Also called: TOFU · MOFU · BOFU
A sales funnel is a model of how prospects narrow from broad awareness down to a closed deal, typically split into top (TOFU), middle (MOFU), and bottom (BOFU) stages, with each stage holding fewer people than the one before it.
A funnel tracks volume shrinking through stages: site visits or ad impressions at the top, leads and marketing-qualified leads in the middle, demos and closed deals at the bottom. It's a marketing-side lens built to answer a conversion question: how many people enter at the top, and what share survive to the bottom.
A sales pipeline is a different thing wearing similar language. A pipeline tracks open sales opportunities, actual deals a rep is working, organized by stage and weighted by dollar value. A funnel counts raw volume narrowing through awareness, consideration, and decision. A pipeline counts live deals moving toward a close date. The two get used interchangeably in casual conversation, but a marketing team reporting on funnel conversion and a sales team reporting on pipeline coverage are answering different questions with different numbers.
TOFU content, awareness-stage blog posts, ads, and organic search, aims at people who don't yet know they have the problem a product solves. MOFU content, comparison guides, webinars, case studies, targets people actively evaluating options. BOFU content, demos, pricing pages, and free trials, targets people close to a decision. Each stage needs a different kind of content and a different measure of success.
Teams use funnel metrics (traffic-to-lead conversion, lead-to-MQL conversion) to diagnose top-of-funnel health and pipeline metrics (deal count, weighted value, stage velocity) to diagnose revenue predictability. Reporting both on one dashboard without labeling which is which is a common way to confuse a marketing problem for a sales problem, or the reverse.
Funnel and pipeline get used as synonyms, but they measure different things. A healthy funnel (strong traffic-to-lead conversion) can still feed a weak pipeline if the leads coming through don't match the ICP, and a strong pipeline can exist even when funnel conversion looks mediocre, if outbound is sourcing opportunities the funnel never touches.
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