Funnel
Aussi : Sales funnel, Marketing funnel, Conversion funnel, Purchase funnel, AIDA, Entonnoir de conversion, Tunnel de conversion
The customer journey from awareness to purchase, typically Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Decision, Action, with prospects narrowing at each stage.
What it is
A funnel is a model of the path a prospect follows from first contact with a brand to a desired outcome, usually a purchase. It is drawn as a funnel because the audience is large at the top and narrows at each stage as people drop off. A common version is:
- Awareness: the prospect discovers the brand or problem.
- Interest: they engage and learn more.
- Consideration: they compare options and evaluate fit.
- Decision: they choose and are ready to buy.
- Action: they convert (purchase, sign up, request a demo).
Some teams add post-purchase stages (Retention, Advocacy), turning the funnel into a loop or flywheel.
Why it matters
The funnel gives cross-functional teams a shared language for where value is created and lost. It turns a vague goal (grow revenue) into measurable stages, each with its own conversion rate. This lets leaders locate the true bottleneck instead of guessing.
- Diagnosis: a low conversion from Consideration to Decision points to pricing, trust, or sales friction, not a traffic problem.
- Forecasting: stage-to-stage rates make pipeline and revenue predictable.
- Budget allocation: spend can be shifted to the stage with the highest marginal return.
How it is used in practice
- CMO: maps campaigns and content to stages (top of funnel for reach, bottom of funnel for conversion) and tracks cost per stage.
- CDO: instruments events and builds the data model that stitches touchpoints into a single funnel view, handling attribution and identity.
- CFO: links funnel volumes and conversion rates to CAC, LTV, and cash flow forecasts.
- AI: uses models for lead scoring, next-best-action, and churn prediction, and increasingly LLM assistants that qualify and nurture leads at scale.
Concrete worked example
A B2B software firm runs a monthly funnel:
- 10,000 site visitors (Awareness)
- 2,000 read a product page (Interest), 20 percent
- 400 start a free trial (Consideration), 20 percent
- 80 request a quote (Decision), 20 percent
- 20 sign a contract (Action), 25 percent
Overall conversion is 0.2 percent. If the team improves the trial-to-quote step from 20 to 30 percent, quotes rise to 120 and contracts to 30, a 50 percent revenue lift with no extra traffic. This shows why measuring each stage beats optimizing the top alone.