Sales Funnel
A sales funnel is the conceptual model of how prospects move from awareness to closed customer — visualized as a narrowing series of stages where most don't convert at each step.
What is a sales funnel?
A sales funnel is the staged model of the buying journey: awareness → interest → consideration → intent → evaluation → purchase. Each stage is narrower than the one before. In B2B, the funnel is usually instrumented as: visitor → lead → MQL → SQL → opportunity → closed-won/lost.
Why it matters
- The shared mental model that lets sales, marketing, and ops talk about the same pipeline
- Stage-conversion rates are the diagnostic tool for finding bottlenecks
- Pipeline coverage and forecast both compute off funnel math
Funnel vs. flywheel
- Funnel: linear, leaks at every stage, ends at close
- Flywheel: post-sale customers feed referrals, expansion, retention — creating compounding rather than ending growth
- Most teams use funnel for new business and flywheel for the customer lifecycle
How TexAu helps
Filter funnel-stage definitions on cleaner, AI-scored data so MQL → SQL conversion rates rise without changing thresholds — better inputs at the top of the funnel improve every downstream rate.
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