Guide to leveraging a B2B sales funnel

While all sales funnels follow the same basic structure, consumer behavior varies depending on whether your company is business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-customer (B2C). Understanding your B2B sales funnel and its effectiveness gives your business a competitive advantage by providing insight into optimizing the sales process and converting more leads.

Below, we'll explain what exactly B2B sales funnels are, the benefits of sales funnels, and how you can leverage your B2B sales funnel and the buyer's journey to gain revenue.

What is a sales funnel?

A B2B sales funnel is crucial to understanding the sales process from your company's point of view. While the buyer's journey captures how buyers move through the process from their point of view, the sales funnel gives businesses critical insight into how to market to particular consumers at each point of the sales process.

Going from the top to the bottom of the funnel, the B2B sales pipeline stages are:

Awareness
Interest
Consideration
Intent
Evaluation
Purchase

Classic sales funnel

The sales funnel has been a cornerstone of the sales and marketing strategy for over a century. It's a sequence of stages/phases in a single selling process. Elias St. Elmo Lewis invented it in 1898, making it widely regarded as the first formal theory of marketing. Ever since the humble sales funnel has been subjected to numerous revisions.

Marketing versus sales funnel

There's huge confusion in the difference between a marketing funnel and a sales funnel. Many people think marketing and sales funnels are two separate entities. There is only one funnel that marketing and sales share. However, the two teams are positioned differently. Marketing is focused more on the top of the funnel, whereas sales teams are focused mainly on the bottom.

The marketing funnel is divided into two sections:

Lead generation: This involves the creation of marketing campaigns to build brand awareness. Trade shows, inbound marketing, content marketing, viral campaigns, online ads, direct email, whitepaper, and more are used to sell the brand.
Lead nurturing: Once a prospect develops an interest in the brand, the next step is to facilitate the lead. The potential customer is introduced to the product or service with tailored sales content to help them consider making a purchase.

There is a heated debate in the marketing and sales worlds over who exactly owns the whole funnel. As consumers have become more dependent on digital content to inform their purchasing decisions, marketers have taken on more responsibility for the funnel in the last few years.

What's the difference between a B2C and B2B sales funnel?

Both the B2C and B2B sales funnels share the awareness, consideration, and purchase stages. However, the sales funnels look different because of different customer intent. While B2B buyers buy products and services on behalf of their company, B2C buyers purchase products for themselves, friends, or family. B2B buyers contemplate products for a long time to determine which best solves a particular business need. On the other hand, consumers who purchase products for personal use may impulsively and independently make the decision to buy.

Because of different intent, the top of the B2B sales funnel is much narrower than for B2C businesses. Marketing departments must accurately target audiences by studying B2B sales funnel metrics, while B2C marketing is much more broad-based. Further, the sales cycle is much shorter for B2C companies compared to B2B.

Here are the differences between the two sales funnels at each stage:

Awareness: Consumers and businesses in both B2C and B2B sales funnels behave the same way during the awareness stage, as they're both searching for more information about a company's products or services. This is the broadest stage of the sales funnel.
Interest: While B2B buyers tend to compare reviews and different products, B2C consumers tend to research the products that interest them after gaining awareness.
Consideration: B2B buyers communicate with company stakeholders by sharing different products and reviews during the consideration phase. B2C buyers at this stage are now comparing reviews and multiple product options.
Intent: At this stage, B2C buyers further learn about products with positive reviews and those that seem to fit their purposes best. On the other hand, this is typically the stage when B2B customers try out product demos to see how products can work with their business.
Evaluation: During the evaluation stage, B2C consumers review their shopping cart and decide to make a purchase, while B2B buyers review contract proposals to determine which product or service is best for them.
Purchase: Finally, this narrowest part of the funnel is when the sales transaction is complete for both B2B and B2C consumers.

Five benefits of using a sales funnel

The B2B sales funnel is a great sales and marketing tool to help you visualize, easily understand, and track the key steps involved in turning a total stranger into a paying customer. It provides visibility into the effectiveness of your sales and marketing efforts.

Benefits of using a sales funnel include:

Attract the right leads: The marketing funnel can help you focus on the right leads for your business. During the awareness and interest stages of the marketing funnel, your marketing team can research to find the most applicable markets to target.
Focus on engagement: Once you've attracted the attention of the right leads, you need to nurture the lead. Sales funnels focus on engaging with leads, which builds trust in your company.
Understand sales data: A sales funnel can help you target specific parts of the sales process you can improve. You'll be able to identify how you can better solve your customers' problems.
Increase lead conversion rate: Optimizing the sales process by analyzing sales data will increase your lead conversion rate, as you’ll better understand the customer experience.
Increased revenue: The ultimate goal of using a sales funnel is to maximize revenue. You'll be able to track every aspect of the sales process to know which products or services sell best to which clients and how to best market to your target markets.

How to create or improve your sales funnel

Consider the following when building the steps of your sales funnel:

Awareness: Try to reach out to customers before they even realize they need your product or service. Conduct market research to identify which demographics to target.
Interest: After customers know how your product or service can help fill a need they have, they are a potential lead. To maintain that lead, you'll have to nurture that lead by providing the customer with more information.
Consideration: During the consideration stage, businesses evaluate different products and their reviews.
Engagement and intent: Continue your company's first solid impression throughout the engagement stage by providing B2B demos.
Purchase: Even after a lead converts, you should still maintain a relationship with that customer by reaching out regularly.

After you've built your sales funnel, you should work to assess and improve your current model regularly.

Why do we need to update how we think about sales funnels

The classic five-stage sales funnel model has been around for about 125 years. Most people claim that while the main phases of this approach are still relevant, the model is outdated overall.

Buyers are in control

In today's marketplace, it's no longer your sales team that's in control — the buyer is. As the access to information has increased, customers conduct their own digital research to inform them about products.

The buyer's journey might not follow the sales funnel

The buyer's journey is a detailed outline of every step a lead takes to become a paying customer, while the sales funnel is a model that businesses use to sell appropriately to leads at different stages.

The buyer's journey is increasingly complex and non-linear

Leads are coming into the funnel at various points in their buyer's journey. Sometimes, this happens because existing customers refer them. It also might happen because they have pursued their own research and made product/service comparisons with different solution providers.

Take the next steps in optimizing your B2B sales funnel

We've discovered how understanding your sales funnel can help you drive and nurture leads by recognizing consumer behavior differences in B2C and B2B sales funnels. You know a sales funnel enables you to engage and convert leads. Now that you've implemented a sales funnel in your business, you can identify where you can improve the sales process.