How to Create a Sales Funnel Chart in Excel

This tutorial will demonstrate how to create a sales funnel chart in all versions of Excel: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, and 2019.

A funnel chart is a graph that dissects different stages of a process, typically sorting the values in descending order (from largest to smallest) in a way that visually looks like a funnel—hence the name.

Funnel charts are commonly used in sales, marketing, and human resources management for analyzing the phases a potential customer or candidate goes through as they move toward the end point, be it signing a deal, purchasing a product, or accepting a job offer.

As an example, take a glance at the sales funnel depicting in great detail the customer journey that leads go through to become paying customers—as well as the number of leads that made it through each phase of the sales process, reflected by the width of the bars.

And in this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to create this fancy-looking, dynamic funnel chart in Excel, even if you’re a complete newbie.

The funnel chart type was rolled out only in Excel 2019, so those who use earlier versions of Excel have to manually put the graph together on their own. For that reason, this comprehensive tutorial covers both the manual and the built-in methods of building a funnel chart.

Getting Started

To show you the ropes, as you may have already guessed, we are going to anatomize the sales process mentioned before.

Take a peek below at the raw data that will be used for creating the chart:

To help you understand the process, we should talk a bit more about the building blocks of the data set:

• Stage: This column characterizes the distinct phases of the recruitment process.
• Users: This column contains the actual values representing the number of prospects that made it through to a certain stage.

Now it’s time to jump right into action.

How to Create a Sales Funnel Chart in Excel 2019+

Let’s start off by covering the built-in method first, which only takes a few simple steps, for those looking for a quick-and-dirty solution.

However, you should be aware of the price you must pay for automating all the dirty work:

• Compatibility issues: The funnel chart type is not available in older versions of Excel, so everyone except for those using Office 365 or Excel 2019 will not be able to see a funnel chart created with this method.
• Poor customization: By definition, sticking to chart templates leaves you somewhat shackled by the rigid parameters of Excel defaults, meaning you lose out a lot on customization options.

For that matter, when you know that the file will be shared with a lot of people, you would be better off creating the chart manually from scratch.

But if those issues are of no concern to you, simply take the shortcut outlined below.

Step #1: Create a built-in funnel chart.

Right off the bat, design a default funnel chart.

1. Highlight the entire cell range containing the stages and values (A1:B6).
2. Go to the Insert tab.
3. Select “Insert Waterfall, Funnel, Stock, Surface, or