The 4 key steps to creating a sales tunnel that converts

Published: June 25, 2025

In digital marketing, the sales tunnel (also known as the sales funnel, sales funnel or conversion funnel) is a formidable tool for analysis and action. Its objective? To turn your prospects into loyal customers.

In this context, knowing how to exploit marketing automation, content personalization and inbound marketing becomes a necessity for deploying your digital communications and maintaining your customer relations with a view to business development. In B2B and B2C alike!

But what exactly is the definition of a sales tunnel, and how can you put it in place to optimize your sales?

Let's take a look at the 4 key stages of the conversion funnel, their analysis and implementation.

See all software Customer relationship management

What is a sales tunnel?

Sales tunnel: definition

The sales tunnel, or sales funnel, refers to the purchasing path taken by a potential customer.

It is made up of 4 main stages:

Attracting a potential buyer,
convert them into qualified leads
accompany them to the point of sale
building customer loyalty.

To achieve the ultimate goal of building customer loyalty, a sales funnel strategy is usually accompanied by an inbound marketing approach. The aim? To naturally attract potential customers to your website.

What is the main objective of the conversion funnel?

The objective of a conversion funnel is clear: to turn a visitor into a customer! At each stage of the funnel, the company guides the prospect towards a specific action on its website, seeking to respond to a need or problem.

Clicking on a blog post, a call to action, filling in a form, making the decision to buy... these are all framed actions designed to convert the user into a customer.

What's the difference between the buying journey and the sales tunnel?

Although the buying journey and the sales tunnel are often confused, these two concepts play distinct roles in any marketing strategy, including digital! Here's how to tell them apart.

The buying journey is seen from the customer's point of view. It reflects the stages the customer goes through, from becoming aware of a need to making a purchase. It focuses on the customer's emotions, research and motivations, so as to understand their needs and respond effectively at each stage.
The sales tunnel, on the other hand, is designed from the company's point of view. It represents the actions taken to guide a prospect towards conversion. It aims to structure marketing and sales efforts to convert prospects into customers, and maximize return on investment.

💡 O ur tip: For a high-performance strategy, the sales tunnel must be aligned with the buying journey. For example, in the awareness phase, a company can use blog posts to attract visitors (top of the tunnel). In the decision phase, case studies or demonstrations can encourage them to take the final step (bottom of the tunnel).

Example of a sales tunnel

Let's look at an example of a SaaS company offering project management software. 📊

1. Attracting visitors (top of the tunnel)

The company creates a blog focused on common project management issues, such as:

"How to organize a remote team?"
"The best tools for managing your deadlines."

🎯 These articles are optimized for SEO, and publications on social networks also redirect to this content. Traffic is generated through relevant keywords and advertising campaigns.

2. Convert visitors into qualified leads (mid-funnel)

To capture visitor information, the company offers premium content, such as:

A free ebook: "A complete guide to optimizing your project management."
A live webinar: "5 strategies to boost your team's productivity."

Interested visitors fill in a form to access these resources. Once the emails have been collected, the company segments leads according to their interests or professional activity. ✅

3. Turn prospects into customers (bottom of the tunnel)

After nurturing leads with personalized emails (tips, case studies, demo videos), the company makes them a clear offer:

A 14-day free trial of the software.
A time-limited discount on their first subscription.

Hot prospects, ready to buy, are encouraged to take action with a convincing call to action.

4. Retain acquired customers

🫂 Once prospects have become customers, the company continues to interact with them via:

Regular newsletters with tips on how to use the software.
A loyalty program or exclusive offers for existing users.
Satisfaction surveys to gather feedback and improve services.

4 stages of the conversion funnel for a high-performance sales tunnel

Step 1: attract visitors with a content strategy

The first stage of the sales funnel consists in capturing the attention of web users, arousing their interest by providing answers to the problems they encounter.

Your website, but also your social networks (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.), prove to be formidable marketing performance levers... provided you disseminate content that attracts readers:

blog articles
white papers
infographics,
inspiring photographs
videos, etc.

💡 A few tips:

Identify your marketing personas beforehand: the targeted profiles and their issues, and the solution you offer them. This will enable you to offer content that is relevant to the needs of your potential customers.
At the same time, optimize your content for natural referencing, or SEO. It would be a shame to create qualitative content that will never be read because it won't appear on the first page of Google results!

Step 2: convert your visitors into qualified leads

Second phase: acquiring qualified leads.

💡 As a reminder, a lead is not just a prospect. First and foremost, this term refers to a sales contact whose intention to buy is already more or less proven.

Think lead nurturing

Lead nurturing consists of maintaining contact with your prospects by continuing to subtly offer them personalized content, in order to :

better inform them,
meet their needs,
remove psychological barriers,
build a climate of trust.

Use marketing automation

Use automated emails to offer a sales pitch tailored to a specific buyer profile. Your modus operandi remains the same: opt for an increasingly targeted and personalized message. In this way, you gently influence the behavior of potential buyers, convincing them without aggression or commercial pressure.

💡 Using a marketing automation solution, coupled with an emailing solution, enables you to achieve this targeting objective while saving you precious time in your sales efforts.

Create high-performance landing pages

A landing page is the web page where the prospect lands after clicking on a call to action. These calls to action are to be integrated into your e-mails, but also into your blog articles, your posts on social networks, etc.

So make sure you work on all your landing pages. The aim of each page should be to convert the surfer into a qualified lead, by means of content adapted to his or her needs and a meticulous design.

At the same time, landing pages offer the opportunity to collect information about your potential customers. A contact form, for example, is ideal for this purpose.

Identify the best opportunities with lead scoring

Lead scoring, generally established using a marketing automation tool, involves assigning a score to a lead, based on predefined criteria.

The higher the score, the more mature the lead.

These are the contacts you should focus your sales and marketing efforts on.

Step 3: Turn your hot prospects into customers

Establish sales contact

Thanks to the work you've done above, your company now has all the information and data it needs to present a sales proposal in line with the lead's profile, areas of interest, behavior and interactions with you, and so on.

At this stage, your added value clearly depends on personalized advice, on your ability to provide your prospects with the best offers adapted to their profiles. This is what we call smart content.

💡 Here too, email marketing is a good lever for encouraging purchase. Once you've obtained your contact's consent (opt-in contact), send them emails to encourage the act of buying:

personalized commercial offers,
promotions,
new products,
tips and advice , etc.

Anticipate customer follow-up

The prospect has gone from lead to customer. Welcome them and show them that you're there for them, by pointing out all your online resources, for example.

In short, it's a question of taking care of the quality of service in the customer relationship from the outset, and showing as much "commercial empathy" as possible.

Step 4: Optimize customer loyalty

Converting a prospect costs seven times more than retaining an existing customer.

As a result, this fourth stage is perhaps the most important in the sales cycle.

Here are a few tips for building customer loyalty.

Keep up your emailing and customer service efforts

Your personas are now materialized by real people, with human behaviors and varying consumer expectations.

Your objective? Adapt your marketing support and email scenarios as closely as possible to each customer: think premium, think personalization and segmentation, think customer satisfaction!

To do this, you need to consider the buyer:

thank them for sharing their opinion on your website or social networks,
respond sympathetically to their comments (even negative ones),
listen to any problems they encounter, and resolve them as quickly as possible,
reward loyalty with special offers such as discounts, gifts, etc.

Thanks to these various actions, you can ensure your customers' loyalty... and even encourage some of them to become your ambassadors. Satisfied customers are your best advertisement!

Ask your customers for their opinions
By asking your customers questions, you can find out what's working, the perceived level of quality, areas for improvement, and so on.

Satisfaction questionnaires, user communities, social networks, surveys... every useful comment is valuable!

Consider all channels
Finally, keep in mind that the customer experience must be satisfying across all channels, and at every point in the funnel. While we've already discussed personalized content through emailing, don't forget that social networks are also an ideal lever for consolidating customer loyalty.

💡 Think social selling, a process that enables you to intelligently develop interaction, and therefore sales opportunities, thanks to better listening to your communities.

Measure your actions

Evaluating the success of your actions is not, strictly speaking, part of the sales tunnel, but it is an essential step in ensuring the success of your strategy. This will help you identify areas for improvement.

Track your KPIs

First of all, remember to avoid common mistakes such as setting up your conversion funnel without defining objectives or key performance indicators, also known as KPIs.

Here are a few examples:

Your website traffic: number of pages viewed by the prospect, time spent, subjects consulted, etc.
Your positioning on Google: monitor the progress of your natural referencing. This will enable you to optimize your content to attract more visitors.
Email marketing: what type of email is most often opened by your leads? Which links are clicked the most? Etc.
Your landing pages: in addition to the conversion rate, it's a good idea to carry out tests on your pages, as well as on your calls to action, so as to retain only the best-performing versions.
Your social networks: number of shares, rate of engagement, traffic returned to your site from social networks... are all indicators to consider.

Use Google Analytics

Having a Google Analytics account is extremely useful for analyzing your conversion path and measuring its effectiveness.

To get an accurate picture of your sales funnel's performance, you can set up Google Analytics to do a number of things, including :

Analyze the progression of visitors through your marketing funnel,
determine the origin of visitors accessing your contact form,
identify which landing pages generate the most leads,
measure your inbound conversion rate, etc.

You can cross-reference these figures with the number of sales and your average basket to deduce the profitability of your actions.

What are the best software tools to support your sales tunnel strategy?

Emailing software

With advances in datamining, email marketing software offers great opportunities, both in terms of deliverability and data exploitation.

However, you'll need to make sure that they are well interconnected with your CRM and marketing automation software.

Marketing automation software

Once again, as we've seen, marketing automation tools offer a host of useful features.

Same point as before: you need your solution to communicate intelligently with your CRM software and emailing functions.

**CRM ( customer relationship management)**

CRM tools are perfectly suited to managing your conversion funnel, since they centralize all customer data and interactions between them and your company.

What's more, many of these tools have modules and functionalities supporting all (or a good part) of your strategy. For example, Sellsy CRM

Sellsy CRM offers :

marketing automation,
email marketing,
CRM, etc.

monday.com CRM : this easy-to-use, intuitive CRM solution guarantees your sales teams :

comprehensive lead tracking,
optimal sales pipeline management,
data-driven decision-making,
an overview of the evolution of each buying path, etc.

Common mistakes... and how to avoid them for a funnel that works

A conversion funnel can be a well-oiled machine... or a sieve! You wouldn't believe the number of companies that fail to follow it, and miss out on a huge number of prospects at every stage of the sales funnel. Here are the pitfalls to avoid along the way to optimize your sales funnel and improve your conversion rate.

Poorly targeted content at different stages of the sales funnel

Sending a subscription offer at the top of the sales funnel is a bit like proposing marriage on the first date! It's unlikely to work... The result? The visitor quickly leaves your website without leaving a point of contact, and will never become a potential future customer.

Content creation needs to be meticulous: each phase needs to be set up to optimize conversions, and this means proposing appropriate content. Informative blog posts in the TOFU (Top of the Funnel) phase, engaging call-to-actions in the MOFU (Middle of the Funnel) phase, and a BOFU (Bottom of the Funnel) tunnel for final decision-making... Take into account the user's progress through the customer journey.

Forget the fluidity of the journey

A slow website, a poorly structured page or a form that asks for useless information... No way! To convert with an ideal conversion tunnel, you need to simplify each stage of your funnel, reduce friction and clarify all contact points. We're all about simplicity. Think customer experience, not maze!

Not analyzing performance

Without Google Analytics, it's hard to know where the conversion funnel is getting stuck. Make an effective study of the bounce rate, the pages that perform well, the CTAs that attract interest... and optimize according to the results, always! A good funnel is one that has the potential to evolve and offer different solutions.

Focus on B2B and SaaS: what's special about them?

In B2B marketing, especially in SaaS, every campaign has a clear end goal: to turn a user into a buyer. But the reality is more complex. A buyer profile is never unique: the process has to reach several decision-makers, with different data, different intentions, specific needs and issues.

For this to work, a strategy must :

include strong added value (not a copy-paste of a product sheet),
be based on technical studies, reviews, a video, a newsletter,
determine the key channels (social networks, advertising, emailing, landing page...),
adapt to the attention span, form and specific type of content required to address the issue.

You need to generate measurable engagement, elicit a reaction, use an effective tool, define and carry out precise follow-up and finally... see the improvement in concrete results day after day. A good model relies on repeated actions, designed for the decision cycle and progression along the conversion path. This is where lead nurturing comes in: automated scenarios, building trust with the customer and analyzing every detail.

Creating an effective lead nurturing tunnel in B2B sales means :

fluid acquisition,
loyalty through experience,
real optimization of links, pages and CTAs,
a discourse that represents the consumer's point of view.

You don't make an offer and hope for the best. You define a clear line, and include personalized messages designed for the right moment, the right channel, the right person. And if you want customers to fill their shopping baskets, you need more than just a good product. You need the right form, the right target, the right data, the right call and the right experience.

👉 In short, in B2B, if you want to set up a funnel that works, knowing your customer, their needs and your objectives well will enable you to hit the bull's-eye. Otherwise, in the end, you'll just be blowing hot air.