How visualizing your sales funnel can transform your organization

Studies have shown that interactions with any employees in your company can have a major effect on customers when it comes time to decide who they want to do business with (or who to stop doing business with). In fact, interactions with frontline employees are so influential that 64% of customers report avoiding specific brands after having a negative experience. Customers now take into account their entire journey with a company when deciding who to do business with. From the point of consideration to the point of purchase — it all matters.

Knowing this, it doesn’t take a genius to arrive at the conclusion that companies who want to continue to gain (and maintain) healthy customer relationships need to do whatever they can to teach their employees what a successful customer experience looks like and how to deliver it. All employees need to understand the entire customer journey, and they need to learn to think through the lens of that experience.

The sales funnel

We’re all familiar with the sales funnel. It’s that inverted pyramid that lets you visualize how your customers narrow down from a wide audience, over stages, from Awareness to Interest to Decision (or desire) and down to a concentrated group of the most qualified, motivated customers who then take Action to purchase from your company.

Customization

But sales funnels are not a one-size-fits-all proposition. While the basic stages may remain the same across companies and industries, the details that make up those stages are as unique to your company as a fingerprint. The first step, then, is to create your own custom sales funnel based on your own product or service offerings as well as on the needs of your specific target audience.

The next step is to communicate that information throughout your company in a form that is easily understood. Familiarizing your employees with this funnel and all its stages as well as the various motivations, influencers, and prescribed actions that populate each of those stages is one of the most effective ways to ensure that the all-important customer experience mentioned above runs smoothly from top to bottom — regardless of who your prospective customers might be interacting with.

But how best to do that?

Visualization

A survey of 300 students from three universities in China, Russia, and Kazakhstan was conducted in 2020. In the study, two groups of students from the same universities either did or did not use visualization to master the same educational material. The results? Students who used information visualization showed a significant increase in the speed and quality of their learning. What’s more, the level of anxiety associated with learning was significantly decreased. Given this information, it’s obvious that visualized learning is the way to go. And a sales funnel is the kind of information that’s custom made for visual representation.

Teamwork

One great way to get the whole team on the same page is to put them all to work on filling that page with sales funnely goodness. Instead of a top-down model in which the information is simply presented in its completed form, a group of employees might collaborate on its creation.

Each contributor might create their own draft, all of which are then harmonized by the group. Or even better, everyone can work together making comments and adjustments asynchronously in a common file. The results can then be published to the entire team either as a final product or as the basis for feedback and another iteration.

Create your sales funnel with draw.io in Confluence

How best to do that? Perhaps the easiest path is to introduce your team to draw.io. draw.io provides you with graphic components and powerful functionality for making flow charts, process diagrams, org charts, UML, ER diagrams, network diagrams and much more – including specialized graphics… Like Sales Funnels!

In addition to all that, draw.io allows your team to work together on the same document, and for companies using Confluence as their knowledge management system, draw.io is fully integrated. It’s the ideal tool for facilitating this visualization process, whether your approach is a singular or collaborative effort.

The point is, by all working together, a greater commitment to the process is built company-wide. And the ultimate result is a deeper familiarity with the sales funnel throughout the company and a smoother sales experience for your customers.

draw.io

For more information on using draw.io to customize your sales funnel, we’ve included a video tutorial to show you how easily it’s done as well as a sample template that you can download to get the process started as quickly as possible.

Want to know more about our latest and greatest diagramming tips and tricks? Stop by our YouTube channel for step-by-step videos that will get you up and running in no time. Our Tutorial page is a great jumping-off point for all your learning needs, so be sure to stop by.