What is a sales funnel
A sales funnel is a model that describes the customer's journey from first contact with a company to purchase as a sequence of stages with a narrowing number of people. It lets you measure conversions between stages, find bottlenecks and forecast revenue. The funnel usually starts in marketing and ends in sales.
What the funnel is for
The funnel turns selling into numbers. Instead of the feeling that "sales is going somehow", the company gets a row of figures: how many people entered, how many moved to the next stage, where they are lost and how long the passage takes. From those figures you can answer the questions that are otherwise only argued over: Do we have too few leads, or poor conversion? Is the problem in marketing, in qualification, or in closing?
A practical example of the count: if a company needs 4 new deals a month, the conversion from lead to meeting is 20 % and from meeting to deal 25 %, it needs 80 leads a month at the top. Without a funnel this number is guesswork, with a funnel it is arithmetic.
The most common mistake: two funnels in one company
Now the essential part. In most B2B companies we run into, there is not one funnel but two. Marketing has its own - it ends with a handed-over lead and reports numbers. Sales has its own - it starts with a meeting and reports the pipeline. Between them is a hole into which leads, data and responsibility fall.
That this is not Czech folklore is shown by the data: Gartner (2024) found that marketing and sales cooperate on only 3 of 15 key commercial activities. Companies with a connected funnel meanwhile grew 32 % year on year according to Aberdeen Group, while disconnected ones fell 7 %. The difference is not made by better marketing or better sales - it is made by it being one system with one definition of stages and one number both sides look at.
How to tell your funnel is split
Three quick tests. First: is there a written definition of when a lead is ready for sales (MQL and SQL)? Second: does marketing see what happened to the leads it handed over - all the way to the deal outcome? Third: do marketing and sales sit over one report, or does each have their own?
If you answered no twice, you do not have a funnel. You have two departments and hope.
Updated: July 2026
Frequently asked questions
What stages does a sales funnel have?
Typically: awareness, interest (lead), qualification (MQL, SQL), sales opportunity, proposal and close. A company defines the specific stages according to its own sales process - more important than the names is that they are measurable and everyone understands them the same way.
How is a sales funnel measured?
By the conversion rate between stages (what percentage moves on), the speed of passage and the value of the pipeline at each stage. From these three quantities you can work out how many leads a company needs at the top for the revenue to come out at the bottom.
What is the difference between a sales funnel and a pipeline?
The funnel is a model of the whole journey from first contact, the pipeline is the sales part of the funnel: the concrete open cases in the stages of the sales process. The pipeline is a subset of the funnel.
One topic, one funnel
We treat marketing and sales as one system. To see what that looks like in practice, read the blog.