Sales funnel: how to build one in a CRM and stop losing leads

A sales funnel is a customer's path from first contact to payment, broken down into stages: inquiry, quote, commercial proposal, contract, payment. At each stage some people drop out, which is why the diagram looks like a funnel. Once the stages are written down, you can see exactly where you're losing customers.

In Kazakhstan, people search Google for «воронка продаж» ("sales funnel") about 590 times a month (Google Ads data, November 2026). Let's look at which stages a typical B2B company needs and how to run the funnel so that no inquiry gets lost.

Funnel stages for B2B

The stages depend on how you sell. For a company that sells building materials, rolled metal or machinery, the funnel usually looks like this:

Stage	What happens	What matters
New inquiry	the customer messaged or called	reply within the first few minutes
Clarification	we find out the volume, timing and address	ask all your questions in one go
Quote and proposal	we've sent the price and terms	don't put off sending it
Negotiation	the customer compares offers and bargains	follow up at the right time
Invoice and payment	we've agreed and issued an invoice	check that the payment has arrived
Shipment	the goods are with the customer	ask for a review and a repeat order

You don't need more stages than your manager has actions to take. Five to seven stages are enough for almost everyone.

How to run the funnel

While inquiries are few, you can run the funnel in a spreadsheet. Once there are more than a dozen a day, the spreadsheet stops working: managers forget to update the rows, and management can't see what's going on. That's when the funnel moves to a CRM:

• each inquiry is a card that moves through the stages;
• each card has a next step and a date: call, send a proposal, follow up;
• WhatsApp chats and calls are saved in the card;
• management sees how many inquiries are at each stage and which manager they're stuck with.

Which numbers to watch

1. How many inquiries came in during the week, and from where.
2. The conversion rate from one stage to the next: for example, how many inquiries led to a quote.
3. Where you lose the most: if people get a proposal and disappear, the problem is the proposal or the price, not the ads.
4. How long a deal takes, so you know when to follow up.

The most common mistake is spending money on new inquiries when half of the old ones were simply never answered.

An example from our work

For KAZ-JOL, a heavy machinery company in Almaty, we built a custom CRM platform: dispatch, requests, orders and shifts in one system; clients, sites, machinery and staff in directories; and tracking for every single machine. The platform works in Russian and Kazakh, and you can open its demo account and take a look.