The marketing and sales objectives of any sound business are creating awareness (to establish a brand image) and lead conversion respectively.
While both are different functions, they often work together to win more customers (customer acquisition).
Any funnel usually starts with a large group of people (known as prospects) and remains with a handful of converted leads, at the end.
In this guide, we’ll discover the difference between sales and marketing funnel and how they independently and together form a strong path towards a seamless customer experience.
How do a Marketing Funnel and a Sales Funnel Differ?
While both are closely related concepts, the key difference is where the customer journey begins and ends.
The marketing funnel has a bigger focus and the sales funnel focuses on the qualified leads.
Simply put, the sales funnel has a more conversion-focused strategy throughout the funnel.
Let’s begin by understanding the market and sales funnel, what they are, and their stages. In the end, we will classify how the two contribute to a smooth customer journey.
What is a Marketing Funnel?
A marketing funnel is how the customer journey will eventually turn out, starting from spreading the word about your brand to making a purchasing decision. It is everything between your brand interaction and the target audience.
Stages of Marketing Funnel
In this section, we will discuss the complete stages of the marketing funnel from top to bottom.
Awareness
The first stage of the funnel is all about making prospects aware of your product or service using branding, customer research, and public relations.
Awareness is the process of making potential customers apprised about the brand’s name, identity, what they do, tone, style, etc.
The major aspect of this stage is content marketing. Like blogs, webinars, social media campaigns, infographics, search engine optimization (SEO), ebooks, whitepapers, and webinars, it’s the core of this strategy.
Other frameworks include email marketing, media outreach, and press releases.
Interest
The next stage involves learning more about the company, products, and services.
Here, the marketers need to nurture brand awareness and make the prospects delve deeper to learn more so the latter can address their specific needs and challenges. And how the former’s brand can turn out to be a solution.
Also, this is where the lead qualification actually begins. The leads who are genuinely interested in your offering pass through the funnel now. The campaign strategy too becomes more targeted.
Consideration
This stage plays a crucial role as now the prospects will look for a solution from a certain brand or company. People will likely turn to different brands of similar niches to understand the best product as per their requirements.
The consideration marketing phase sometimes becomes a high-stakes situation otherwise all the previous efforts go in vain.
Hence, this time the marketing strategy focuses on providing more trust and value. Like testimonials, customer reviews, or delivering content that established their brand better than the competitors.
Intent
This stage shows how eager prospects are to buy the product. The intent phase helps in understanding how close they are to making a purchasing decision.
This decision stage comes in several ways like filling out a survey, or a form, asking for a product demo, or adding the product or item into the shopping cart.
Providing in-depth content like product comparisons, free trials, limited offers, etc can make this step easier.
Purchase
This stage is also known as action, decision, or conversion. At this point, the prospect finally turns into a customer and makes the buy.
It happens because now the potential customers believe that they’ve identified a solution to their needs and pain points and are ready to spend their money on it.
For this stage, the role of marketers should be to make the buying process easy for the customers.
Loyalty
Many marketers refer to “purchase” or “action” as the last stage of the funnel. But the truth is every marketing layout or strategy has a lot more to do after making their ideal customers purchase a product or service.
It is all about the continued positive experience or feeling of a customer after making the purchase.
This is where terms like customer support, quality products and services, and continuous engagement come in.
Loyalty helps a brand in many ways. Like, first of all, it reduces customer acquisition costs and enhances the overall customer lifetime value.
Additionally, it establishes the brand as trustworthy and reliable due to positive word of mouth.
What is a Sales Funnel?
Unlike the marketing funnel, the sales funnel is all about taking action. It also looks into the customer journey but puts more emphasis on a specific part, the decision stage (we’ll talk more about it later).
Stages of Sales Funnel
A sales funnel has typical six to seven stages and we are going to discuss all of them so you can find what’s best for your business.
Although the stages as described in the marketing funnel may seem similar here they serve a different purpose.
Top of the Funnel or TOFU (Awareness)
When your marketing strategy is a win, you attract quality leads. And it enters as “awareness” in the sales funnel.
Well, they know about you, they know your brand, and what you do. By they might be unaware of what problem you can solve or the comfort you can provide, exclusively for them.
In the marketing funnel, the task was to bring the attention of your brand to a large group of people.
This time, the work is around reaching potential customers who might already be experiencing a problem.
The strategies for this stage can be cold calling, offering assessment, email outreach, and industry events.
Middle of the Funnel or MOFU (Interest & Consideration)
The potential customers who have shown initial interest are now looking for your solution more specifically. The trust of the prospect is immensely inclined toward your brand, more interested in plans and pricing.
This stage becomes the decisive part of sales. As the qualified leads are already considering their value proposition and sales teams need to convert this opportunity into a positive decision.
Providing case studies, testimonials, and product demos, addressing objections, and highlighting unique selling propositions (USPs) are some major strategies used in this stage.
Bottom of the Funnel or BOFU (Decision & Retention Stages)
It’s all about bringing it all together and closing the deal after a prospect comes toward this stage. The future customers have now made it to the conversion stage.
These customers who are at the end of the funnel are also known as “high-intent prospects”.
Addressing all the last minute concerns, or providing special/personalized offers, free trials (with deadlines), limited quantity/cohort, and creating a smooth buying experience by ensuring your website is easy to navigate, has multiple payment options, and strong, action-oriented, and clear calls to action (CTA) button.
Marketing Funnel, Sales Funnel, or Both?
As we can now see the major difference between both the funnels depends on understanding the customer’s needs and motivations, just viewed from different angles.
And talking about the situations when both the funnels share the same goal. Sales nurtures the interest that marketing attracts.
Furthermore, both channels require consistent and quality messaging and brand identity, like using the same materials, brand voice, visuals, etc. And, the data insights generated from the marketing team turn valuable to the sales reps (behavior, location, bounce rates, etc) as the latter can use it to personalize their communication.
Marketing Sales Funnel: A New Jargon?
Many marketers and salespeople use the term “marketing sales funnel” to acknowledge the relation and how they complement it as a complete package.
A marketing sales funnel is a visualization of the buyer’s journey showing the different stages of the decision path.
It combines both marketing efforts and sales activities, from awareness to making a purchase, following a complete lifecycle.
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