Lead gen­er­a­tion is one of the most impor­tant aspects of run­ning a busi­ness, and fun­nels can be a huge help. But should you be using a mar­ket­ing fun­nel or a sales fun­nel? And are they even that dif­fer­ent from each other?

Though mar­ket­ing and sales are close­ly linked, the fact remains that they are sep­a­rate prac­tices, and their respec­tive tech­niques, although some­times over­lap­ping, will vary. Fur­ther­more, they won’t always share the same goals.

Both mar­ket­ing and sales make use of fun­nels, which can be extreme­ly help­ful for organ­is­ing mar­ket­ing efforts, under­stand­ing cus­tomer jour­neys, and opti­mis­ing B2C interactions.

In gen­er­al, busi­ness own­ers tend to go for either sales fun­nels or mar­ket­ing fun­nels – hard­ly ever know­ing about the oth­er or mis­tak­en­ly see­ing them as the same thing.

Though the dif­fer­ences between these two fun­nels are small, know­ing them can be help­ful for busi­ness­es when it comes to defin­ing what they want to gain from fun­nels and how they’ll use them. Down the line, this can fur­ther help resource and task dis­tri­b­u­tion as well as clar­i­fy per­for­mance met­rics depart­men­tal­ly and at the dif­fer­ent fun­nel stages.

This arti­cle will explain the dif­fer­ences between these two fun­nels and explore how you can best use them to your com­pa­ny’s advantage.

What is a sales funnel?

Sales fun­nels are the path a cus­tomer takes from first hear­ing about your ser­vice or prod­uct to pur­chas­ing that ser­vice or prod­uct. The fun­nel fol­lows three stages the cus­tomer goes through: the ini­tial inter­est phase, the con­sid­er­a­tion phase, and the high­ly inter­est­ed or pur­chas­ing phase.

Busi­ness­es can use sales fun­nels to bet­ter under­stand their cus­tomers and nur­ture their jour­ney from being ini­tial­ly inter­est­ed to decid­ing to make a pur­chase. For exam­ple, you’ll like­ly dis­cov­er the aver­age length of time it takes for a lead to remain in the con­sid­er­a­tion phase, which can help with plan­ning and track­ing the effi­ca­cy of your efforts. Fur­ther­more, look­ing close­ly at each phase can indi­cate which parts of your mar­ket­ing require refining.

Strong sales fun­nels also allow busi­ness­es to get their prod­ucts or ser­vices to reach the peo­ple most in need of them – oth­er­wise called high-qual­i­ty traf­fic. Oth­er ben­e­fits include gain­ing more cus­tomer infor­ma­tion via mail­ing list sign-ups and auto­mat­ed lead gen­er­a­tion process­es that allow busi­ness own­ers, man­agers, and staff mem­bers alike to focus on oth­er impor­tant tasks.

The sales fun­nel stages are some­times known as ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu. Here’s what they mean:

ToFu: Leads at the top of the fun­nel are inter­est­ed in what you’re offer­ing but haven’t yet made a commitment.

MoFu: In the mid­dle of the sales fun­nel, site vis­i­tors have defined their prob­lem and elect­ed your prod­uct or ser­vice as a poten­tial solution.

BoFu: At the bot­tom of the sales fun­nel lie high­ly qual­i­fied poten­tial cus­tomers. They’re close to pur­chas­ing some­thing from you.

Not every lead will reach the end of the sales fun­nel stages – they could stop at any time due to a lack of mar­ket­ing re-engage­ment or if they find anoth­er suit­able solu­tion to their pain point. Don’t fret if your num­ber of leads reduces sig­nif­i­cant­ly after the ToFu stage. After all, you will have fil­tered your prospects into the high-qual­i­ty leads most like­ly to make a pur­chase – and there’s no use wast­ing mon­ey and time on poor-qual­i­ty leads.

How­ev­er, you can pre­vent the loss of poten­tial­ly high-qual­i­ty leads by prop­er­ly defin­ing your tar­get audi­ence and per­son­al­is­ing your mar­ket­ing efforts.

Marketing funnels and how they differ

Though the terms “sales fun­nels” and “mar­ket­ing fun­nels” are often sub­sti­tut­ed for each oth­er, there are key dif­fer­ences. To those who are more accus­tomed to the term “sales fun­nels,” the exis­tence of “mar­ket­ing fun­nels” can come as a shock (and vice versa).

This isn’t some­thing to wor­ry about since the two kinds of fun­nels are not sub­stan­tial­ly dif­fer­ent enough to mean that you’re los­ing out sig­nif­i­cant­ly by choos­ing just one type. Know­ing their slight dif­fer­ences can just ele­vate your mar­ket­ing and sales effort to the next level.

Mar­ket­ing fun­nels essen­tial­ly fol­low the exact same rules as sales fun­nels: they sig­ni­fy the jour­ney that busi­ness­es take to gen­er­ate brand aware­ness and inter­est amongst poten­tial cus­tomers. They fol­low cus­tomers from first learn­ing about a busi­ness’s ser­vices or prod­ucts and through­out their next steps that even­tu­al­ly end with a pur­chase or oth­er desir­able act of engagement.

The mar­ket­ing fun­nel stages, essen­tial­ly the same as for sales fun­nels, are as follows:

Aware­ness: peo­ple first become aware of your com­pa­ny and what it sells.

Inter­est: peo­ple con­sid­er your prod­ucts or ser­vices as a solu­tion to their pain points and may take cer­tain actions to learn more about them.

Desire: qual­i­fied leads will look deep­er into what you’re offer­ing and seri­ous­ly con­sid­er tak­ing fur­ther steps of engage­ment. They might even fill up a bas­ket but aban­don their cart. (This phase isn’t always includ­ed in the dis­cus­sion of fun­nels, but it can still be use­ful to be aware of.)

Action: leads will either make a pur­chase or com­plete anoth­er action, such as sign­ing up for a mail­ing list.

Though the phas­es list­ed above resem­ble those of a sales fun­nel, they have a key dif­fer­ence. Mar­ket­ing fun­nels don’t have to end with a pur­chase – the goal could be to gain more sub­scribers to a mail­ing list, for example.

Mar­ket­ing fun­nels are best sit­u­at­ed before the sales fun­nel, where­by the end of the mar­ket­ing fun­nel forms the begin­ning of the sales fun­nel. This would make the ToFu stage of the sales fun­nel more inclu­sive and not just for peo­ple who are first dis­cov­er­ing a company.

Using funnels (and their differences) to your advantage

By includ­ing both types of fun­nels in your strat­e­gy, you place a big­ger empha­sis on lead acqui­si­tion and mar­ket­ing efforts that aim for engage­ment – not just sales. This approach would par­tic­u­lar­ly suit com­pa­nies whose prod­ucts cost more or have longer con­sid­er­a­tion phas­es, as more nur­tur­ing is need­ed to con­vert leads into pay­ing customers.

Even if your con­sid­er­a­tion phas­es aren’t long, divid­ing mar­ket­ing and sales teams by giv­ing them each a sep­a­rate fun­nel can make their tasks more man­age­able and focused, thus pro­duc­ing bet­ter results.

Still con­fused? Here’s how we pro­pose using both fun­nels at once:

Use a mar­ket­ing fun­nel to acquire leads and intro­duce those leads to a sales fun­nel once they’ve been acquired. Then use the sales fun­nel to con­vert leads into pay­ing customers.

Sales fun­nels, unlike mar­ket­ing fun­nels, can be used repeat­ed­ly after each sale. Put simply:

Mar­ket­ing fun­nel: for acquir­ing leads (occurs once per lead and nev­er repeated)

Sales fun­nel: for acquir­ing sales (occurs once after the mar­ket­ing fun­nel is com­plet­ed and then repeat­ed after each sale)

This for­mat means your mar­ket­ing efforts, tai­lored to nur­tur­ing new leads, are kept sep­a­rate from your sales efforts which are per­son­alised to both inter­est­ed leads and exist­ing cus­tomers. One ben­e­fit of this is that your mar­ket­ing efforts in both fun­nels are more rel­e­vant to where the cus­tomer is on their jour­ney. After all, being in the ini­tial inter­est phase is wild­ly dif­fer­ent to the con­sid­er­a­tion phase, so they’ll require dif­fer­ent tactics.

For the entire fun­nel to work suc­cess­ful­ly, each stage must be exe­cut­ed to per­fec­tion. Here are some things you can do to opti­mise each fun­nel stage:

ToFu, or Awareness

For the aware­ness stage to be reached, a com­pa­ny will be helped by a good online pres­ence. For, in the instance that an indi­vid­ual car­ries out a Google search for a pain point that you can solve, you’ll want them to find you.

Here are some exam­ples of busi­ness­es that would ben­e­fit from cer­tain Google searches:

A mat­tress retail­er: “What makes a com­fort­able mattress?”

A hair prod­uct shop: “Why is my hair so frizzy?”

An SEO con­tent agency: “How can I opti­mise my blog content?”

Clear­ly, an estab­lished blog or high site domain author­i­ty would help busi­ness­es reach these cus­tomers. Oth­er things you might do to fos­ter brand aware­ness include cold calls and con­ven­tion­al paid adver­tis­ing. Actions at this stage will be influ­enced by the cost per lead acquisition.

Make sure all your blogs, social media posts, ads, e‑books, or webi­na­rs link to a land­ing page or CTA. This page should com­mu­ni­cate what your com­pa­ny’s all about, its unique ben­e­fits, and, most impor­tant­ly, have a sign-up sec­tion for site vis­i­tors to leave their con­tact details.

Emails will be cru­cial to your next steps; there­fore, it’s essen­tial that your Untouched prospects turn into Con­tact Made leads.

MoFu, Consideration, or Interest

You can con­vince prospects via email mar­ket­ing, sales pages, calls, and webi­na­rs, as well as more spe­cif­ic arti­cles and blogs that delve deep­er into pain points. These could be pros and cons lists, how-to guides, top ten lists, and in-depth guides. Remem­ber: all these pages should have a CTA at the end.

For exam­ple, the mat­tress-seek­er could be search­ing “what makes a com­fort­able mat­tress for a bad back?”, the frizzy-haired Google searcher might ask “what prod­uct smooths out frizzy hair?”, and the blog­ger might search “what to look for in an SEO con­tent agency”.

These spe­cif­ic ques­tions enable you to pro­vide a solu­tion and show off your exper­tise on the top­ic. And since these indi­vid­u­als are in the mid­dle of the fun­nel, they’ll be look­ing for high-qual­i­ty research that you can pro­vide. Hope­ful­ly, if you get this stage right, your leads will become qual­i­fied leads and move into the desire or action phase.

In order for this stage to be suc­cess­ful, key­word research will be your best friend. Make sure you inves­ti­gate con­tent mar­ket­ing as an option for lead acqui­si­tion and nurturing.

Desire (optional)

As men­tioned above, the desire phase is not always includ­ed in expla­na­tions of mar­ket­ing or sales fun­nels, so it is not an essen­tial stage to incor­po­rate into your strat­e­gy. It is mere­ly an exten­sion of the inter­est phase where leads take fur­ther steps to learn about your com­pa­ny and its prod­ucts or ser­vices. Leads at this stage will still have con­cerns and questions;

how­ev­er, they will be more ven­dor or brand-spe­cif­ic. For instance, they might search your brand name along with a ques­tion about your suitability:

“[Com­pa­ny name] reviews”

“Does [com­pa­ny name] make good mattresses?”

“Is [com­pa­ny name] the best SEO con­tent agency?”

To reach the searchers mak­ing these queries, a com­pa­ny can make use of long­tail key­words in their SEO con­tent strat­e­gy. After iden­ti­fy­ing what these are, sites should then pub­lish con­tent in the form of FAQ pages, demo videos, com­peti­tor com­par­i­son posts, and blogs list­ing their ben­e­fits and fea­tures. Remem­ber: all these pages should have a CTA at the end.

If leads desire your prod­ucts or ser­vices, they might go as far as fill­ing up their bas­ket and brows­ing your site. If they aban­don their carts, you’ll have to offer dis­counts in order to get them to the BoFu, or Action phase.

BoFu, or Action

To sway the final deci­sion, you can send out spe­cial deals, coupons, and dis­counts to mail­ing list sub­scribers who haven’t yet made a pur­chase. And when they final­ly reach the check­out, you can boost bas­ket val­ues with upsells.

After the funnel ends

After your fun­nel comes to an end, hope­ful­ly with a pur­chase, you can begin your re-engage­ment efforts. Since your leads already know about your com­pa­ny, have access to your site, get emails from you, and have tried your prod­ucts, it’s just a case of keep­ing them engaged. This would look like a sales fun­nel, but with­out the top sec­tion ded­i­cat­ed to lead acqui­si­tion. Via dif­fer­ent email cam­paigns, exist­ing cus­tomers can remain involved and become repeat buyers.

Should you use a marketing funnel or a sales funnel?

Despite the minor dif­fer­ences, com­pa­nies are merg­ing the pur­pos­es of sales fun­nels and mar­ket­ing fun­nels, so that it is becom­ing almost impos­si­ble to dis­tin­guish between them. So, to answer the ques­tion above, it does­n’t mat­ter which fun­nel you use as long as you tar­get leads at every stage.

To get expert help with your mar­ket­ing and sales fun­nels, why not book a fun­nel strat­e­gy call with us?

Get in touch here