GSD 199: Sales Funnels vs. Sales Pipelines (And How To Maximize Them!)

Welcome to today’s edition of GSD Daily. Now, today what we’re going to do is talk about sales funnels versus sales pipelines. Now, a sales funnel is meant to direct your prospects through your marketing material unhindered. So somebody clicks an ad on Facebook and then they bounce to a landing page, then they sign up for a webinar, then they go from a webinar into an order form, and then they proceed through the purchase without any human involvement or with very little human involvement, I should say. So it’s meant to [inaudible 00:00:44] that sales decision unabated without any kind of human interaction or contact whatsoever. Now, this oftentimes happens for offers that are under 2000, 2500, or 3500, or somewhere in there, and it largely depends on how the sales funnel is structured. So it might be an automated webinar, or it might be a via cell funnel. It just depends on the price and the complexity of the offer.

Now, if the offer goes above that two or $3,000 mark or whatever, or it’s more complex, consulting, coaching, masterminds, that kind of thing, then it’s going to go through a sales process, and that will be somebody fills out a form, books a call, and then they’re on a phone call. Now that sales process is where the sales pipeline comes on. So basically the sales pipeline happens after the lead, after somebody comes into your, they fill out the application, they jump on a call, then they go into a sales pipeline. And the sales pipeline is a tool that keeps track of your leads, who’s hot, who’s warm, who’s been sent a proposal, who hasn’t been, what deals have you won, what deals have you lost, and what kind of thing. So we’re going to flip over to the iPad here, and we’re going to walk through this just graphically what a sales funnel looks like versus a sales pipeline. And then we’re going to follow it up with a little bit of software. So we’re going to kick over here.

All right, so now the sales funnel itself, if we are looking at a sales funnel, we are looking at something that has traffic and it’s going to have three or four different kinds, maybe. So we have YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, whatever, and then all of that gets piped down into a landing page, and then from that landing page, it goes to a sales page or some sort of an automated webinar, and then they go to checkout. So that checkout might also be an application for a call. So all in all, they hit some traffic, come through, sign up on a landing page, go to a sales page, make an informed buying decision, and buy. That’s the majority of transactions that happen online. There are some other ones that they will alternatively apply or fill out some sort of a call, an action plan call, or some call that a salesperson is going to make.

This is oftentimes like a consultative sales call. So that’s usually what happens here. Now, a sales pipeline is after this happens. So, I’m just going to slide down here a little bit, after this person applies, then they’re going to go into the sales pipeline. Now the sales pipeline typically looks a little bit different. It’s usually structured like this, you have columns, so you have a lead, and this person is going to get dumped right into this lead column. Then you have a call, no-show, proposal, and result. Now, this can be anything that you have set up. Every sales floor is a little bit different, but they all stem from this same process. Somebody comes in, they move through the sales funnel, they get outputted into that application, they fill out the application, and then they end up a lead on somebody’s list. Now that lead, you’re looking at person one, person two, person three, person four.

Now, all of them scheduled the call and they either jumped on the call or they didn’t show up. So maybe person one showed up on the call. Person two was a no-show. Person three showed up on the call and person four showed up on the call. So what most software lets you do is just drag this around so you can just drag this lead over and then let’s say person two didn’t show up on the call. So that’s the end of their relationship. Person three, however, was sent a proposal. Person four was sent a proposal, so following their call, these guys were good, and then person four lost… So we lost person four, so they said, no, but person three won. So this person ended up winning or we won this client or this job, and they are now onboarding with us. So it’s a way of keeping track of your sales leads.

That’s what a sales pipeline is. Now, one of my favorite pieces of software, my favorite simple piece of software to put these together that is non-CRM based, it is a CRM, is a piece of software called Pipe Drive. So right up top here, the CRM platform to grow your business. When I think of CRM platforms, I think of heavy marketing automation. Pipe Drive is not heavy marketing automation. Pipe Drive is very much, you can see here, you can see that it’s created in pipes. This is a sales workflow. So just like I described over here where we have our pipes, we have lead, call, no-show, proposal. You can see here on this one demo, this one demo image. I’ll make this a little bigger. So right here you can see qualified contact made, the demo scheduled, the proposal made, and negotiating. So you can pull these people right through the sales process, and that’s the strong point of Pipe Drive.

What Pipe Drive doesn’t do is a lot of heavy marketing automation on the back end. It’s very much just a sales tool. Another industry leader very, very much so is Salesforce, it’s the biggest CRM in the world. So Salesforce lets you pull those people. It also does a little bit of marketing automation. It has a CRM that isn’t quite 100% integrated, but it’s integrated enough. Active campaign is the marketing automation tool that we used most often, and it has a sales pipeline functionality on some of the more expensive plants. So it will allow the pipes, so you can go through and move a lead to a prospect, prospect to a deal, and so on through. And it has the marketing automation on the back end all built out too. So those are the differences between a sales funnel and a sales pipeline. The biggest sale funnel warms the lead-up and gets them into the pipeline.

So they’re both necessary for expensive and complex offers. You need to have the marketing automation on the front side, the sales funnel on the front side, and the pipeline on the back. But where they are similar is they are both used heavily to keep your customer records, to keep your contacts where they need to be. So if you have any questions at all on sales funnels and sales pipelines, go ahead and go ahead and ask them below this video if you would like to set up a free action plan call where we walk through your sales funnel, walk your traffic channels, all that stuff and give you a plan of action to continue skilling your business. Then go to doneforyou.com/start. If you just like this kind of stuff and you would like to continue receiving tools, tips, or tricks, all that good stuff, go to doneforyou.com/gsd and we will make sure that whenever we put something new out there, you will get it in your inbox and I will talk to you soon.

All right. Thanks. Bye.