Sales funnel is a fundamental concept for any business. Basically, he means the set of steps that someone is expected to take between the first contact with your company and the closing of the deal.

As simple as the concept is, the best way to use it is not always so intuitive. The entrepreneur's usual approach is to put as many people at the top of the funnel, investing heavily in acquisition channels, people and tools.

However, it is useless to invest in all this if, in the shopping journey, your client encounters objections, frictions and concerns.

>> Also read: What problem does your startup solve?

>> See more: What is MVP and how important is it to your business

A number of aspects can become problematic and prevent the funnel from working as expected. A product that doesn't speak the customer's language. Or a service that does not have a clear value proposition. An application that is too complex from the user's point of view. Buggy software everywhere. A slow and heavy site to load.

Examples of problems abound. But the question remains: while they are not resolved, what is the use of putting people at the top of the funnel?

The answer is: you need to optimize your sales funnel!

How to optimize a sales funnel?

It may seem unintuitive, but the correct approach to optimizing the funnel is to look at it from the bottom up, starting with the product.

Let me explain what this means in practice.

Product analysis

It all starts with a good product analysis. At this stage, you need to ensure that the customer understands and is able to extract the proposed value (famous wow moment).

For this, it is necessary to make sure that the system has no bugs, that navigation and screens are not complex, that the onboarding be well executed and etc.

At this stage everything needs to be super aligned. If you have a dating app, for example, the list of people function does not job to be done. To achieve this, there must also be a connection between the parties. So, if the system has a problem with the match, it generates user loss and therefore there is no point in investing in acquisition.

>> Also read: How to measure churn and engagement

>> See more: What is the customer acquisition cost (CAC)

Leaving for sale

Once the product is adjusted, we go up a step in the funnel, which is usually the sale.

If it is for sale, we can look at issues such as product price, terms & conditions of use, privacy policy, payment gateway, performance of Sales team (in the case of B2B), customer budget, purchase intention, trial success ...

But before taking the next step, it is important to remember that the funnel is generally different for each company and business model (B2B, B2C, B2G ...).

See examples below:

In the examples above, the next step would be to check the trial. Once this is understood, it is necessary to optimize as much as possible before increasing each level.

Tracking your funnel

Funnels (Yes, the plural of Funnel is funnels) are purely mathematical, but not complex structures. To optimize we need two metrics:

• Quantity (at the top of the funnel)
• Conversion rate

A good job at increasing the conversion rate may be worth more than the effort to enlarge the top of the funnel.

See the images below for the impact of increasing conversion rates without growing the number at the top of the funnel.

Before

After

As we can see, an adjustment of 18 percentage points in the conversion of visitors into trials leveraged the number of purchases by more than 50%.

And, to make this adjustment, you may have invested in a series of measures, such as adapting the message to correct persona, improvements on landing pages, clear and well-defined call to actions ...

Exercise knowing your conversion rates and see where you have room to improve and optimize.

Starting from the bottom up is a smart strategy that saves your customer acquisition cost (CAC).

Speed up your funnel

If you want to speed up the development of your startup and optimize your funnel, know that ACE has open for subscriptions.