How To Set Up a Sales Funnel in a CRM

Table of Contents

CRM, Marketing Automation, or Both?

For your Sales Funnel, the first step is to decide if you want to use a CRM, Marketing Automation System, or both, to funnel your Leads:

1. Leads can be funneled from your website or via upload directly into your system if you use a CRM.

2. I wouldn’t recommend that anyone in the B2B world only use a Marketing Automation System because they are not designed for sales to work out of them. However, some CRMs have built in marketing functionality. In which case, you can absolutely use this system on its own. 

3. Lastly, you can use a Marketing Automation System to capture Leads, and handle all marketing activity, and then push certain Leads into your CRM.

Which Leads To Push Into The CRM?

In our previous article on the Sales Funnel, we discussed Leads, MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads), SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads), Deals, and Customers. Let’s focus on Leads and MQLs here. 

The time to push a Lead into your CRM can vary, but a good rule of thumb is to do so when they become an MQL. When a Lead goes from your Marketing Automation System into your CRM, they go from being a Lead to being a Contact. While this isn’t a hard rule, this distinction is useful to help regulate the amount of data in your CRM. 

Leads to Contacts Expanded

Imagine that your B2B website has a ton of traffic and people fill out forms left and right to read your material. Over time, you could end up with 100,000 people in your Marketing Automation System. However, it might be that only 2,000 of these Leads could become potential customers. This is why we have Lead Scoring, to help us automate who we should reach out to. Accordingly, if we push all 100,000 Leads into our CRM, it could be a bit overwhelming for sales. It could also bog down our CRM and cause it to run slowly. 

This is why we keep all Leads in our marketing system, automatically assign value with Lead Scoring, then push our MQLs into our CRM, which we now call Contacts.

How Do I Move a Lead to an MQL?

Lead Scoring! In our previous article, we discussed how you can set up Lead Scoring as part of the Sales Funnel. Once you establish a scoring criteria, you can set up a workflow to decide what score moves someone from a Lead to MQL. For example, you can write a workflow rule that states: When a Lead has a Score of 100 or more, change the Lifecycle (the name of this field depends on your system) from Lead to MQL.

You will also want to add in a qualifier to your workflow that if a contact is already listed as an MQL, SQL, Deal, or Customer, that the system should do nothing. I recommend that you only move Leads forward in the funnel, not backwards. The reason is that you don’t want to accidentally mark someone who is part of a Deal as an MQL; it could cause confusion. 

Lastly, we need to get these MQLs into the hands of Account Development. For this, we can set up another workflow. This time, we can write that when a Lead becomes an MQL:

1. An email is sent to the Lead Owner
2. A task is created for the Lead Owner
3. A message such as in Slack, is sent to the Lead Owner
4. Any other communication method your team finds effective

If there is no Lead Owner, many systems enable you to set up a round robin distribution of your MQLs to the Account Development team.

How Do I Move an MQL to an SQL?

A Sales Qualified Lead is someone that Account Development has deemed a potential candidate to purchase their company’s products or services. This is not done via automation, but with an actual person-to-person meeting. This meeting should have a specific purpose that is standardized for all team members with clear objectives in mind such as: do they have budget, what does their timing look like, etc. 

Account Development should manually move the person to SQL if they should talk to Sales. While this is manual, what we can automate however, is how that newly minted SQLs gets sent to Sales. Follow similar action to the Lead to MQL process above to make this happen.

What To Do With MQLs That Do Not Convert to SQLs?

We need to mark that the team reached out to the person if an MQL should not become an SQL. For this, a second field is often used called Lead Status. This will be our next article, but the basic gist is this: you can create a Lead Status to denote where your team is at in terms of outreach. For ones that don’t move to SQL, we can mark those as Nurture. A Lead Status of Nurture is a way for marketing to note who should receive marketing outreach. Again, stay tuned for our next article on Lead Status.

How Do I Move an SQL to a Deal?

Once Account Development marks someone as an SQL, it’s time for Sales to meet with them. Just as Account Development should have standardized objectives in their meeting with MQLs, so too should Sales in their meetings with SQLs. The basic goal of sales at this point is to further qualify prospects to determine if there is a genuine interest and potential to purchase. 

If there is interest, we should create a Deal and associate our main point of contact with said Deal.

If the SQL does not become a Deal, they can be left as an SQL and moved to a Lead Status of Nurture if there is still potential for them to purchase one day in the future.

Wrap up – Sales Funnel in a CRM

Now that we know how the sales funnel works and how to set it up, it’s time to take action. Work with Marketing to understand the capabilities of your systems. Chat with Account Development and Sales to understand what they think makes for a good Lead. Lastly, use all of this information to set up a process that makes sense for your company.