No matter what you sell, getting prospecting customers to buy your products/services doesn’t happen instantly. 

Instead, the sales process consists of sales funnel stages. Warming up cold leads to spend their hard-earned money on your products and priming them to purchase in the future. 

Unfortunately, in today’s climate of low trust and fiery competition.. there’s no easy task. 

The pain is no return on investment (ROI) if you spend on marketing and advertising.

The antidote of this pain—and secret to get success—lies in creating five stages of sales funnels. In other words, step by step process to get qualified leads and sales for your business. 

What is a sales funnel? 

Sales funnel is a marketing strategy to turn cold customers into lifelong customers by funneling them in five different stages. 

The goal is to have returning customers with lifetime value not just they buying only once. 

Value ladder describes the sales funnel stages

Sales Funnel Stages Explained: The 5 Stages of Filling Your Sales Pipeline

Pre-stage: Create the offer

First thing first, you should define everything you offer to customers as they move through the funnel, from bait to backend offer.

Before you dig into each section, finalize your whole sales funnel with the end goal in mind. 

This pre-stage is vital. If you don’t know what you are  offering your customers at each stage, they probably leave.  

Stage 1. Traffic 

To fill your funnel with leads you have to bring quality traffic. 

Top Traffic sources:

• Paid advertisement 
• Search engine optimization
• Social media marketing 
• Email marketing 
• Affiliates sites

Traffic generation points to remember:

• “Hang out” places of your high quality prospects 
• What social media networks they interact with 
• What free or lower cost service you can provide

Stage 2. Bait 

Bait is a lead magnet offered for free or at a very low cost to customers. 

Some clarification here…

While “Bait” is a stage of the overall sales funnel, For each stage, you need to use some kind of low-risk offer to hook your customers and let them engage further. 

The “Bait” can be in the form of ebooks, videos, product samples, and email sequences.

Stage 3. Front End Offer

A low-cost offer that provides value to new customers and which solves surface level problems. 

Once your prospects have taken your front end offer, immediately send them to landing page  when you have your “levelled” premium offer.

Stage 4. Middle Offer

Progressively more valuable and intensive solutions that help customers solve deep-rooted problems. In the middle offer you also have to prepare them for a high price product or service.

Now we’re getting down to the business.

At each stage of your value letter you have to provide an resistible offer to your prospects and prepare them for the next tier of the ladder.

Upsell or Downsell?

An upsell is an offer that cost more than front end offer;a downsell cost less than upsell. 

It’s an important of sales funnel increase more revenue of the business. 

Typically, upsell offers come in the form of:

• Bulk orders
• Customized version or a variation of the initial product or service
• An offer to increase subscription length at a discounted price
• Supplemental products (cross-sells) 

Stage 5. Backend Offer

Your most expensive and valuable product or service that customers can use to solve their lasting problem in life. 

By now hope you have understood that, your ultimate goal is to tie each of your “mini funnels” together with an overarching sales funnel. 

Basically, this involves doing whatever you can to provide value to your customers after that purchase of your product or service. 

This could be: 

• Providing personalized content in their preferred format, that allows them to make the most use of our product or service.
• Deliver high-quality support and customer service. 
• A community where they can live and grow within. 

Conclusion

You learned to attract, capture and nurture leads. After nurturing leads they become buyers.  ⁠

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