The short version: a typical sales funnel has four stages, awareness, interest, decision and action, and most of your traffic drops off at every single one, which is normal, not a sign you have broken something. The funnel that pays your bills is not the pretty diagram, it is the follow up sequence and the human conversation that happens after someone clicks “buy now” or fills in a form.
The four stages, in plain English
Strip away the jargon and a sales funnel is just a map of what a stranger does before they hand you money. It has four stages that repeat in every industry I have worked in, from SaaS to coaching to local trades.
- Awareness: someone sees you for the first time. A LinkedIn post, a Google search, a friend’s recommendation, an ad.
- Interest: they stick around long enough to want more. They opt in for a lead magnet, follow you, join your email list.
- Decision: they compare you against alternatives, read reviews, watch a demo, ask questions.
- Action: they buy, book a call, sign the contract.
Most people stop the map there. That is the mistake. The real money sits in the stage after action, retention and referral, and I will come back to that because it is the part almost nobody builds.
What this looks like as an actual page-by-page journey
Picture a small business coach selling a group programme. Her funnel, in order, might be:
- A Facebook or Instagram ad pointing to a free checklist
- A landing page that collects an email in exchange for that checklist
- A thank you page that immediately offers a low cost tripwire product, £27, or invites them to a free live training
- A five to seven email nurture sequence over ten days
- A sales page or a booked call for the main offer
- A checkout page, then an order confirmation and onboarding sequence
That is a typical funnel. Nothing exotic. If you want a longer look at where to physically build this, on your own website, inside a Facebook group, or through a platform like Kajabi or ClickFunnels, I wrote a full breakdown here on where you should build your first sales funnel, because the platform choice matters more than most people think at the start.
A funnel I ran, with the real numbers
In one launch for a five day challenge that fed into a paid programme, I sent to a list of 4,200 people. Here is exactly what happened, no rounding to make it look prettier:
- 4,200 emails sent, 1,680 opened (a 40% open rate, high because the list was warm)
- 612 clicked through to the registration page
- 391 registered for the challenge
- 140 showed up live on day one, dropping to 90 by day five
- 34 booked a call for the paid programme
- 11 bought at £997
That is £10,967 from a list of 4,200 people, a 0.26% conversion from list to sale. It sounds tiny written out like that. It is also completely typical. Most funnel courses will not show you numbers this modest because they are selling you the dream of a funnel that converts at 20%. In eighteen years of doing this, I have seen that maybe three times, always with an unusually hot, pre-sold audience.
The uncomfortable bit that people selling funnel templates rarely say out loud is this, the page design barely moved the needle. What moved it was the phone calls my team made to the 34 people who booked and didn’t show up, and the three follow up emails after the challenge ended. The funnel got people to the top of the decision. The close happened in a conversation.
How to build one in seven steps
If you are starting from nothing, here is the order I would build in, not the order most guides tell you to build in.
- Pick one offer. Not three. One thing, one price, one promise.
- Write the sales page or sales call script first, before the lead magnet. If you cannot sell it in one page, you do not understand it well enough yet.
- Build the opt in, a checklist, a short video, a free audit, something that takes five minutes to consume and proves you can solve the problem.
- Set up the email sequence, five to seven emails, each one answering a real objection (cost, time, whether it will work for their specific situation).
- Add the booking or checkout step. For service businesses this is usually a calendar link; for products it is a Stripe checkout. If you run a service business that takes bookings, worth reading what to look for in all-in-one booking and website software before you bolt together six different tools that do not talk to each other.
- Send traffic to it, one channel at a time. Do not try paid ads, organic content, and a podcast tour in week one.
- Follow up manually with everyone who shows interest but does not buy. This step gets skipped constantly and it is where 30 to 40% of “lost” sales sit.
Where funnels leak, and why that’s fine
Every stage of a funnel loses people. A landing page converting opt ins at 20 to 30% is good. A sales page converting cold traffic at 1 to 3% is normal, not a failure. A webinar converting attendees to buyers at 8 to 12% is solid. If your numbers look like this, your funnel is not broken, it is working exactly as most funnels work.
The panic sets in when people compare their real numbers to the screenshots they see on other people’s sales pages, showing a launch that made £180,000 in a weekend. Those numbers are usually true, and they are usually also the result of a list built over three or four years, a personal brand, and a paid ads budget in the tens of thousands, not the funnel template itself. I have run funnels for clients with six-figure lists and clients with 400 subscribers, and the mechanics were identical. What changed the result was the size and warmth of the audience going in, not the funnel.
The stage nobody builds, retention and referral
A typical funnel diagram stops at “action,” the sale. That is half a funnel. What happens in the 90 days after someone buys decides whether you have a business or a series of one off transactions.
Concrete example, a client selling a £47 a month membership had brilliant top of funnel numbers, strong opt in rate, decent sales page conversion, and was still losing money because 60% of members cancelled within two months. We fixed it not by touching the funnel at all, but by adding a 30-day onboarding email sequence and a personal welcome call. Churn dropped to 34% within a quarter. The funnel had never been the problem.
If your funnel currently ends at “thank you for your purchase,” you are leaving money on the table. Referral asks, review requests, and a simple upsell email 14 days after purchase should all sit in the funnel too.
Funnels that don’t look like funnels
Not every funnel starts with an ad and a landing page. A lot of small businesses now build their top of funnel inside a community they run for free. I covered the mechanics of this, including whether the person running one gets paid, in does a Facebook group admin get paid, because a free Facebook group can act as the entire awareness and interest stage of a funnel if you run it with intent rather than just posting for the sake of it.
Affiliate partners can do the same job, they bring the awareness stage to you rather than you paying for ads. I wrote about how small businesses can do this without collecting hundreds of affiliates who never sell a single thing in this piece on affiliate sales, and the same rule applies, one or two people sending you real buyers beats fifty people sending you nothing.
When to bring someone in to build it for you
If you have tried to build a funnel three times and it still is not converting, the fix is rarely a new tool. It is usually the offer, the audience, or the follow up. A fractional CMO or a hands-on marketing consultant can diagnose this in a single working session in a way that another course cannot, and I broke down what that costs, in the UK and the US, in how much a fractional CMO costs per month. Worth reading before you spend another £2,000 on funnel software.
I also talked through where sales and marketing are heading, and where funnels fit into that, on a recent podcast appearance, the full transcript and takeaways are here in the UNmiss podcast episode on the future of marketing and sales, if you want a longer, more conversational version of a lot of what is written above.
Related reading: ai videos look like dreams.
Frequently asked questions
What are the four stages of a typical sales funnel?
Awareness, interest, decision and action, sometimes written as attention, interest, desire, action. Most businesses should add a fifth stage, retention and referral, because that is where repeat revenue and word of mouth come from.
What is a good conversion rate for a sales funnel?
A landing page converting opt ins at 20 to 30% is good, a cold sales page converting at 1 to 3% is normal, and a webinar converting attendees to buyers at 8 to 12% is solid. If someone shows you a funnel converting at 20% from cold traffic to sale, ask how warm that traffic really was first.
Do I need paid ads to run a sales funnel?
No. A free Facebook group, an email list built through guest podcasting, or a partnership with two or three affiliates can fill the top of a funnel without ad spend. Paid ads speed things up, they are not required to have a working funnel.
Why does my funnel get clicks but no sales?
Usually one of three things, the offer does not match what the traffic was expecting, there is no follow up sequence chasing people who did not buy the first time, or the price sits above what that specific audience is ready to pay without a phone call first. Fix the follow up before you touch the design.
