From Cold Contact to Brand Advocate (Part 1)

A two-layer guide to the sales funnel—first in plain English, then with a full professional teardown, examples, and best‑practice tips

Part 1 – The Story Told Simply (Bird’s‑Eye View)

What a “sales funnel” is and why every revenue‑driven team needs one

Picture the kitchen funnel your grandmother used for jam: a wide rim at the top and a narrow spout at the bottom. In business we borrow that shape to describe how a crowd of potential buyers gradually turns into a handful of paying customers.

• At the top we pour in everyone we can possibly reach—conference badge scans, newsletter sign‑ups, scraped lists.
  
  
• At the bottom only those remain who have actually transferred money into our account.

The model is more than a drawing:

1. It measures efficiency. If 5 000 names enter and only 20 deals emerge, the layers in between reveal exactly where most prospects leak out.
   
   
2. It predicts cash. Knowing historical conversion rates and average deal size, Finance can estimate next quarter’s revenue with surprising accuracy.
   
   
3. It guides investment. If leakage happens mostly between qualification and proposal, leadership strengthens SDR coaching instead of buying more advertising.

The Cold Contact

You return from a trade show with a spreadsheet of 5 000 business cards. Each record holds a name, an email address, maybe a job title. These are cold contacts: information is thin, value unproven, but the volume is huge—the mouth of the funnel.

X‑raying the Data

First you verify and enrich: delete invalid emails, add industry codes, company size, and job titles pulled from external databases. The result is a profile of the person and a profile of the company—a little dossier answering who exactly is this and what do they do?

Passing the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP, “ideal client portrait”) Gate

Next that dossier is compared with the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)—a formal checklist of traits (industry, geography, head‑count, installed technology, strategic goals) that statistically predicts a profitable, repeatable sale.

Teams often test multiple go‑to‑market hypotheses—“sell our SaaS to mid‑market manufacturers,” “launch a retail edition,” “export to Southeast Asia.” Each hypothesis gets its own ICP and therefore its own funnel, so its success or failure is visible without contaminating the core metrics.

If the record fits the ICP, the contact is filtered down to the next layer and earns the label Marketing‑Qualified Lead (MQL). The funnel has already narrowed—impossible buyers are gone.

Sparking Interest with Marketing Campaigns

An MQL is still only potential. Marketing now runs campaigns of many flavours: banner ads, print magazines, roadside billboards, how‑to blog posts, cook‑book style newsletters, white papers that show how the product solves real‑world problems. The goal is a deliberate response—an email click, a webinar registration, a pricing‑page visit—each logged as behavioural points inside the CRM.

The Sales‑Accepted Lead

When points reach a threshold or a direct reply arrives (“Send me details”), the record becomes a Sales‑Accepted Lead (SAL). An SDR (Sales Development Representative) phones or messages to confirm three things:
1. Pain – is there a real problem?
2. Budget – is money roughly available?
3. Authority – is this person involved in the decision?

A positive triage upgrades the record to Sales‑Qualified Lead (SQL). The funnel shrinks sharply: fewer people remain, but each smells like a deal.

The Opportunity Journey

An Account Executive (AE) opens an opportunity and moves it through predictable stages—Discovery → Evaluation → Proposal → Negotiation → Verbal Commit. Progress is allowed only when tangible evidence (a document, a next‑meeting date) is stored in the CRM; that discipline protects the forecast. A signed contract flips the opportunity to Closed‑Won: money has been received.

Customer Success and the Birth of an Advocate

After purchase the account lands with Customer Success. Key metrics become time‑to‑first‑value and Net Revenue Retention. When a happy user agrees to record a testimonial or refer peers, the customer graduates to Advocate status. Advocates are few, but their referrals bring the cheapest new revenue of any channel.