How to Create a Sales Funnel: The Stages, a Template You Can Copy, and Real Examples

What Is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is the set of steps a person goes through between first hearing about you and paying you, drawn as a funnel because fewer people reach each step. It is a way of seeing your sales as a sequence you can measure, rather than as one big number at the end of the month. Most people who see an ad do not click it, most who land on a page do not sign up, and most who sign up do not buy. The funnel tells you which of those drops is the one to work on.

Three terms get mixed up, so here is the difference in one line each:

If you want the fuller picture of what customers do between those stages, our guide to customer journey mapping shows how to map it. For a sales funnel you only need the stages, the asset at each one, and one number per stage. The diagram below is the whole model on one page.

The 5 Stages of a Sales Funnel

Different guides name the stages differently, but they describe the same movement. This guide uses five, because the fifth, retention, is where the cheapest sales come from and the three- and four-stage models leave it out.

The other versions you will see. A three-stage funnel (top, middle, bottom, often written TOFU, MOFU and BOFU) groups awareness at the top, interest and decision in the middle, and action at the bottom. AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action) is the advertising model from the late 1800s that most funnels descend from; desire is roughly the decision stage. The four-stage version on many builder pages is AIDA with a checkout. Pick one model and use its names consistently; the stages matter less than measuring the move between them.

What Is the 10-3-1 Rule in Sales?

The 10-3-1 rule says that out of 10 qualified prospects, about 3 will agree to a meeting, and about 1 of those will become a customer, over time rather than immediately. It comes from life insurance selling; Jim Ruta, writing in Insurance Portal in April 2014, credits the late Al Granum as its likely originator, and stresses that the 10 are qualified prospects: people who have the need, understand it and can pay.

This is the sales funnel template: one row per stage, four things to decide for each. Fill it in before you build, because it turns "make a funnel" into a short list of pages, emails and numbers. Each field shows the yoga course example, with a dashed line under it for yours.

A second ad or a fourth email can come later. The first version of the funnel only has to work end to end.

The middle is where most funnels are won. A sign-up is someone who is interested, not someone who has decided. The follow-up gives them the reasons, and a short sequence does more than a long one nobody reads.

• The form asks for as little as possible. An email address, and a first name if you will use it. Every extra field is a reason to stop.
• Deliver the lead magnet at once. The first email arrives within a minute of signing up, with the free class link at the top.
• Three emails over a week, then stop. The sequence below is the minimum that works: deliver, build trust, ask.

The deadline in email 3 must be real: a start date, a cohort, or a price that genuinely changes. An invented countdown works once and costs you the second sale.

With the template filled in, the build itself is an afternoon in a funnel builder. The Appy Pie AI sales funnel builder page describes the short version in three steps: name the funnel and pick a template, customise the pages, publish. Here is what happened when we ran it with the yoga brief on 29 September 2026, on a free account.

The draft came back in under a minute as one scrolling website called Yoga Flow, not as separate funnel pages. Reading it section by section:

• Right: a "Join Our Free Yoga Class Today" section with a Sign Up button, a "Master Yoga for $49" offer, and a thank-you section confirming the $49 purchase. The funnel copy followed the brief.
• Built in: a store with Your Orders, My Cart and Checkout pages, and course products with prices, so the action stage has somewhere to happen.
• To replace: the hero kept a generic "Discover Unique Finds at Our Store!" banner, the offer images were unrelated stock pictures, and the testimonials were placeholder shoppers. All of that is editing work.

Whichever builder you use, the order is the same: build the landing page and form first, connect the email tool, then the checkout and thank-you page, then test the whole path yourself with a real card and a real inbox before you send any traffic. To pick the form tool itself, see our form builder comparison.

Sales Funnel Examples: SaaS, Ecommerce and a Local Service

The same five stages, filled in for three different businesses. The mechanics are the point; the only numbers used are the sourced benchmarks above.

Mistakes That Break Sales Funnels