What Is A CRM Funnel And How to Implement It in Your Sales Process in 2024?

When running an online business, it is important that you have a conversion-optimized sales process in place. And it will only get more productive if you have proper control the over over-buyer journey.

At the same time, to maintain high efficiency, you also want to embrace marketing automation as part of your overall sales process.

Hence, the best course of action is to set up a compelling CRM funnel that is tailored to generate leads, qualify & nurture them, and eventually convert them.

Today, you will get a comprehensive guide on what a CRM funnel is and how you can create one for maximum sales conversions.

Let’s start by understanding the basics.

What Is A CRM Funnel?

A CRM funnel is a strategic marketing approach that guides the journey of potential customers from initial contact to conversion and beyond. It comprises stages focused on lead management: Lead Generation, Lead Qualification, Lead Nurturing, and Conversion.

You should consider implementing a CRM funnel when you aim to streamline your sales and marketing processes, efficiently manage customer interactions, and increase conversions.

For instance, imagine you’re managing a real estate agency. Utilizing a CRM funnel could begin with Lead Generation through various channels like property listings, website inquiries, or social media engagement. Subsequently, you’d move to Lead Qualification by assessing leads based on their budget, location preferences, and property specifications. Lead Nurturing then involves personalized interactions, such as sending tailored property recommendations or hosting virtual tours to nurture these leads. Finally, when a lead decides to purchase or rent a property, it becomes a successful Conversion.

By implementing a CRM funnel in this scenario, you can effectively track leads, personalize interactions, and ultimately boost sales, optimizing your real estate business’s overall efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Importance Of CRM Funnels In Sales Optimization

The structured approach of CRM funnels makes it an ideal strategy to ensure more organized marketing efforts with a significant increase in sales.

Here, you are not simply getting organic traffic and trying to convert. The whole process is a targetted approach and in every stage, you get a lead more and more qualified until you convert.

This will ensure your overall sales process involves using resources and budget on customers that are more likely to convert than wasting time with leads that will not give you any business.

So, having a CRM funnel in place means, you will have more control over your sales process along with high conversion rates and increased sales to customers that will retain for a long time.

Fundamental Stages of a CRM Funnel

A typical CRM funnel consists of 4 fundamental stages:

1. Lead Generation
2. Lead Qualification
3. Lead Nurturing
4. Conversion

Let us look at each of these stages more closely.

Stage 1 – Lead Generation

You start by setting up strategies to attract and capture potential customers’ interest and gather their information for future engagement. This stage focuses on creating awareness about your products or services and enticing individuals to express interest or interact with your brand through various channels.

The goal here is to encourage prospects to provide their contact details or engage with your content, allowing you to initiate communication and move them further along the sales funnel.

Strategies for Effective Lead Generation

• Content Marketing – Create valuable content like blogs and guides to attract visitors and capture lead data.
• SEO – Optimize website content to rank higher in search engines and earn more traffic.
• Paid Ads – Run targeted ads on platforms like Facebook and Google to reach more buyers.
• Referral Programs – Incentivize existing customers to refer their network to your business.
• Lead Magnets – Offer free resources in exchange for contact information to build your list.
• Webinars – Host educational webinars to establish authority and generate sales-ready leads.

Stage 2 – Lead Qualification

Once you have lead generation strategies in place, you then have to focus on assessing and determining the readiness of leads to make a purchase or take the next step in the buying process. This phase aims to evaluate and prioritize leads based on specific criteria or characteristics that align with your ideal customer profile.

Qualifying leads helps in identifying which prospects are most likely to convert into customers, allowing you to focus your efforts and resources on those with the highest potential.

You typically qualify leads based on factors such as their level of interest, budget, authority to make buying decisions, and their fit with your product or service.

For instance, suppose you’re implementing lead qualification for a software company selling project management tools. You might assess leads by considering criteria like the size of the organization, the industry they belong to, their specific project management needs, and whether they have the decision-making authority or budget for purchasing the software. By qualifying leads based on these factors, you can prioritize and direct your sales efforts towards those leads that are most likely to benefit from and invest in your software, thus maximizing the efficiency of your sales process within the CRM funnel.

Criteria for Lead Qualification

The criteria for lead qualification may vary from business to business. Following are a few common lead qualification criteria that most online businesses use:

• Fit/Need: Determine if the lead’s needs align with your product or service by assessing if your solution solves their specific challenges or fulfills their requirements.
• Budget: Evaluate whether the lead has the financial resources or budget to invest in your product or service.
• Authority: Identify if the lead has decision-making power within their organization or can influence the purchasing decision.
• Timeline: Determine the lead’s timeframe for implementing a solution or making a purchase to understand their urgency or readiness to proceed.
• Engagement Level: Assess the lead’s level of engagement with your brand, such as their interactions with content, response to communications, or frequency of visits to your website.
• Company Size/Industry: Consider if the lead’s company size or industry aligns with your target market or ideal customer profile.

By using these criteria for lead qualification, you can effectively prioritize leads and focus your efforts on those most likely to convert, ensuring a more efficient and targeted approach in the sales process within the CRM funnel.

Stage 3 – Lead Nurturing

Next comes this lead nurturing stage that involves building relationships with qualified leads by providing them with valuable and personalized content, interactions, and support.

This phase focuses on guiding leads through the sales funnel by delivering relevant information and nurturing their interest, trust, and engagement with your brand.

Lead nurturing aims to keep your brand “top-of-mind” and address the needs and concerns of potential customers as they move closer to making a purchasing decision.

By consistently delivering valuable and personalized content at this stage, you build stronger relationships, maintain engagement, and increase the likelihood of leads choosing your brand when they’re ready to make a decision within the CRM funnel.

Techniques for Lead Nurturing

• Send relevant content like ebooks and tip sheets.
• Provide product walkthroughs and free trials.
• Segment and personalize messaging to their needs.
• Use email, phone, and chat for two-way engagement.
• Incentivize readiness to talk to sales with discounts.

Stage 4 – Conversion

Once you have applied the strategies in the above 3 stages, it’s time to close the deal. It’s the critical point where a qualified lead transitions into a paying customer or completes the desired action, such as making a purchase, signing a contract, or subscribing to a service.

This phase signifies the culmination of the entire customer journey, where the efforts invested in lead generation, qualification, and nurturing ultimately result in a successful conversion.

It involves guiding the lead through the final steps, addressing any remaining concerns or objections, and facilitating the decision-making process to secure the sale or desired action.

Tactics for Enhancing Conversion Rates

• Offer free trials to encourage product testing.
• Share customer success stories to build trust.
• Provide pricing/product matrices for comparison.
• Bundle offerings/tiers for greater perceived value.
• Highlight ROI and long-term savings.
• Upsell additional products/services.
• Offer limited-time percentages off or payment plans.
• Use visible and persuasive CTAs to guide leads toward conversion.
• Simplify and optimize the conversion process for easy lead action.
• Follow up with leads who abandon carts to recover potential sales.
• Provide prompt and helpful support to address queries and build confidence.

How To Implement A CRM Funnel in Your Sales Process

As you saw, each stage of a CRM funnel has a crucial impact on your overall sales process. Now, let us look at how you can implement a compelling CRM funnel for high results from your marketing efforts.

1. Choosing the Right Solution To Create This Funnel

First of all, you will need to have the right set of tools to put the overall CRM funnel in place.

You will need tools that will allow you to

• Capture and manage leads including segmentation.
• Track and control a sales pipeline or funnel journey.
• Automation Workflow for email marketing automation.
• Analytics to track the overall performance of the funnel.

For example, if you are using a WordPress website, then you may use the combination of WooCommerce, WPFunnels, and Mail Mint, to put down a viable CRM funnel.

• If you have products or services to sell, you may use WooCommerce to host them for sales.
• Use WPFunnels to create lead-generation funnels and sales funnel journeys.
• Mail Mint will allow you to collect leads, track them, and set up email automation workflows to drive overall conversions.

Together, these plugins give WordPress sites a customizable funnel builder, email marketing capabilities, and analytics to optimize campaigns — an all-in-one toolbox to capture, nurture, and convert leads.

2. Prepare Necessary Funnels For The Complete Sales Process

To start, you will need to prepare 2 types of funnels:

• A lead generation funnel that comes with a landing page with an opt-in form, and thank you page.

• And a sales funnel that comes with a sales landing page, checkout page, post-purchase upsell page, and order summary page.

You may create multiple of these funnels depending on the various products and offers you have in your plan.

If you are using WPFunnels, you may simply create a funnel in 15-20 minutes. Go to the WPFunnels dashboard, and click on “Add new funnel.” There, you will get the option to choose from various funnel templates that you can use with little changes required. There, you simply have to set up the opt-in form or assign the products for sale, and then design the funnel pages with your copy and design. Once they are ready, you may actively promote them and use them to collect leads and drive conversions.

Plus, you may use other lead generation strategies mentioned earlier to create more ways to collect leads and drive conversions.

3. Integrate To CRM or Lead Management Tool

Once you have your funnels in place, you then need to connect them with a CRM or a tool that allows controlled lead management.

In this case, you may send all collected leads and their data to your tool and segment them according to how you collected the leads and their details.

Mail Mint and WPFunnels have a special integration where you may set up email automation workflows specifically for your funnels built using WPFunnels. You may easily set up actions to assign leads to particular leads based on their actions in the funnel, and then go ahead and segment them in your Mail Mint dashboard. So, in this case, you capture leads with WPFunnels and send the data to Mail Mint for lead management & segmentation.

4. Set Up Email Automation For Nurturing

So, now, you have a process in place to collect leads and convert them via a sales funnel. But, getting people directly into the sales funnel doesn’t always deliver the highest conversion. The better option is to use the “Lead nurturing” stage of your CRM funnel.

Use lead nurturing email campaigns as a bridge between the lead generation funnel and the sales funnel. Once you have the leads, initiate an automated email series to nurture the leads before directing them into your sales funnel. This will help you conduct a proper lead qualification while nurturing them to get closer to making a decision.

To make this process more efficient, you may create conditional drips in the automation workflows so that you are able to definite different emails for people who open or do not open the emails at a certain stage of your lead nurturing series. This will help with defining the qualification stage of the leads and help you take tailored persuasive emails to convince them.

This overall automated process is the most important part of the overall CRM funnel. If done right, your conversion rates will be significantly high.

In Mail Mint, you will be able to trigger email automation workflows for your leads easily. When setting up the automation flow with WPFunnels, there, you may place your email series as part of the automation workflow. The plugin has conditional action to let you define different email paths based on their actions with your emails. Hence, you may take a short journey for people who engage with your emails and a more persuading email series for people who don’t engage with your emails too soon.

So, for your funnels, initially, set up a lead nurturing email series for the lead generation funnel. And on the last email of this automation workflow, link to the landing page of your sales funnel. Then, set up automation workflows for your sales funnel to follow up in case people do not complete the purchase.

Overall, this will cover the entire lead qualification and lead nurturing process, leading up to the conversion stage.

5. Initiate Sales Conversion

Your sales funnel will hold the final push to drive conversion. At the end of your lead nurturing email series, you may link people to the sales funnel landing page. Use a persuasive landing page copy with a benefit-focused approach to convince the prospect to purchase your product or service.

Apart from the landing page, work on making the checkout process as simplified as possible to offer a fast, distraction-free buying experience. If you have multiple products or subscription tiers, you may then initial one-click upsell offers after checkout to trigger additional sales or an instant upgrade. And finally, use an order summary page to confirm the order. As discussed above, this whole funnel can be created in WPFunnels.

Also, set up retargeting Ads so that people visiting your sales funnel can be reminded of your product or service via Ads on social platforms or other online Ads.

You may also initiate a promotional email series for people who don’t convert within the first 24-48 hours of visiting your sales funnel.

This, you can easily set up using Mail Mint following the initial email to visit your sales funnels at 2-3 days intervals. In fact, you can even set up automation workflows for people who did covert but didn’t accept the upsell offer, to try and get them to upgrade.

Overall, this step will cover all aspects of conversion.

6. Tracking & Data Analysis

Define the key metrics that you want to track for your funnels and get ready to monitor them on a regular basis.

WPFunnels and Mail Mint will provide you with detailed analytics to track the performance of your funnels and email automation results to stay on top of what worked and what didn’t.

If you want, you can even set up A/B testing variations for your funnel steps to identify better approaches to conversions.

Have the overall plan on tracking and monitoring data so that after launch, you are able to understand how well your CRM funnel is performing.

7. Update Lead Segmentation Based On Conversion Or Rejection

This is a small automation that you add to your funnels where upon conversion, you assign them to a specific list so that they no longer get the rest of the conversion-focused automated emails, and you can then plan on promoting other sales programs to these leads. This is just to ensure you do not annoy the people who have decided to accept your offer.

8. Launch & Promote Your CRM Funnel

If you have followed all the steps so far, it’s time to get the whole process rolling. Get all the pages and automation flows live had start getting traffic into your funnels.

Set up paid ads, share on social media, ask influencers and affiliates to spread the news, host webinars and live sessions, etc. The more targeted traffic you can generate the more leads you will produce, and eventually convert more into clients.

In the process, continuously monitor the tracked data and optimize various elements of your funnel to get the highest results.

Which Industries Can Benefit From Using A CRM Funnel

Many industries can optimize their sales process using structured CRM funnels:

• eCommerce: Guide shoppers to purchase with product recommendations to match interests and cart abandonment flows reminding them to complete their order.
• Software: Capture leads with free trial signup forms then nurture users through onboarding tips and product capability emails matched to their role.
• Consultants: Establish thought leadership with educational content and schedule value-adding activities to convert prospects based on their firm type.
• Education: Segment students based on programs of interest for personalized application tips and enrollment deadline reminders per their admission status.
• Insurance: Build trust by answering common FAQs and addressing customer pain points through tailored email journeys specific to each policy type.
• Nonprofits: Steward donors with campaigns focused on their cause-aligned interests and multi-channel fundraising sequences with time-based urgency.
• Services: Promote relevant service packages to past customers and set reminders for renewals or annual appointments to generate repeat business

Essentially any company selling products, services, or memberships can benefit from a CRM sales funnel.

Identify key customer milestones and build multi-layered journeys to guide them through each stage. The higher satisfaction and conversion at every step, the faster your business grows.

Benefits of Utilizing CRM Funnels

While you can already tell the immense potential of a CRM sales funnel, let us still look at the core benefits it offers.

i. Enhanced Sales Efficiency

Since the CRM funnel is so well-organized, you are able to make your content more tailored toward your target audience and effectively communicate with the right audience.

This ensures you are dealing with the most potential clients and are able to get maximum conversions without burning excessive resources.

ii. Improved Customer Relationships

The overall process is focused on a personalized approach, making your customers feel valued as they go down the funnel stages. From becoming a lead to getting valuable content, to eventually getting introduced to a product makes them connected and emotionally triggered to convert.

Hence, the people who become your customers or clients tend to find you credible and may consider doing business with you for a long time.

iii. Increased Revenue and ROI

A targeted approach in any marketing plan means you are aligning your budget and resources to deal only with the most potential prospects. This ensures you are able to convert enough leads into customers without wasting much money, time, or effort.

The automated aspect of the CRM funnel ensures you do not need excessive resources to carry out the overall process. This means, that once you have put the whole journey in place, your conversions will continue to grow almost with no intervention from you.

So, in the long run, you will get higher revenue, higher profits, and definitely, higher ROI.

Future Trends in CRM Funnels

So, what’s in the future for CRM Funnels? Could it get more profitable and efficient than it already is?

Well, the good news is, just like any other technology, marketing technologies are also getting better and better.

We believe that pretty soon, you will get a lot more advanced options to work with to make your sales process much more efficient and optimized for high conversions.

• AI has already stirred up the world with accurate content generation. And with time, it will only get better and better. We predict that, pretty soon, you will get AI tools that will plan your funnels for you upon learning about your business goals and target audience. In fact, we wouldn’t be surprised to see AI tools generating unique page designs for your funnels upon a single command from you.

• Predictive analysis and result estimation are already quite reliable and it may get even better with advancements in machine learning and big data analysis. You may be able to predict the outcome of a campaign right from the planning stage based on your niche.

More advancement in data visualization, omnichannel marketing, database management, Ads displays, etc., can be expected to get higher marketing benefits, helping to make your CRM funnels more conversion optimized.

Is WPFunnels And Mail Mint The Right Choice For CRM Funnels?

For WordPress users, integrating WPFunnels and Mail Mint provides an incredibly robust platform for deploying high-converting CRM funnels with minimal effort:

• Visually build beautiful landing pages, upsells, and flows with flexible templates.
• Capture all interactions and lead activity into organized contact records.
• Design multi-layered customer journeys with powerful automation.
• Take payments, integrate affiliates, and track ROI seamlessly.
• Manage customer messaging across email, SMS, Facebook Messenger, and more.
• Leverage deep analytics for continuous optimization.

With the WPFunnels suite, get all essential tools for funnel creation, campaign execution, customer communication, and insights analysis in one system. This empowers scaling world-class customer experiences faster.

So take control of your sales process now with the WPFunnels Bundle.

Author’s Note

As explained throughout this guide, implementing a structured CRM funnel offers immense opportunities for business and revenue growth. Optimizing the overall process with proper strategies can help you convert more people with high efficiency.

However, the difference between an average vs high-converting funnel boils down to the quality of copywriting and creative messaging aligned to your audience. No automation can replace deep market research into your customers’ pain points and motivations when crafting content. Though tools like WPFunnels and Mail Mint make execution simple, the foundational work of understanding your audience is essential.

So as you plan your funnel, dedicate time to analyzing buyer psychology, trends, and expectations before deployment. Create draft journeys, share with target customers for feedback, and iterate based on insights. This human-centered approach ensures your automated experiences resonate for maximum impact.

If you have a WordPress site, we highly recommend exploring WPFunnels and Mail Mint as they have all the right features to help you craft CRM funnels that work.

So go ahead and craft a well-planned CRM funnel to boost your overall sales process for greater business growth.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What are the key stages in a CRM funnel?

A CRM funnel typically consists of lead generation, lead qualification, lead nurturing, and conversion stages.

2. How do CRM funnels benefit businesses?

CRM funnels streamline sales workflows, enhance customer relationships, and drive revenue growth through optimized processes.

3. What tools can be used to implement a CRM sales funnel?

You will need tools that allow capturing leads, segmenting them, setting up email automation, and monitoring the funnel performance.

For example, in WordPress, the combination of WooCommerce, WPFunnels, and Mail Mint offers a complete solution to create CRM funnels.