The Sales Funnel (Edition #2)

Riley Kearl - Senior Marketing & Sales Growth Partner | B2B Funnel Clarity & Pipeline Systems – Turn Traffic ​into Revenue


March 20, 2026



Here we are at Edition 2 of Funnel Clarity Weekly! How do you currently think about your sales funnel? You may be focused on getting leads and sales for your own business, for your clients, or for both. The fact remains both SaaS business owners and service owners need to make money. Where to begin? How do we start to attract the right traffic, create quality leads, and close sales? Let's begin...

But first, I believe we have a mix of marketers, owners, and CEOs here. I would be very interested to know what level you are at with your sales funnel understanding:

**Comment on this post what kind of business you are in and your self-assessed level of "Sales Funnel Understanding".

We will be going over some of the basics here and getting progressively more advanced as we move on. So for those who know some of this stuff, stay with me...even within the more basic parts you may learn something. And later editions of this newsletter will get more advanced!

The Basic Funnel; Traffic → Leads → Sales, and the metrics hiding in plain sight.

How many leads does your website produce for your business? Answers could range from "none" to "not many" to "quite a lot" but we can always improve your overall website conversion no matter your answer. Website conversion is also know as CRO - Conversion Rate Optimization.

We start with the basic sales funnel:

Traffic > Leads > Sales

Traffic comes to our site as a human user, an ai-agent, or a search engine bot and finds information, browses and then leaves. We want human traffic to be engaged, this means spending more time and visiting more pages (not as important for ai-agents and search bots). You can look at your website bounce rate, session time, and pages/session to get an idea here and track improvements over time. If ai-agents are visiting then we want them to easily find the info they need to serve it over to their respective human users (through Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini etc.) Traffic comes from 7 different channels: Paid ads, Organic search (SEO), Email, Backlinks, Direct, Social Media, and AI LLMs (GEO). Edition 3 of this newsletter will cover traffic channels/sources in more detail.

Leads come next. If human users are spending more time on our site we expect them to be very interested. They most likely have had multiple touchpoints with our brand over social media and other channels as well, if they trust our brand and resonate with the messaging then they may want to complete an action such as filling out a form with their details (name, email, company, etc.) We will dive more into how leads surface through ai-agents in a future post as there is too much to unpack here (start with creating content for humans that is also structured for LLMs and add an llms.txt file to your site).

Sales come when we get leads (hopefully good ones). If we are not making money then we are not in business! This is where our sales team comes in and marketing-sales alignment is super important. Often we see sales blaming marketing for shitty leads and marketing blaming sales for being bad closers. But this is not helpful, we want good leads that are more likely to close and impact the bottom line. You may also want to look at Revenue as an indicator of overall business health instead of just Sales, talk more to your CFO! Get sales and finance involved here.

You want to increase your number of online TOUCHPOINTS and increase online TRUST.

Expanding the basic funnel

So now we can expand the Traffic > Leads > Sales Funnel like this:

- Attract Engaged Traffic

- Create Quality Leads

- Increase Sales/Revenue/MRR/ARR

Conversion Deltas (measure differences over time)

We have only three stages in the basic funnel and so two different conversion points:

Traffic to Lead .. and .. Lead to Sale.

There are more stages that we'll cover in much more detail in Edition 6 but for now let's look at these two.

Traffic > Lead: You want to convert traffic into quality leads but oftentimes founders and marketing teams really don't know why or where they are getting leads from. If you knew what channels converted to leads, you would probably double down on those efforts.

Lead > Sale: Taking it a step further, close rates from Lead to Sale are usually tracked by sales but the higher quality the lead is the more likely they are to close. And revenue is what we want in the end so it’s a much better indicator.

The more advanced sales funnel introduces more stages as we start to break it down further. Specific language may differ at your company so adapt it to your preferred terminology (the main idea remains the same, just make sure to agree and stick to the same terms across the company). These include terms like Prospects, MQL, SQL and we also start to track Delta % in between each stage, calculate MRR/ARR, ARPU/ASP and also CLV, retention, churn etc. If unsure, ignore this for now as Edition 6 will cover this further!(including how to calculate and the rest of the stages in the advanced funnel).

Quick expansion on website visitor types and crawlers

I found this distinction helpful when talking to other marketers about SEO and GEO, let's get clear on website visitors! Over 50% of traffic may be "non-human" already. I mentioned three of these above but worth expanding...

Human Visitors/Traffic - actual humans visiting and browsing your site directly, we can also get human interaction through the ai-agents they use.

Web Crawlers/bots - Search engine crawlers (Googlebot, bingbot, duckduckbot), social crawlers, and analysis bots such as SEMRushBot. This is where you want to check your robots.txt file.

Agentic Traffic (ai-agents) - Includes LLM training bots AND "the agents" or user action fetchers (this is where we want to focus get leads/sales in Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini). Don't block these bots, create or check your llms.txt file.

Maliscious bots - used to mimic human behaviour and may or may not follow your txt file rules. Get more in depth here.


We will be getting more into advanced funnel stages in later articles, stay subscribed to this Linkedin newsletter to get updates.

I wrote this article myself (Riley the human) with almost no use of AI, does it show? Interested to hear your thoughts ... grammar and spelling mistakes are my own, and I did limited proofreading so please do point out my mistakes or choose to forgive and ignore! :)

At the end of this article series I will be releasing and giving away for free:

An outline of my workshop process, and a FULL FUNNEL definition sheet and analysis tool. It is currently being built and utilizes my 12+ years of marketing experience to help you create a funnel that converts.


Three ways for us to continue to conversation:

Read Edition #3 on LinkedIn