Since digital marketing became a common business practice, it has undergone significant changes, which have also affected sales funnels. Now, as you design them, you have to factor in non-standard interaction paths – some users may enter the funnel from MoFu or skip several key touchpoints.
Alongside customer behavior, technologies are evolving as well. B2B companies need comprehensive tech stacks, ideally with AI integrations, for quick lead distribution and closing more deals.
In this article, you’ll learn how to build an up-to-date B2B sales funnel that drives maximum conversion at every stage.
Reality of Sales Funnels in 2025
In the current marketing landscape, customer paths aren’t as predictable as they used to be. Instead of progressing through the entire customer journey – involving awareness, interest, consideration, trial, and purchase stages – many users jump stages and may, for example, begin their paths at BoFu.
Here’s how it can work: A CTO discovers your offer through a web search, reads your ToFu article, and, instead of gathering more information about your product, requests a demo outright. Thus, they bypass the entire MoFu, which is one of the scenarios that non-linear funnels create.
Let’s now explore how to build a sales funnel for a B2B brand in 2025, covering its stages and trends.
Top of the Funnel
That’s where users encounter a problem, and you help them solve it with educational, not overly promotional, website or social media content.
If designed well, this content hooks users. It leads them to your studies, courses, webinars, and other lead magnets available in exchange for personal information, essentially including emails and phone numbers. Also, don’t forget to use social media analytics to see which topics drive the most engagement.
However, as mentioned, these interactions aren’t mandatory for building your lead pool. By leveraging intent data, gathered through third-party cookies and your funnel analytics, you can surface users who are, say, seeking urgent solutions, target them with ad campaigns, and transition them directly to the MoFu or BoFu.
Middle of the Funnel
You want to route fresh leads through lead distribution software to manage and score them, separating marketing- from sales-qualified prospects.
You can streamline lead scoring with AI that automatically analyzes lead attributes, assigns scores, and even suggests the best sales reps for each lead. The best part? AI scoring is constantly improving, meaning your lead distribution improves with each processed lead.
The primary MoFu goal is to nurture your marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) into sales-qualified leads (SQLs), which you can do through email campaigns, persuasive website content, or other tactics that help your leads connect with your sales development representative (SDR).
Bottom of the Funnel
As for the BoFu – the point at which SQLs convert into opportunities and close – you traditionally want to pass leads to account executives (AE) who, at first, assess their attributes:
- Pain points
- Budget
- Timeframe
- Next point in the customer journey
From there, AEs determine whether a lead is ready for the sales team's commitment and decide which incentives, such as personalized discounts, are most relevant.
As BoFu is dense with live communication, it’s crucial to anticipate possible objections. You can identify them through call transcriptions or recordings, and then train your closers via call simulations to maximize your win rate.
Post-Purchase Stage
It’s common for B2B customer journeys to go beyond BoFu, right into the post-purchase stage, where you can drive repeat conversions and nurture customers into brand advocates.
You can achieve this through diligent customer support:
- Conduct onboarding to help set up the software
- Offer customers to set milestones and assist in attaining them
- Ensure that your managers are ready to help at any time
Meeting the goals of the post-purchase stage enhances your revenue loops. By multiplying your profit, you can invest in your marketing or sales efforts, continually increasing profit and scaling.
How To Build a High-Converting Sales Funnel
With basics covered, it’s time to reveal advanced techniques and teach you how to build a sales funnel for SaaS, with every stage optimized for conversions.
Leverage Automation To Accelerate Your Customer Journeys
Automation enables businesses to increase funnel velocity, thereby processing leads faster and creating more opportunities.
Here’s how to automate your sales funnel with traditional and AI tools:
- AI-powered lead scoring: Analyze hundreds of data points to assign the most accurate lead scores
- AI call agents: Expand your call-handling capabilities and route calls based on caller intent and historical data.
- Sales engagement platform: Reach prospects and track feedback to optimize your future efforts.
- Conversation intelligence: Record, transcribe, and analyze calls to identify areas for improvement and enhance your sales rep's effectiveness.
How Do CRMs and Automation Tools Integrate To Create a Single Source of Truth?
Automation solutions that support APIs, pre-built connectors, or iPaaS are easily integrated with your customer relationship management (CRM) system, consolidating your funnel data in one place – all in real time. Thus, you can track and optimize your efforts on the fly, ensuring that none of your opportunities go to waste.
Besides reporting, some integrations also help you create personalized playbooks. For example, sales engagement tools and AI call agents immediately pass lead data into CRMs, so that your call agents can tailor their scripts to specific users.
Demodesk is an excellent example of how a B2B SaaS company can solidify automation software into a cohesive tech stack. As the foundation, the platform uses Salesforce CRM to pull data from:
- Demodesk: Records and transcribes conversions, predicts deal risks, and gives coaching insights.
- Adobe Marketo Measure: Analyzes multi-touch customer journeys to identify optimal channels and their combinations.
- Adroll: Optimizes ad campaign spending, bidding strategies, and targeting, surfacing results via custom reports.
To connect the dots, Einstein – Salesforce’s AI assistant – processes data from these and other Gong.io automation solutions to forecast sales and give business recommendations.
Qualify Leads Through Surveys & Quizzes
Quizzes and surveys are great tools for collecting intent data and accelerating your sales cycles, and they perform best as lead magnets:
- Create a landing page with a quiz or a survey
- Promise a personalized solution after completion
- Enable completion only in exchange for email addresses
This will work best if your landing page is properly targeted. Look for visibility among users at the ToFu, or those who haven’t even discovered your brand, so they enter your funnel from MoFu.
Tailor Your Funnel to Your Sales Cycle Length
For cheaper products, you can get away with short sales cycles and funnels. Yet if you want to close enterprise-level deals, it’s crucial to extend your funnel to the point where you can present a number of benefits sufficient to generate a sale.
The intent data we already discussed is particularly useful for enterprise deals. It helps you identify targets for your account-based marketing (ABM) – a practice where your efforts are tailored to a single user or, in the B2B context, an account (brand).
To ensure your ABM delivers the best results, you need to optimize your campaign for all stakeholders involved in the buying process, which is much easier with ABM AI solutions. They reveal entire buying groups, showing the exact person who moves a deal.
Select Content for Each Funnel Stage Strategically
For each funnel stage, there are specific content types you should prioritize:
- ToFu: Blog posts, social media posts, videos, and paid ads
- MoFu: E-books, resonating emails, whitepapers, webinars, courses, case studies, and product overviews and comparisons
- BoFu: Product tours and demos, free trials, success stories, and promotional emails
To ensure a smooth transition from marketing nurture to sales-led follow-up, gather lead qualification data from all touchpoints and organize it in your CRM. Closers who know lead sources, the content they consumed, their timeframes, and other pertinent information secure deals more effectively.
Incorporate Generative Engine Optimization
It’s no secret that SEO is paramount for generating traffic, especially at the ToFu stage – yet you won’t get far with SEO alone in 2025. As AI advances, 63% of users already prefer LLMs to search engines, and even if not, they likely use Google and receive Gemini’s answers before any search results.
Businesses have to adapt to this new reality, and the best way to do so is generative engine optimization (GEO) – a set of recommendations that secure LLM citations to maintain website visibility regardless of trends.
Here are the GEO basics:
- Break your content into paragraphs, lists, and tables
- Prioritize question-based subheadings, like “What are the benefits of this product?” instead of plain “Product benefits”
- Use self-contained sentences that are informative even out of context
- Confirm that your content is human-made through authority signals, such as the author bio, mentions on other sites, or an attached social media profile
- Share your articles on LinkedIn, Quora, Reddit, and newsletters
Track Funnel Health Through Key Performance Indicators
You can keep your finger on the pulse of your sales funnel by ensuring that conversion rates at every stage meet the following benchmarks:
- ToFu: 3 - 5%
- MoFu: 10 - 25%
- BoFu: 15 - 35%
Despite being a primary funnel health indicator, conversion rates don’t provide you with a full picture – to acquire it, you also need to track the following metrics.
Metrics for ToFu:
Metrics for MoFu:
Metrics for BoFu:
Metrics for the post-sale stage:
Sales Funnel Examples for B2B
Slack, a popular CRM system, shows a great example of a non-linear B2B SaaS funnel. Although it has ToFu blog posts, many users already know about Slack and are seeking to explore its functionality – that’s where freemium steps in.
Throughout the trial, Slack highlights how premium features can enhance the experience, eventually leading users to upgrade to paid plans. What if they aren’t ready? Then, they click the “Talk to sales” button, becoming SQL that are back into a traditional funnel where they convert into opportunities and sales.
Since it’s not as popular as Slack, Cisco – a company that creates IT infrastructures – invests more heavily in ToFu. The platform generates traffic through organic/paid search, referrals, sponsors, and networks, and then offers users gated educational content, including courses and webinars, to create its lead pool.
Cisco ensures its services are visible and well presented across MoFu content to encourage users to click the “Trials and demos” button and start their road to purchase.
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