What stages should your sales funnel have?
Build your funnel from stages the buyer completes, each with an exit rule you can check in your CRM. For a small B2B team that sells on calls, these six are enough:
| Part | Stage | Exit rule: the buyer has... | Your job at this stage | Count each week |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top | Target | Fits your customer profile and given you a reason to write now (a hiring post, a question, a tool complaint) | Research and note the reason | New targets added |
| Top | Contacted | Received your first message | Follow up until they answer or the sequence ends | People contacted |
| Middle | Engaged | Replied with interest or booked a time | Reply within the hour with two times | Positive replies |
| Middle | Qualified | Held a call and confirmed the problem, who decides and when | Run discovery, agree a next step with a date | Calls held |
| Bottom | Proposal | Received a price and agreed a date to decide | Answer objections, chase on that date | Proposals out |
| Bottom | Won or lost | Signed, or said no (write down why) | Hand over, or log the reason | Wins, losses, reasons |
The three parts people ask about are just groupings of these: the top gets attention, the middle turns interest into a real conversation, the bottom turns that conversation into a signature. If you want the textbook version with MQL and SQL stages and published conversion rates, read what a sales funnel is and what each stage converts at.
One trap when you copy a CRM's defaults. HubSpot's pipeline guide lists seven default deal stages, each with a probability: Appointment scheduled (20%), Qualified to buy (40%), Presentation scheduled (60%), Decision maker bought-in (80%), Contract sent (90%), Closed won (100%) and Closed lost (0%). The same page says the probability is multiplied by the amount in each stage to give the weighted amount on the board. Those percentages are settings, not your history, so your forecast is fiction until you replace them with your own rates.
How do you build a sales funnel step by step?
Six steps, in this order. By the times given below, the first four take under two hours (20 + 30 + 60 minutes, plus a decision).
Write one sentence on who it's for
Role, company type, size and the problem you fix, for example: "Heads of finance at UK accounting firms with 10 to 50 staff who still chase invoices by hand". If you can't write it, the funnel will fill with people who never buy.
Copy the stage table and write your exit rules
Use the buyer's action, never your own. "Sent a proposal" is your action; "agreed a date to decide" is theirs. Exit rules stop deals sitting in a stage because someone felt hopeful.
Pick one way in
Choose outbound or inbound to start (the table further down helps). Two half-built entry points give you two sets of numbers too small to read.
Build the board in your CRM
One column per stage, one card per person or company, a required "reason picked" field and a "next step date" field. A spreadsheet works for the first 50 cards. In Siela, Lead Finder saves every lead to the built-in CRM with a visual pipeline with the reason it was picked, in its own group for each run.
Write one message for each move between stages
First message, two follow-ups, the reply that offers times, the note after a call, and the proposal chase. Five or six short templates cover the whole funnel.
Run it for four weeks before changing anything
Count each stage every Friday. With 20 people in a stage, one person more or less moves its rate by 5 percentage points (1 ÷ 20 = 5%), so don't redesign on a single week.
How many leads can your funnel handle? A worked example
Your calendar, more than your lead list, usually sets the size of a founder-led funnel. Here is the arithmetic for a sample founder, Priya at Acme Analytics (an invented example), who has 8 hours a week for sales. Every rate and time below is our assumption for the example, so swap in your own.
Assumptions: 5 minutes to research and write to each person; 5% reply with interest; 10 minutes to handle each positive reply; half of those book a call; each call takes 1 hour with prep and notes; 40% of calls lead to a proposal taking 2 hours; 30% of proposals are won.
Per 100 people contacted: outreach 100 × 5 = 500 minutes (8.33 hours); 5 replies × 10 minutes = 0.83 hours; 2.5 calls × 1 hour = 2.5 hours; 1 proposal × 2 hours = 2 hours. Total 13.67 hours for 0.3 customers.
| Scenario | Hours per 100 contacted | People a week in 8 hours | Customers a month |
|---|---|---|---|
| As above | 8.33 + 0.83 + 2.5 + 2 = 13.67 | 8 ÷ 13.67 × 100 = 58 | 58 × 0.003 × 4.33 = 0.75 |
| Research drops to 2 minutes a person | 3.33 + 0.83 + 2.5 + 2 = 8.67 | 8 ÷ 8.67 × 100 = 92 | 92 × 0.003 × 4.33 = 1.2 |
| 5 minutes research, reply rate doubles to 10% | 8.33 + 1.67 + 5 + 4 = 19 | 8 ÷ 19 × 100 = 42 | 42 × 0.006 × 4.33 = 1.1 |
Two lessons from the example. First, research and writing take 61% of the hours (8.33 ÷ 13.67), so that's the first place to save time. Second, better targeting raises output but moves the bottleneck to calls and proposals, which take 9 of the 19 hours in the last row. At that point, protect call time and stop adding people at the top. Lead Finder in Siela is one way to cut the research step: it looks for a reason to reach out now and scores every lead hot, warm or cold with a one-line reason.
Should your funnel start with outbound or inbound?
Start where your buyers already look for a supplier, and check one fact before choosing: can someone buy, or at least book, without talking to you?
| Your situation | Start with | Deciding fact |
|---|---|---|
| Fewer than 10 customers, price above a few thousand a year | Outbound | You can choose exactly who enters the funnel and learn from every reply |
| People already search for your category or visit your site | Inbound page plus a booking link | Demand exists; the gap is converting it |
| Low price, self-serve sign-up | Inbound with a funnel builder | Pages, checkout and follow-up email matter more than calls |
| A list of past customers or warm contacts | Outbound to that list first | They already know you, and you can start today |
Two Gartner releases shape the inbound side. A Gartner release dated 9 March 2026 says 67% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience, and its survey of 646 B2B buyers (August to September 2025) found 45% used AI during a recent purchase. So your site has to answer price, fit and next step without a call. An earlier Gartner release (25 June 2025), on a survey of 632 B2B buyers from August to September 2024, says 69% of B2B buyers report inconsistencies between a supplier's website and the information its sellers provide. Make your outreach and your pages say the same thing.
On the outbound side, email has rules before it has tactics. Google's sender guidelines require every sender to Gmail accounts to set up SPF or DKIM and to keep spam rates reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%. If you're choosing software for the inbound pages, our comparison of sales funnel builders and their prices covers the options.
How do you optimise a sales funnel once it's running?
Optimise one stage at a time, and start with the gate between Engaged and Qualified, because a loose gate fills the bottom of the funnel with deals that were never going to close.
Vendor data points the same way. Ebsta's 2025 Sales Qualification Report, which the company says analysed over 655,000 B2B opportunities, reports 50% win rates for deals with high qualification scores against 8% for poorly qualified ones. Ebsta sells revenue intelligence software, and its release doesn't define the qualification score or say what period the data covers (checked 5 Nov 2026), so read it as one vendor's data, not a target for your funnel. Our guide to qualifying a lead in the first ten minutes gives the questions.
| Symptom in your weekly count | Stage to fix | First thing to try |
|---|---|---|
| Many contacted, almost no replies | Target | Tighten who you pick and require a written reason for each person |
| Replies, but few calls booked | Engaged | Reply within the hour and offer two specific times plus a link |
| Calls held, few proposals | Qualified | Confirm problem, decider and timing before the call ends |
| Proposals stall for weeks | Proposal | Agree the decision date before sending the price |
| Wins, then early churn | Target and Qualified | Add the churn reasons to your disqualify list |
Work through the table from the top. For the Engaged stage, see our ten fixes that book more sales meetings. Once deals are open, a short weekly meeting keeps the stages honest, and the nine-question pipeline review is a good script for it.
What is the 10-3-1 rule in sales?
The 10-3-1 rule says 10 leads produce 3 prospects and 1 client. It comes from life insurance, not B2B software. According to a January 2014 ThinkAdvisor article, the ratio was made famous by Al Granum, CLU, whose sales principles, the article says, guided the careers of many thousands of agents and financial advisors. Agents working with Granum kept records on more than 50,000 referred leads over 10 years, and, the article says, analysing data compiled over the next 15 years on 150,000 suspects reaffirmed the ratio.
Note the word referred. Those were introductions, and a prospect meant someone who took part in full fact finding. A cold B2B list behaves differently: in the example above, 100 people contacted produced 0.3 customers, where 10-3-1 would predict 10. Use 10-3-1 as a reminder to count every stage and to plan activity from the result you want, then measure your own ratios after four weeks.
Frequently asked questions
What is an example of a sales funnel?
As an invented example, Northwind Ltd, a sample consultancy, emails 60 finance leads a week who recently posted about a problem it solves. Three reply with interest, two book a call, one call leads to a proposal, and roughly one in three proposals is signed. Each of those moves is a stage, and the counts show which move loses the most people.
What is the best sales funnel builder?
It depends on where the sale happens. If customers buy online without a call, a page and checkout builder fits. If every deal closes on a call, you mostly need a CRM with pipeline columns, a booking link that shows real availability, and templates for each follow-up, and a funnel builder adds little at first.
How long does it take to build a sales funnel?
By the step times in this guide, setup takes under four hours: 50 minutes on who it's for and the exit rules, an hour on the CRM board and two hours writing templates. Readable numbers take longer: with 20 people in a stage, one person more or less moves its rate by 5 percentage points, so count for at least four weeks before changing anything.
Do I need a CRM to make a sales funnel?
Not for the first few dozen leads. A spreadsheet with one row per person and columns for stage, reason picked and next step date works. Move to a CRM when follow-ups start slipping, when two people share the pipeline, or when you need sequences to stop automatically after someone replies.
What should I do when a funnel stage has no data yet?
Write down a guess for its conversion rate and label it as a guess, then plan from it. After four weeks, compare the guess with what happened and replace it. Never copy a CRM's default stage probabilities into a forecast, because they are settings rather than your own history.
Sources
- HubSpot: Set up and customize pipelines (checked 5 Nov 2026)
- Gartner: 67% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience (9 March 2026) (checked 5 Nov 2026)
- Gartner: 61% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience (25 June 2025) (checked 5 Nov 2026)
- Google Workspace: Email sender guidelines (checked 5 Nov 2026)
- Ebsta: 2025 Sales Qualification Report press release (1 August 2025) (checked 5 Nov 2026)
- ThinkAdvisor: 10-3-1 and the One Card System (8 January 2014) (checked 5 Nov 2026)