Many people have asked me how to make an automated sales funnel in a spreadsheet. I usually recommend that they use a marketing automation tool (HubSpot), but for those who are on a tight budget, this post can help you design a marketing and sales funnel using Excel or Google Sheets - for FREE!
Before we dig in to the funnel, and in order to get the best use out of it, you should unify your sales and marketing processes with an SLA, applying inbound methodology. If you don't know much about the topic, feel free to read this article that can help guide you in establishing an SLA (Service Level Agreement) between your sales and marketing teams.
Once you finish reading these two articles, you will be able to create a sales and marketing funnel similar to the one below, that will update automatically.
What does a Sales Funnel do?
The graph that we are going to make is similar to a bar graph. Though the bars have been centered in order to create a funnel shape. This is useful in visualizing the amount of leads and clients that you have at each stage in your company's sales process.
Why use a Sales Funnel graph?
The reason, is because it will help you to better organize your potential clients at each stage in the sales process, allowing you to predict your companies future earnings.
This graph also provides you with a clearer and more representative picture of your business' sales process stages. In the case of an Inbound funnel, we are going to start with a large amount of potential clients in Stage 1 (First Contact), but only a small portion of these consumers are going to get to Step 5 (Closed), which is when the product or service is sold. Keep in mind that the number of stages in your funnel, and the name of each stage can change depending on the needs of your company. In this example, we used 5 stages:
Knowing this is important, since it allows us to know how many clients we need in the first stage in order to close 2 clients, 5 clients, or 100 clients.
The 3 steps to making a Sales Funnel in Google Sheets.
Download the free template to make your own automatic Sales Funnel!
Step 1:
Define what each stage of your company's sales funnel is called. Once this is done, enter them into column 'B' in the 'Final Funnel' tab.
We have created 5 stages as an example:
1. First Contact: These are the leads that are sent to the sales team once the marketing team has qualified them. These leads need to be contacted in order to start a conversation. The goal is help these leads go through to the next stage of the funnel, which is generally when we qualify the lead.
2. Qualified: At this stage, we have ensured that these leads are the most qualified possible. We use the BANT score to classify them. Each category should have a value from 1 to 10.
- (B)udget – Do they have a large enough budget to afford our product or service?
- (A)uthority – Do they have the power to make the purchasing decision within their company?
- (N)eed – Do they need our product or service?
- (T)iming – Is their need urgent enough?
3. Meeting: At this stage, the product or service has been presented to the client and we advise them on the best solutions for them.
4. Proposal: At this stage a proposal is sent to the client and any questions or concerns that they may have are addressed.
5. Closed - Won: These are all of the contacts that you have converted into clients.
Step 2:
Input all of your contacts into the 'Data Input' tab. For the integrity of the funnel, you can modify all of the data except for column 'I'.
Step 3:
All set! Now you can see the funnel that has been generated automatically along with relevant data such as the conversion rate and probability of closing.
What are you waiting for!? Download the free template now and create your own sales funnel in Google Sheets or Excel.
