stage 2—Interest

Interest begins when a person raises their hand. That means they give you their contact details in exchange for some piece of value. Often that’s a lead magnet. But it can take on many shapes and sizes. For example, a lead magnet can just be a 15-minute consultation as opposed to a freebie that we send out. It can also be a free 5-minute massage in a shopping mall. All lead magnets are designed to capture your interest. Afterward, it’s the job of the business owner to take you from awareness to the next sales funnel stage of desire.

When someone displays an interest and exchanges their contact details, you add them to your email list. That allows you to communicate with the prospect. Without communication, it’s hard to move them across the various stages. And the better you communicate, the more likely you’ll convert a browser into a buyer. To do this you have to share stories. Stories are woken into the fabric of society. If you can share stories the right way, you can invoke emotion and solicit a sale. This doesn’t mean you have to be a master storyteller. You just need to know how to use stories to sell.

You’ll need a software platform like this one if you want to build all of this out without any coding knowledge. Otherwise, you’ll find it hard to build a sales funnel that moves prospects through these sales funnel stages. That’s because your sales funnel must connect to your lead magnet with a lead generation form. And that lead generation form must move people onto your email list. You can do all of that with the proper sales funnel builder.

Stage 3—Desire

The third stage of a sales funnel is desire. Desire is where you make the prospect hungry to buy whatever you’re selling. This happens through communication. It happens with story-selling. Stories are used to help build rapport and invoke emotion in the prospect. The better you can tell stories the right way, the more likely you’ll get prospects to buy. Think about it this way. A prospect is where you were years ago before you started the journey into solving the problem they’re facing. And you can use stories to help shift their belief systems on what is possible.

Desire doesn’t happen instantly. Yes, you have to share stories. But you also have to provide proof that what you’re selling works. Okay, maybe it worked for you. That’s obvious. What if it doesn’t work for them? Do you have social proof? What testimonials can you provide? How can they authenticate that what you’re saying is true? Desire is multi-faceted. It’s not just the stories we tell. Desire comes from many directions. But the more you’re able to layer these on, the more likely the prospect will come to an epiphany similar to the one that you reached when you started your journey.

The better you are at creating desire in the mind of the prospect, the more likely you’ll be to sell. Remember that most people don’t buy something on the first touch. It takes, on average, seven interactions before someone purchases something. That’s also why sales funnels are so crucial. They provide an arena for multiple interactions with the prospect. And the more you get in front of that prospect, the more likely they’ll buy the thing you’re selling. It’s as simple as that.

Stage 4—Action

The desired goal is action. Whatever action you want the prospect to take is the end goal of a funnel. That’s where it leads. Different sales funnel types have different actions. Some are designed to generate leads. Others are designed to make you money by generating sales. And others are designed for different goals like getting prospects to fill out applications or signing up for a webinar presentation. It doesn’t matter what the action is, you have to design your sales funnels in the right way to lead prospects here.

The beauty of sales funnels is that they are designed with a single purpose in mind. They’re not like websites. They don’t overwhelm you with choices. Nope. They lead you down one intended path. One goal. One result. That’s all. And that’s why sales funnels convert so well. But to get prospects to move into this stage, they have to believe that your solution will work for them. It’s not just a matter of presenting your solution. They must believe that it works first before they’ll take action. It’s not just about creating the desire. Yes, the desire must be there. But desire doesn’t move them across the goal line.

To do that we must use things like urgency and scarcity. These are some of the fundamental tenets of sales funnels and the selling process. People will not always take action unless you give them a reason to take action. For example, when you see a sale about to end it compels you to purchase. That’s urgency. There’s a countdown clock or some other impending deadline. Scarcity works in a similar way. If there are only a few things left in the store you’ll rush to buy it. Amazon shows you this from time to time when it says that only a certain number are left in stock. But you must use authentic urgency and scarcity. Don’t try to trick the prospects. That will backfire.

How To Build Your First Sales Funnel

To implement these sales funnel stages in real life you have to build a sales funnel. And at the very front of your sales funnel is your bait. It’s your lead magnet. And it must be very good. Otherwise, people won’t move from the first sales funnel stage of awareness to the second stage of interest. Interest means they’ve given you their contact details. Your sales funnel will have many different parts. But you can’t build one unless you start. You have to begin somewhere.

The best part? You can build a sales funnel without any coding skills. You don’t need to be a web developer to create a sales funnel. All you need is the right type of sales funnel software. Once you have that you can use premade templates and a drag-and-drop editor to create your sales funnel. It’s not complicated beyond understanding how to move a mouse and type. That’s it. If you can do that then you can build a sales funnel with this sales funnel builder.

How To Find The Right Sales Funnel Templates

Building a sales funnel is easy when you have the right templates. The right templates can make your life a whole lot easier. You can use them to quickly launch any type of sales funnel. Templates exist for squeeze pages. Squeeze pages are lead-generation funnels designed to squeeze the contact details out of a prospect. They also exist for webinars, application funnels, tripwire funnels, and more. There’s a sales funnel template for every type of sales funnel.

All you have to do is pick the right template for the right situation. Sometimes, funnels are designed to ascend customers higher to spend more money with you. Other times they’re designed to simply boost sales or generate leads. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel here. All you have to do is pick the right template for the right situation. Then use a drag-and-drop editor to move elements around the page. You can change colors, words, and so on. Then, roll out your sales funnel and start testing it. That’s the only way to determine if your sales funnel is working or if some part of it is broken and needs to be fixed.