1 - Funnels

Welcome to the Funnel

In the kitchen, a funnel comes in handy when you need to get your hand-squeezed orange juice into a jug without spilling it all over the counter. The concept of a funnel comes in handy for marketers, too. It represents customers’ progression through the marketing and sales cycle: A whole bunch of leads enter through the wide top part of the funnel, and some of those leads - hopefully lots of them! - eventually make it through all the stages to emerge as customers at the bottom.

Full Circle’s Funnel Metrics with Response Management gives you several different ways to track and understand your funnels. You can track all of them together, or you can break things down to track individual funnels for sales, partners, marketing, and so on. When it comes to stages (the set steps that every lead has to take on their way to becoming a customer, like scheduling a demo or graduating from a Marketing Qualified Lead to a Sales Accepted Lead) and milestones (which only some leads achieve, usually by changing status or meeting certain criteria), you can use the same ones for all your funnels, or you can customize each one. It’s your call!

During deployment, you’ll work with your Customer Success representative to create funnels that work for your company. These funnels can always be modified later on, but sticking with a consistent model will help keep your data reliable.

How Do We Track the Funnel?

Full Circle tracks funnels on the campaign member. As a result, we can track from the time the person is a lead, to a contact, to an opportunity without interruption. Funnels work best in an organization that uses campaigns on all their engagements, and we can help set up special campaigns to make sure everything is tracked.

Typical Funnel Stages

From top to bottom, typical Full Circle customer’s marketing funnel stages will look something like this:

Inquiry

Everyone who enters the funnel. You might also think of an inquiry as a hand-raise. Anyone who fills out a form or responds to your marketing in any way is considered an inquiry.

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)

As soon as an inquiry meets your designated threshold through scoring (or other criteria as applicable), that inquiry is now an MQL.

Sales Accepted Lead (SAL)

Once an MQL’s interest and qualification has been verified by a sales rep, that MQL becomes an SAL.

Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)

Now we’re getting serious! When an opportunity has been created and the lead has been converted to a contact, that contact is an SQL.

Sales Qualified Opportunity (SQO)

Typically, an SQL becomes an SQO when the opportunity reaches the pipeline stage, or has a greater than 50% chance of being won.

Won

Woohoo - the desired endpoint! The lead that started as an inquiry has made it all the way through your funnel and is now a bona fide customer. Congratulations!

Common Milestones

Here are a few common milestones:

Initial Meeting

The initial meeting with the customer was completed.

Met BANT Criteria

The lead or contact was determined to meet your company’s budget, authority, need, and timeline requirements.

Sales Rejected Lead (SRL)

Sales dispositioned the Lead or contact to Nurture or Disqualified.

More Fun(nel) Facts

In addition to stamping the date when the stage (or milestone) was reached, Funnel Metrics also enables you to track a wide variety of pertinent details. For example, at each stage, you can capture the record owner, the running user, their role, their division, and any other useful information you’d like to use for segmenting your data.

And how do we know which funnel someone belongs in? We determine this by looking at the campaign. We add a field to the campaign called “Campaign Sourced By,” which has a picklist that includes Marketing, Sales, and other sources as appropriate. When someone responds to a campaign, they will enter the funnel associated with that campaign’s Campaign Sourced By picklist value.

Your funnels can vary - a lot! A Sales funnel, for example, might start at SAL, and often won’t include Inquiry or MQL stages. You can get as complicated as you like with your funnels, or you can keep it simple. You can set up all sorts of reports to look at all sorts of data, so you have plenty of flexibility. Just remember: The more complex the funnel design, the trickier the reporting.

Once you have your funnel tracking data, you can calculate your volume (totals of people who have reached each stage), your velocity rates (the average number of days to get from point to point in the funnel), and conversation rates. The conversion rates tell you what percentage of people moved on to the next stage, how many are stuck in the same place, and how many fell out of the funnel entirely.

Funnel Metrics gives you a treasure trove of information that you can use in all kinds of practical day-to-day applications. You can calculate how many MQLs you will need next year to reach your revenue goals, or determine what kind of campaigns bring in the best deals. To learn how to make the most out of your Funnel Metrics data, check out the Full Circle Method.