What is a Lead Generation Funnel? Steps in lead generation funnel?

Leads are most important for any organization to grow business and generate profits, Generating leads is the difficult and the most critical aspect for every business, However, generating leads involves a careful process that if done in the right way can get a huge return on investments at a very short time. Understanding the process and stages behind lead generation, funnel, and lead management can make a lead into a customer.

Understanding the lead generation funnel:

Lead generation funnel is the process of funneling the target audience to go through the different stages until they purchase an item.

1.Awareness: Nowadays social media is a powerful tool to share about business, so the first step is promoting your business on the social media platform to generate traffic to your website or to increase your brand awareness, Search engine optimization (SEO) also can generate traffic to your website. However one needs to be careful at this stage particularly when requiring first-contact visitors to sign up, fill up a form, or register. 

2.All names: The next step is entering the names in the database, although these are not yet confirmed as leads these are the marketing efforts that you put in through a variety of ways, getting their contact information as well as their permission to communicate.

3.Engaged: Gathering contact information is your introductory window to prospective leads, and processing them to move through the lead generation process further by signing up to a newsletter, attend a webinar, downloading an ebook, or accomplishing a lead capture form on a landing page, which leads to the next stage in the funnel – engagement.

4.Target: If the contact engages with our marketing, Now we can continue with the process and perform lead scoring to predict if this particular contact can be a lead or not. we can perform lead scoring in many ways and these can be done both automatically and manually, depending on the type of business we are targeting.

5.Marketing qualified lead: When the contact fits the profile of your lead and has been identified as having a high lead score, we can qualify this particular lead for further marketing. this lead should show interest in our products and services for further marketing efforts and direct contact from your sales team, otherwise, our campaign will be washed away in a drain.

6.Recycled: Not all the targets can become a certified lead right away, but it doesn’t mean that if they did not become a lead the first time that doesn't mean that they don't have interest in our product but at that particular point of time they are not ready to commit to a sale. Such leads can be placed in our recycled leads database and nurtured by feeding them with offers on our product. Continue doing so until such time when they are ready to take the next step and become a qualified sales lead.

7.sales Qualified lead: Once a lead has shown interest in our products or services and have good engagement with our sales team, an account executive should then take over and contact the sales team with this sale qualified lead, and make a careful assessment if the target is truly a sales lead or need further lead nurturing from marketing.

8.Opportunity: once an account executive identifies a target as a qualified sales lead, one can then identify the target further as a sales opportunity and will undergo further opportunity marketing. At this point, it is important to understand that engaging with leads will incur a cost, which includes the cost of engagement, conversion, and opportunity marketing.

9.customer: At this stage, the lead we have engaged with and nurtured with further marketing has finally turned himself into a paying customer.