Marketing funnel stages only help if everyone in the company can say, for any contact, which stage they are in and why. Labels like awareness and consideration are easy to draw on a slide and hard to apply to a real person in your database. This article gives you a set of stages defined by what the contact did, not what you hope they think, and shows how to make the levelpartner.ai platform move contacts between stages automatically so the counts are always current.
Why stages defined by behaviour work better
Most funnel diagrams describe a buyer's state of mind. Aware, interested, considering, intending. You cannot see a state of mind in a CRM. You can see actions: visited a page, downloaded a guide, opened three emails, booked a call. Define every stage by an action and the argument about which bucket someone belongs in disappears.
The stage definitions below suit most service companies. Rename them if you like, but keep each one tied to something the contact did.
A practical set of five stages
- Visitor. Someone who has visited your site or a funnel page but given no details. You can count them in aggregate, not individually.
- Subscriber. Gave an email address for a newsletter or update, with no specific problem signalled yet.
- Engaged. Took an action that shows a specific interest, such as downloading a guide on a topic or using a calculator.
- Marketing qualified. Met your handover rule, for example engaged and visited a service page, or replied to a nurture email.
- Sales accepted. A salesperson has reviewed the contact and agreed to pursue it. From here the sales funnel stages take over.
The fifth stage is the one most companies leave out, and it matters. It records the moment sales agreed, which lets you measure how often marketing's handovers are accepted.
Before you start
- Agreement on the five stage names and their rules between marketing and sales.
- Tags created in Contacts for each stage that applies to an individual.
- Forms and downloads already live, so there are actions to trigger on.
- A pipeline in Opportunities where sales accepted contacts will appear.
How to set it up
- Define five stages by what the contact did.
- Write the handover rule for marketing qualified contacts.
- In Automation, open Workflows and click + Create Workflow.
- Choose Start from scratch.
- Click Add New Trigger and choose Form Submitted.
- Add the Form Is filter for your newsletter form.
- Add an action that adds the subscriber stage tag.
- Build similar workflows for engaged and qualified stages.
- On qualified, add Send Internal Notification for the sales owner.
- Turn on the Publish toggle, then click Save.
- In Contacts, click + Add smart list for each stage tag.
Setting the handover rule
The handover rule is where marketing funnel stages earn their keep. Too loose and sales drowns in contacts who downloaded one checklist. Too strict and good buyers sit in nurture for months.
Say the first handover rule is any download, and sales accept 20% of handovers. Tighten it to a download plus a visit to the remortgage service page within 14 days, and handovers might fall from 80 a month to 30. If sales then accepted 70% of them, that would be 21 accepted leads instead of 16. Fewer notifications would also mean the team stops ignoring them.
What it replaces and the weekly time
Defined stages replace the vague "lead" label that covers everyone from a newsletter subscriber to a buyer with a signed proposal. They give marketing and sales a shared vocabulary, which is worth more than any single report.
Once the workflows run, the weekly effort is 30 minutes: check the counts per stage, read the rejected handovers and note why sales rejected them.
Letting people tag stages by hand. Manual tagging drifts within a month as different people apply different judgement. Let workflows apply every stage except sales accepted, which is a human decision by design.
When not to use this many stages
A company that gets a few enquiries a month and talks to every one of them does not need five marketing stages. Two will do: subscriber and enquirer. Add stages as volume grows, and use the marketing funnel overview to decide how much structure you need.
Troubleshooting
Contacts carry two or three stage tags at once. A workflow adds a new tag without removing the old one. Add a remove-tag step before each add-tag step.
Engaged counts are far too high. A trigger is firing on any email open, which some mail clients do automatically. Trigger engagement on clicks, downloads or replies instead.
Sales never accept or reject handovers. The request arrives as an email they ignore. Put handovers into a dedicated pipeline stage and review it in the weekly sales meeting.
Old contacts never get a stage. The workflows only trigger on new events. Run a one-off bulk action on the existing list using the same rules.
Frequently asked questions
How many marketing funnel stages should we have?
Between three and five for most companies of this size. Fewer than three tells you nothing; more than five usually means stages nobody can tell apart.
Do stages differ by industry?
The names can stay the same while the rules differ. An engaged action for a real estate firm might be a valuation request; for an agency, an audit download. Keep the structure and change the triggers.
Where do content readers fit?
They usually sit at visitor or subscriber until they download something specific. The content marketing funnel guide shows how to move them on.
How do stages show up in reporting?
Each stage tag can be counted over time. The marketing funnel dashboard article shows how to chart them side by side.