Revenue Funnel
The staged model describing how prospects progress from first awareness to closed revenue, used to locate where volume is lost between stages.
What the model is for
The funnel is a measurement device, not a description of how people buy. Real buying is non-linear — prospects re-enter, stall, and involve people who never appear in your data. The funnel is useful because it localises loss, not because it is accurate about behaviour.
Reading it
Absolute volume at each stage is less informative than conversion between adjacent stages. A funnel that is wide at the top and narrow throughout has a qualification problem; one that is narrow at the top and converts well has a demand problem. These require opposite responses.
The definitional dependency
RELATED TERMS
Revenue Flywheel
A model that treats revenue as compounding rather than linear: satisfied customers generate expansion, referral and reputation that reduce the cost of the next acquisition.
Bowtie Model
An extension of the funnel that mirrors it after the sale — the narrow point is the purchase, with onboarding, adoption, retention and expansion forming the second half.
Stage-to-Stage Conversion
The proportion of opportunities moving from each stage to the next. The most localised view of where pipeline dies.
Lifecycle Stages
The shared sequence describing a contact's relationship with the company over time — subscriber through customer — used to align marketing, sales and customer success on where someone is.
Learn how to apply this: RevOps 101: Revenue Operations Foundations
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