The 4 key steps to creating a sales tunnel that converts

Published: 25 June 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.

Knowing how to make the most of marketing automation, personalising your content and inbound marketing is becoming a necessity if you want to roll out your digital communications and maintain your customer relationships with a view to developing your business. In B2B as well as B2C!

But what exactly is the definition of the sales tunnel and how can you put it in place to optimise 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, is the buying journey that a potential customer goes through.

This is made up of 4 main stages:

getting a potential buyer interested
converting them into a qualified lead
guiding them through to a sale
building loyalty once they are a customer.

To achieve the ultimate objective of building customer loyalty, a sales funnel strategy is generally accompanied by an inbound marketing approach. The aim? To naturally attract your 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 and seeks to respond to a need or problem.

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

What is 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 a 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. This journey focuses on their emotions, their searches and their motivations, 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 maximise return on investment.

💡 O ur advice: 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 articles 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. Attract visitors (top of the tunnel).

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

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

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

2. Converting visitors into qualified leads (middle of the tunnel)

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

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

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

3. Turning leads into customers (bottom of the tunnel)

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

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

Warm prospects who are ready to buy are encouraged to take action with a convincing call to action.

4. Retaining existing customers

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

Regular newsletters containing tips on using the software.
A loyalty programme or exclusive offers for existing users.
Satisfaction surveys to gather feedback and improve services.

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

Stage 1: Attract visitors with a content strategy

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

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

blog articles
white papers
infographics
inspirational 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 responds in a relevant way to the needs of your potential customers.
At the same time, optimise your content for natural referencing, or SEO. It would be a shame to create high-quality 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 simple prospect. This term primarily 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 personalised content in order to :

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

Use marketing automation

With automated emails, you can offer a sales pitch tailored to a specific buyer profile. Your modus operandi always remains the same: opt for an increasingly targeted and personalised message. In this way, you gently influence the behaviour 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 on which the prospect lands after clicking on a call to action. These calls to action should be included in your emails, as mentioned above, but also in 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 Internet user into a qualified lead by means of content that is adapted to the issues they are facing and a meticulous design.

At the same time, landing pages provide an opportunity to gather information about your potential customers. A contact form, for example, is perfectly suited to this objective.

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 "hotter" and more mature the lead.

It's these contacts that you should focus your sales and marketing efforts on first.

Step 3: Turn your hot leads into customers

Establish commercial 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, behaviour and interactions with you, and so on.

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

💡 Email marketing is also a good way of encouraging people to buy. Once you have obtained your contact's agreement (opt-in contact), send them emails to encourage them to make a purchase:

personalised commercial offers
promotions
new products
relevant tips and advice, etc.

Anticipate customer follow-up

The prospect has gone from being a lead to being a customer. Welcome them and show them that you're there for them, by pointing them to 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: Optimise customer loyalty

It costs seven times more to convert a prospect than to retain an existing customer.

So this fourth stage is perhaps the most important in the sales cycle.

Here are a few tips for building customer loyalty.

Continue your efforts on emailing and customer service

Your personas are now embodied in real people, with varying levels of human behaviour and consumer expectations.

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

To do this, you need to consider the buyer:

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

Thanks to these different actions, you can ensure that your customers remain loyal... 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, etc.

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

Consider all channels
Finally, bear in mind that the customer experience must be satisfactory across all channels, at every point in the funnel. While we've already discussed personalised 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, by listening more closely to your communities.

Measure your actions

While evaluating the success of your actions is not, strictly speaking, part of the sales tunnel, it is an essential step in ensuring the success of your strategy. In this way, you can identify areas for improvement.

Monitor 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: the number of pages viewed by the prospect, the time spent, the subjects consulted, etc.
Your positioning on Google: monitor the progress of your natural referencing. This will enable you to optimise 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? And so on.
Your landing pages: as well as the conversion rate, it's a good idea to carry out tests on your pages and your calls to action, so as to retain only the best-performing versions.
Your social networks: the number of shares, the rate of engagement, the traffic sent back to your site from social networks... these are all indicators to consider.

Use Google Analytics

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

In order to gain a precise understanding of the performance of your sales channel, you can set up Google Analytics to perform a number of actions, such as :

analysing visitors' progress through your marketing funnel,
determining the origin of visitors who access your contact form,
find out which landing pages generate the most leads,
measure the 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 packages to support your sales tunnel strategy?

Emailing software

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

Make sure, however, that you have an excellent interconnection with your CRM and marketing automation software.

Marketing automation software

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

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, as they centralise all the customer data and interactions between them and your company.

What's more, many of these tools have modules and features that support 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,
optimum management of sales pipelines
decision-making based on figures,
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 real sieve! You wouldn't believe the number of companies that fail to follow the funnel and miss out on a large number of prospects at each stage of the sales funnel. Here are the various pitfalls to avoid along the way in order to optimise your sales funnel and improve your conversion rate.

Poorly targeting your content according to the stage of the sales funnel

Sending a subscription offer at the top of the sales funnel is a bit like offering 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 must be meticulous: each phase must be put in place to optimise conversions, and that means offering appropriate content. Informative blog posts in the TOFU (Top of the Funnel - first stage), engaging call-to-actions in the MOFU (Middle of the Funnel - middle of the customer journey), and a BOFU tunnel (Bottom of the Funnel - last stage) aimed at making the final decision... Take into account the user's progress through the customer journey.

Forget the fluidity of the customer journey

A slow website, a badly 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 the contact points. We're looking for simplicity. Think customer experience, not maze!

Not analysing 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 always optimise according to the results! A good funnel is one that has the potential to evolve and offer different solutions.

Focus on B2B and SaaS: what are the differences?

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, opinions, a video and a newsletter,
determine the key channels (social networks, advertising, emailing, landing page, etc.),
adapt to the attention span, form and specific type of content required to address the issue.

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

Creating an effective conversion path in B2B sales means :

Fluid acquisition,
building loyalty through experience
real optimisation of links, pages and CTAs,
a message that represents the consumer's point of view.

You don't just make an offer and hope for the best. You define a clear line, you include personalised messages designed for the right time, 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 will enable you to hit the bull's-eye. Otherwise, in the end, you'll just be blowing hot air.