Funnel
The ordered steps between a stranger seeing you and paying you, measured so you can see where people stop.
A funnel is the sequence of steps a stranger passes through on the way to becoming a customer — saw it, clicked it, read it, enquired, bought — with a count at each step. The shape is the point: fewer people arrive at each stage than the one before, and the ratios between them tell you where the business is actually broken.
Most operators respond to weak sales by adding more people at the top, because that is the visible lever. It is almost always the wrong one. A step converting at 3% when it should convert at 10% is throwing away two thirds of everything you send it, and doubling traffic doubles the waste along with the result. Find the worst ratio first; it is usually cheaper to fix than to outrun.
The second discipline is keeping the steps few and real. A funnel with nine stages is a diagram, not a measurement — nobody can name what moves someone from stage four to stage five, so nobody improves it.
Worked: 4,000 visitors, 400 enquiries (10%), 80 calls booked (20%), 16 clients (20%). Doubling traffic costs money and yields 16 more clients. Moving the enquiry-to-call step from 20% to 35% costs one rewritten follow-up email and yields 12.
Also known as
- sales funnel
- marketing funnel
- pipeline
Relevant for
- Founders
- Before you buy more traffic, find the step with the worst ratio — more volume through a broken step buys you more waste at the same price.
- Creators
- Your funnel is views to subscribers to buyers, and the middle step is the one nobody measures; that is where the audience you already have is leaking out.
- Business owners
- Referrals are a funnel too — enquiry, quote, signed — and knowing which step you lose people at tells you whether the problem is your price or your follow-up.