What You Need to Know about the Sales Funnel
I’m a big fan of borrowing tactics that work in the corporate sector and applying them to mission-driven work for our clients. One of my favorite corporate marketing concepts is the “sales funnel”, a framework that illustrates how people decide to make a purchase.
The funnel metaphor works like this—your potential customer starts at the top, and as they get closer to making a purchase, they move down through the funnel until they get to the bottom.
This sales funnel framework works extremely well when applied to organizations, foundations, and nonprofits, too. Let me explain…
With a car example, the funnel goes like this:
Start with awareness: a potential customer becomes aware of different car options. This is mostly done in the corporate sector through advertising.
Next, consideration: the customer considers options, weighs what they’re looking for (Sunroof? Leather seats?), and figures out what they want.
Then, intent: it’s time to purchase. They know mostly what they want, getting more committed and making final tweaks between select options.
Finally, the purchase stage, where money is exchanged. Cha-ching!
Lastly, loyalty: ideally their chosen car brand keeps engaging them so they keep coming back for more Toyota/Ford/Subaru goodness later.
Let’s see that illustrated:
So. How does this translate from buying cars to child and family-focused organizations like yours? Well, let’s have a looksee:
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As you can see, there are lots of similarities between the two, but I’ll break it down further.
Let’s start with awareness. Similar to buying cars, this stage is all about piquing the interest of potential customers, donors, volunteers and supporters. This is where most public relations and branding work is done—getting your name in front of those who need to hear about you. Car brands have a lot of advertising dollars to throw at this, but for most of us, inexpensive or free tactics like earned media work just as well (and can be even more purposefully targeted).
From there, let’s move into consideration. Once you’ve caught your target audience’s attention, it’s time for them to learn more about you. This is where your communications assets—such as your website, your about us video, and your outreach materials, really come into play. If someone is considering supporting you, you’ll need lots of juicy information and spiffy-looking materials to make them say, “wow!”
Next up is intent. This is your audience member sticking their toe in the water—just getting to know you, and seeing what it’s like to start building a relationship with your organization. This means they may follow you on Twitter, or join your email newsletter list. You’ll want to make sure you’re doing enough regular outreach to move them from intent to purchase.
This is where it gets exciting—the “purchase” stage. This is when they decide to dive in with your organization and really invest, either financially or with their time. You’ll want to make this as easy as possible for them. For example, putting a call to action button (such as enroll or donate) front and center, with a streamlined registration process. Ask yourself: how easy do we make it for our potential target audience member to ultimately take our desired action?
Once they’ve committed to you, you need to make sure they stick around. Some sales funnel models move this “customer” back into the intent phase. But I like to think of this loyalty phase as reinforcing action—making sure that your current donors, customers, supporters and advocates feel like you are worth continuing to support and that they always know your current impact.
I find this framework to be helpful in illustrating why the work we do as communicators is SO important! You can see our impact and our deliverables in literally every stage of the funnel.
