A sales funnel is a visual representation of your sales cycle – the steps you lead customers through to make a purchase. The funnel shape is due to the tendency for the number of leads to decrease the closer you get to a sale. Unqualified leads are at the top, and nearly-closed deals are at the bottom. In this article, we’ll be providing sales funnel templates and examples you can use to create your own.

Using a CRM is an easy way to manage your sales funnel and see what next steps you need to take with each sale. With Pipedrive, you can see the current status of your various projects in one convenient location, making it easy to prioritize and take action. Start converting more leads to sales today by signing up for a free trial.

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Sales Funnel Template

You can use our templates below to create your own sales funnel. We’ll also show you how to do this automatically using Pipedrive CRM further below.

5 Stage Sales Funnel Template

• Download as a PDF
• Download as .PPTX (Powerpoint) – Use this if you want to add text and edit the sales funnel using PowerPoint.

7 Stage Sales Funnel Template

• Download as a PDF
• Download as .PPTX (Powerpoint) – Use this if you want to add text and edit the sales funnel using PowerPoint.

If you’re wondering which stages apply to your business, we’ll help you figure this out further below and provide some examples. You can also check out our article What is the Sales Cycle? The Stages Of Customer Acquisition. A sales funnel is essentially a graphical drawing your sales cycle, so the article above can also be used to figure out your sales stages.

Why Do I Need a Sales Funnel?

There are three key reasons to use a sales funnel:

• Figure out your process (and improve it) – Identifying the steps you take to close a sale is a prerequisite to selling better. With a standard method in place and a visual representation of it, you can apply it to your business, test it, and improve it.
• Manage your day-to-day – When you create a sales funnel within a CRM, you can view the progress of all your deals at a single glance, including the number of deals in each stage of the funnel. This allows you to answer questions like, are there any high-value deals I should keep an eye on today? Or, do we have enough leads to keep us occupied for a while? We’ll be showing you how to create sales funnels using Pipedrive CRM later in this article.
• Forecast earnings – When you apply a probability to each sales stage (i.e., leads in the first stage have a 10% chance of closing, 20% in the second stage, etc.) you can multiply this by the value of each deal and thus find out how much revenue to expect overall. Pipedrive CRM can make these calculations automatically, as we’ll explain further below.

How to Create a Sales Funnel

To create a sales funnel, you first have to think about the different stages involved in your sales cycle.

The five steps of a typical sales funnel

At the top of the funnel are your new leads, coming fresh from your contact form, marketing campaign, leads list, or whatever your lead source might be. The first stage is often your initial contact with the lead, be that a call, email response, etc.

What follows are a series of stages where you move towards closing the sale. Most businesses will have a qualification stage, in which they make sure the lead has a need for the product and is financially capable of making the purchase. Following that are various stages of research, presenting, as well as an evaluation phase in which you address client concerns.

The cycle ends with closing – the moment the deal is officially done, whether that’s by signing a contract or processing a payment.

How Long Should My Sales Funnel Be?

While our example above has five stages, some funnels will be longer to account for more complexity. For example, a B2B business with large contracts – say, for security system installation – will need additional steps for researching the premises and drafting a proposal. They may also have extra rounds of negotiation towards the end.

Another typical sales funnel, this one with seven steps

Generally speaking, you want to keep your sales funnel around 5 – 7 steps. Anything longer can be difficult to manage, whereas anything shorter can be too vague. In either case, consider combining or splitting steps to reach an appropriate sales funnel length.

How to Create a Sales Funnel Using Pipedrive CRM

Another way to create a sales funnel is to use a CRM such as Pipedrive. This has a few big advantages compared to simply writing it out on paper:

• It shows you the number of leads in each stage of the funnel — so at a single glance, you get a good idea how well-stocked your pipeline is
• It shows you the amount of revenue in your pipeline — using your probabilities of winning at each stage of the funnel, you can use this to realistically forecast your revenue

In this section, we will show you how to create your own sales cycle using Pipedrive CRM.

A sales funnel in Pipedrive

Pipedrive includes a sales funnel with default stages, but you can easily customize them to fit the stages that your business uses. Note that Pipedrive calls the sales funnel a ‘pipeline’ so we’ll use the same term going forward.

1. Click on the ‘$ Deals’ button in the top navigation to bring you to your Deals page
2. Click on the ‘Pipeline settings’ button in the top-right to bring you to the Customize sales stages page
3. Click on each stage in the default pipeline to bring up the Edit stage modal window
4. Edit the name of the stage to match the corresponding stage in your business’ sales funnel — for this guide, we’ll use the stages we suggested above
5. Click the ‘Save’ button and move to the next stage in the pipeline

If the number of stages in Pipedrive doesn’t match the number of stages your business uses, you can either click the ‘Add stage’ button to add more or click the ‘Delete this stage’ link in the modal window to delete any extras.

Our finished pipeline looks like this:

Customize the stages of your sales funnel

Back on the Deals page, we can see each stage of our sales funnel. Your potential deals are displayed in the column of their current stage. You can then drag and drop each deal between stages as they progress.

Drag and drop your leads as they progress through the stages of your sales funnel

Using a Sales Funnel to Forecast Earnings

Your sales funnel gives you a high-level overview of where in the sales process all of your potential deals — and therefore, your revenue — are. It shows you how many prospects you have at each stage and can give you insight into the conversion rates for each stage, any bottlenecks or gaps in your process, and if you need to refocus your attention towards any deals — all at a glance.

Pipedrive displays every deal’s potential revenue and the total potential revenue for every deal in each stage. You can use this information, plus the expected close date in each deal, to forecast your revenue. To view this, click on the ‘Forecast View’ icon on the Deals page.

Use Pipedrive to help forecast your earnings

This view will show you your potential deals; but instead of organizing them by stage, Pipedrive will organize them by their expected closing date. This will show you how much potential revenue exists each month. Pipedrive will also sort the potential deals in each month by what stage they’re in — the closer it is to closing, the higher in the column it will appear.

You can also weight the likelihood of any potential deal progressing to the next stage when you set up your sales funnel in Pipedrive. Weighted revenue is especially useful since it can be used to more accurately forecast your earnings. When you add your stages to your pipeline, you can predict how likely you are to win a deal in each stage – i.e. 20% in the “Qualify Opportunity” stage, 50% in the “Presentation” stage, and so on. This can be based on existing data you might have, or simply be estimates you’ll test and improve over time. Pipedrive will adjust your revenue projections to reflect these weights.

Sales Funnel Automatically Updated

Your sales funnel is updated automatically based on the latest data you enter, so you can easily check your funnel each morning and watch for anything out of the ordinary. For example, if the top of the funnel is too small, you can push more resources towards lead generation to ensure you don’t have a shortage later on. If the bottom is especially large, you’ll know there are some high-value deals near closing to keep an eye on.

Sales funnels can also be drilled down by individual employee, so you can forecast individual earnings, or just see how everybody’s pipeline is doing.

The Bottom Line

A sales funnel is two different things: first and foremost, it’s a simplified model of your selling process. It shows step-by-step how leads become customers.

Secondly, when you create a sales funnel using your CRM, it becomes a summary of your pipeline. By showing how many leads (or how much potential revenue) is in each stage of the funnel, you get an at-a-glance diagnosis of your pipeline.

To discover your sales funnel using Pipedrive CRM, sign up for a free 14-day trial. To learn more about what the CRM has to offer, check out our Pipedrive User Reviews.

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