An introduction to Funnels

A funnel refers to the process customers go through when purchasing your products or services. Your funnel exists whether you know it or not but if you're aware of your funnel, you have much more influence over it and can optimise it.

Imagine a household funnel - something is poured into the top which filters down towards one finite destination. In sales, it's similar. At the top, you may have lots of leads which enter your funnel from many different sources. However, unlike a real funnel, not all leads entering the funnel will reemerge at the other end. Some leads never leave the top of the funnel, while others reach the very end.

A funnel is a useful method for gaining insight on your sales life-cycle as leads move through the funnel steps. It helps highlight where performance is strong or weak. Where weak, it allows you to focus on understanding and improving that step. Generally you will want to know where you're bleeding opportunities by looking at the biggest drop offs between funnel steps and where you need to improve or prioritise effort. 

A funnel is made up of two elements in FLG Insights:

• Funnel
  

  This defines the structure of the data to collect. A funnel is divided into funnel steps. Within each funnel step is one or more lead group statuses.

  As a funnel report is only concerned with changes in funnel step, data can only be collected once the funnel has been created. 

• Report
  

  This interrogates and presents the data collected by the funnel. A funnel report has a time period associated with it and is concerned with what happened to leads in that period as defined by the steps in your funnel. Like any report in FLG Insights, a report can be downloaded, shared or scheduled

Most other FLG reports are concerned with when a lead is received rather than how it progresses through your process. This is the key difference between a funnel and a status change report. Funnels also allow you to group lead statuses together to reflect the high level stages of your process without further massaging the raw status data.

FLG Insights supports different interpretations of a funnel so that you can fine-tune your funnel report. It is possible to create a strict "closed" funnel, where a lead has to follow the defined steps in order to be included in the report otherwise it is excluded from the report, or various types of "open" funnel where a lead can enter midway through a funnel, can leave and return and skip steps with previous steps being back-filled. Take a look at how to Create a new funnel report.

It's best if you get your funnel design right at the start so data collection starts correctly. Analyse your business process and define what you want to get out of your funnel report before creating your funnel or create multiple funnels to see which collects the data you need. A funnel can have as many funnel steps as you need (although you'd never need more funnel steps than statuses in the lead group you're concerned with).

A typical funnel scenario will help you get started building your own.

Let us know how we can improve FLG on our feedback site.