What Is a Lead Generation Funnel and Why Your Business Needs One

5 min readAug 14

Word of mouth, networking, and similar marketing efforts can bring in a lot of revenue. But they are also unreliable and unpredictable. To establish and maintain a successful business, you must be consistently finding and nurturing new leads.

This may sound overwhelming. As a business without a massive marketing department, you don’t have the time and manpower to develop complex systems of advertising and marketing campaigns. Where do you even begin? Start small. Begin by refining your lead generation funnel.

The Lead Generation Funnel

A lead generation funnel provides direction and purpose for your marketing. To bring in more leads and close more sales. It’s called a funnel because the first stage captures the attention of a broad audience, and this marketing becomes more refined and detailed in the following stages. Here are the four main stages of a lead generation funnel.

Stage One: Awareness. Consider a new prospect who has never heard of your company or your solution before. They may not even know they need you. In this awareness stage, you are focused on introducing your company and guiding the prospect to understand what you do and why they should trust you.
Stage Two: Engagement. As the prospect considers making a purchase or is at least attracted to your business, they progress into the engagement stage. In this stage, you are building more rapport and your messaging becomes more focused on selling your solution to the prospect.
Stage Three: Conversion. A prospect who gets to this stage is ready to buy from you. In this stage, your goal is to make their purchase as easy as possible and upsell where you can. Remember prospects are busy and don’t assume they understand your process. Keep it simple and lead them to the sale.
Stage Four: Follow-Up. Your visitor’s journey does not end once they have transitioned from a prospect to a customer. So, it’s crucial to provide post-purchase support to your customer in order to earn referrals and positive reviews, which leads to more sales. This is why it’s important to begin the onboarding process as soon as possible to ensure that your customer feels like a priority to avoid buyer’s remorse.