Sales funnel
Sales funnel
A sales funnel is a model that describes the journey from a person first becoming aware of your product to the moment they become a customer. The classic stages — awareness, interest, consideration, intent, purchase — provide a framework for understanding where prospects drop off and where your marketing needs work. It is called a funnel because the number of people shrinks at each stage: many discover you, fewer engage, and only a fraction ultimately buy.
The most useful thing about the funnel model is not the shape but the questions it forces you to ask. Where is the biggest drop-off? Is it a traffic problem (top of funnel) or a persuasion problem (bottom of funnel)? I have worked with companies that poured money into awareness campaigns when their real issue was a broken checkout flow, and others that obsessed over conversion optimization when they simply did not have enough people entering the funnel in the first place. Diagnosing the right stage to fix is half the battle.
From a growth engineering perspective, the funnel is your diagnostic map. Instrument each stage with measurable metrics, identify the stage with the highest drop-off rate, and focus your experiments there. A 10% improvement at the weakest stage of your funnel will almost always outperform a 10% improvement at a stage that is already performing well. Work on the bottleneck, not the vanity metric.