Sales funnel

Picture a kitchen funnel: wide at the top, narrow at the bottom. At the top, everyone who hears about you. At the bottom, the people who sign. In between, steps where anyone can stop: they do not reply, they do not have the need, they do not have the budget, they pick a competitor.

The oldest model, AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action), comes from late nineteenth century advertising. B2B teams often use a more practical split into top, middle and bottom of the funnel, shortened to TOFU, MOFU and BOFU.

The funnel is a model, not a live view. It describes the average journey and its conversion rates. The sales pipeline lists the deals in progress with their names.

For B2B sales driven by prospecting, a useful split looks like this: people targeted, people contacted, people who reply, qualified conversations, meetings, proposals, signatures. In inbound marketing the top is usually called visitors, leads and MQLs instead.

Every stage needs a measurable definition. 'People who reply' can be counted. 'Interested people' depends on the mood of whoever is counting.

Keep the same split over time. A funnel whose definitions change every quarter no longer lets you compare anything.

Plan for the side exit as well. Many prospects say neither yes nor no: they ask to be contacted again in three months. They are not losses, but they are out of this month's flow. Give them their own bucket with a date, or they vanish from your numbers and your memory.

Divide the number of people at one stage by the number at the previous stage. If 300 people accepted your invitation and 90 replied to your first message, the conversion rate at that step is 30%. Repeat for every step.

Two more readings complete the picture. The cumulative rate, relative to the top of the funnel, tells you how many entries you need for one signature. The delay between two stages tells you how long to wait before judging a result. In MimikFlow's 2026 LinkedIn Prospecting Observatory (published in French), 64% of invitation acceptances arrive the same day, but only 48.6% of replies arrive within 24 hours of the first message. Judging a campaign after two days underestimates its replies.

The step with the lowest rate is not always the most urgent. Look for the one where a small gain changes the end result the most, and where you actually have a way to act.

Mixing sources. A funnel that adds up your profile visitors and strangers found through search produces an average that describes neither. The 2026 Observatory measured a 68.4% reply rate among contacted profile visitors against 35.6% among strangers: those are two different funnels.

Optimizing the top at the expense of the bottom. Broader invitations raise acceptances and lower the share of meetings. The number that pays the bills is at the bottom.

Forgetting silent losses. A prospect who has not replied has not left the funnel while a follow-up is still planned: in the study, 46.4% of replies came after at least one follow-up.

On LinkedIn, the funnel for a stranger has five visible steps: invitation, acceptance, first message, reply, meeting. The 2026 Observatory measured them on 50,930 invitations sent at least 30 days earlier: 30.2% accepted, 24.8% followed by a first message, 9.7% replies and 1.6% observed meetings, all relative to invitations.

Those rates are not targets, they are markers that tell you where to look. Acceptance far below them points to targeting or your profile. Plenty of acceptances with few replies points to the first message. Replies without meetings point to the conversation.

MimikFlow covers every step, from finding prospects to booking the meeting in your calendar, then handles what comes after: a reminder on the day of the meeting and a recovery message if the prospect does not show up. The dashboard tracks how many prospects sit at each step so you can see which one is slowing you down.