Table of Contents

Funnel Terms and Concepts

Camela Thompson Updated by Camela Thompson

Default Funnel Stages in CaliberMind

The following definitions are meant to capture 80% of net new business Starter use cases in the B2B space and can accommodate most businesses selling SaaS with very minor modifications. If you want additional stages or your business does things a little differently, please work with sales and your customer success team.

CaliberMind Funnel App Stages

Terms Used During Configuration

These features are only visible to CaliberMind Administrators.
Funnel Events

Administrators can create events that are used to help flag a stage transition. An example would be a date/time stamp for a stage being filled out on the account, contact, or lead object. Alternatively, you can use the history tracking feature in your CRM to ensure we capture previous journeys (for more on Salesforce custom field limits, click here).

Funnels

On the initial "Create New Funnel Screen" you'll see the following prompts:

Name: What do you name this stage of the buyer journey?

Field (API): What is the system name (not the label) of the field (in your CRM or MAS) you stamp a date or value when the journey stage is met?

On each stage, you'll have the following prompts:

Rules: Rules are used to define when an account or person meets the stage criteria for the stage you are configuring. For example, Marketing Reponses may be all inbound marketing campaigns and a later stage called Marketing Qualified may be a subset of those responses that also match your ICP criteria. These rules are built using references to your cm_Event table and associated values.

If you're using a date/time stamp on a history table or standard table, you'll need to build a custom event in the Funnel Configuration screen. We recommend replicating the logic, if possible, prior to opportunity stages so that your team can get more out of your Funnels Trigger Analysis (otherwise you'll see "History Event" as the event type for every journey and will need to rely on the pressure dashboard more heavily).

Early Exits: Early exits are defined ways in your buyer journey process that signal an end of an engagement other than success. A great example is moving from an open opportunity to a lost opportunity or an "Engaged" account status to a "Nurture" account status.

Person Status Exits: Person status exits are used for early funnel stages that are triggered by person-based events. For example, if a qualified account happens when a contact performs a campaign response or "hand raise", you may also want to add a person status exit for when people at the account are no longer active and there is not an open opportunity. For example, you may have one contact in a "Marketing Qualified" status that the salesperson then moves to "Disqualified" or "Nurture." If no other contacts are active in the journey, this status update would terminate the active journey.

Inactivity Timeout: There's a populatr term used in Sales: "Time Kills All Deals." The Timeout allows you to set a threshold for the number of days a journey can be considered "alive" in a stage. The countdown begins with the lasted logged inbound activity. If someone fills out a form and then dissappears/becomes non-responsive, you may want to terminate the journey after a reasonable period of time.

We don't recommend setting timeouts once an opportunity is created.
We do recommend setting a timeout for marketing qualified and considering updating the lead and contact status to "Nurture" once the period has elapsed.

Terms Used in Reports & Dashboards

Journey: A Journey is an account's or person's (depending on what kind of funnel you have selected) engagement with your brand. CaliberMind tracks how many stages it has met and stops at the currently engaged stage (this is an "Active Journey") or stage progression through either becoming a customer, exiting early, or meeting some other success criteria that denotes the funnel journey end.

Active Journey: An Active Journey is an account or person (depending on what kind of funnel you have selected) who is currently in an active stage of the journey. This is a subset of Journeys and the accounts or people are still considered engaged or "active."

Stage: A segment of a buyer journey or benchmark created to categorize buyers by interest level.

Conversion Rate: The conversion rate is a denominator of a set population with a numerator of a subset of that set population. For example, an MQL conversion rate: the denominator is the total population of accounts that have met MQL stage criteria in the given period and the numerator is the number of that same population that has since progressed to a later stage - in any time period - to the subsequent stage.

Cohort: This concept means that the numerator of any percentage is a subset of the denominator. For example, an MQL conversion rate: the denominator is the total population of accounts that have met MQL stage criteria in the given period and the numerator is the number of that same population that has since progressed - in any time period - to the subsequent stage.

Stage Start: When viewing the cohort table, a stage start is considered the number of accounts or people (depending on the funnel build) that have passed through the stage in a given time period.

Journey Win Rate: The percentage of accounts that have progressed to the final stage from the stage you are viewing. This percentage should not be considered "final" until at least the average number of days from that stage through the final stage has passed. This can be calculated by adding up the average stage duration for each stage met or passed through that you are evaluating.

Avg. Days to Advance: The average number of calendar days that passes before an account progresses to the next stage.

Is Synthetic? Synthetic events are created when a journey skips stages to make sure conversion rates and other calculations make sense. For example, if a salesperson is interacting with someone on LinkedIn without logging it and then creates an opportunity, stages will be skipped and "backfill" or synthetic events will be created for the same day to keep the denominator of a conversion rate larger than the numerator at all times.

Pressure Event: This is an event that has not "triggered" a stage definition to be met but has happened since the stage began. This allows us to look at the sometimes dozens of touchpoints that happen in a stage before the next is met. For example, someone with an "Inbound" stage may have dozens of website visits before they request a demo and progress to the next stage in the buyer journey.

Odds of Completion: This is a Pressure Event Dashboard-specific term that takes the number of successes with this event (the records that reach the "end stage" that began in your "start stage") and compares it to the number of failures (records that started in your start stage but exited early - before reaching your end stage) with the same event. The higher the number, the more likely it is that the event has a statistically positive impact.

# of Successes with the Feature: This is a Pressure Event Dashboard-specific term that is a count of records that began in the start stage and ended in the end stage you are evaluating. Knowing the number of successes allows people to see whether we're dealing with "the law of small numbers" and should take the Odds of Completion with a grain of salt. The lower the number, the shakier the calculated impact.

Start Stage: This is a Pressure Event Dashboard-specific term that indicates the total pool of records we want to evaluate. By selecting a stage and time range, we are telling the system to look at all journeys that were in the start stage at some point during the selected period.

End Stage: This is a Pressure Event Dashboard-specific term that indicates the "success criteria" or stage we want to get to. This could be helpful in understanding which activities happen when an MQL (start stage) moves to a qualified opportunity (end stage).

Trigger Event: This is the event or action your prospect took immediately prior to conversion into a stage. We also look at this as the "tipping point." For example, if a form fill meets your criteria for qualification, filling out that form would be a trigger event if it's the thing that happened immediately before the record is qualified.

True Start: The number of records that started in the evaluated stage, excluding backfills and journeys star

Early Exit: The number of records that moved from the stage to an exit, which is an early exit from the funnel caused by a timeout, disqualification criteria, or no longer meeting the filter criteria defined in your funnel configuration.

Exit Rate: The percentage of records that moved from the stage to an exit, which is an early exit from the funnel caused by a timeout, disqualification criteria, or no longer meeting the filter criteria defined in your funnel configuration.

Removed: The number of records that moved from the stage to an exit, which is an early exit from the funnel caused by a timeout, disqualification criteria, or no longer meeting the filter criteria defined in your funnel configuration. (This is the same as Early Exit).

Removal Rate: The percentage of records that moved from the stage to an exit, which is an early exit from the funnel caused by a timeout, disqualification criteria, or no longer meeting the filter criteria defined in your funnel configuration. (This is the same as Exit Rate).

How did we do?

Event Explore for Funnels

Common Funnel Issues

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