Yes that’s right – The Funnel that is used by some of the best marking organisations on the planet – has long passed its use-by date. The Funnel that we so often use to describe leads to converts (social media, marketing and sales), has stopped being useful at all, in fact I believe it actually hinders engagement with our future customers.
Additionally, this focus on targets regularly hurts customers and your brand.
Let me explain the faults with the Funnel.
One: Outdated
The Funnel had its origins in the early days of the last century when knocking on doors was key to making sales. Then we evolved to making phone calls to get sales. So what happens today, in this age of the customer where we have information parity..?
Our future customers are doing their research online and within their social networks (up to two-thirds or their buying journey). So all we have done is translate the front end of The Funnel to now include visitors on websites, or people that download a report or ebook and sign up for an email newsletter. Not what The Funnel was designed for.
The customer environment and context has changed and yet we are still using the same tool. Does not make any sense.
Two: Stages create silos
Following on from this first point is that fact that using The Funnel, means we need to qualify the various stages and make individuals responsible for each stage. The Social Media Manager and or Marketing at the front end, and middle. Then Sales at the lower end. We develop complicated qualifications and then internally trade between these definitions to ensure our numbers balance. The use of The Funnel is fostering internal horse-trading. Rather than managing the whole system, we are focused on the parts and dealings with ourselves.
A Forrester Report (The New Physics of Lead-Revenue Management) demonstrates the inappropriateness of The Funnel (to me anyway) by showing the conversion rate from the top end to a customer is 0.75% (B2B in the west). Yes, 99.25% of people we bring into The Funnel reject your offering. Surely this is not what we are trying to do… (by the way, here are four tips on B2B sales)
Three: Language
The language of The Funnel is a shocker.
Let’s think about those people that might be wanting to engage with our brand and offerings those people that we would like to become our customers, who love what we do and will become promoters of what we do.
Now, let’s call them Leads and then give them definitions like marketing qualified, or sales qualified. Now let’s see them as unenlightened individuals that need to be converted. The sales team then approach these people like evangelists on a mission. Is this really how we want to treat our future customers. I think not.
We should start the customer relationship the way we want it to be forever. How we communicate with our marketing and sales teams has a huge influence on how they ‘think about’ and ‘talk with’ the people we want to be our awesome customers.
Okay, so there are the top three from me on what’s wrong with the way we use The Funnel.
Engagement Flow
So here is an alternative way to think about what we are doing.
Surely our goal is to engage with our customers. We want to ensure we have value exchanged between us, and we would love our customers to be promoters. So let’s talk about Engagement Flow.
Rather than a funnel, let’s think about how we can draw customers towards us…
Image a pristine stream, up in the distance are some potential customers, we don’t quite know them yet, can’t quite see them clearly. As they are drawn towards us we start to see and understand them more clearly. Our role is to remove the obstacles that prevent them getting close to us. Draw them towards us. And, if the value exchange between us is right, and communicated well, then those customers will join our pool of customers who are also our advocates.
Today we live in the age of the customer and information parity.
The Funnel does not sponsor customer engagement, it never did. The management tool of The Funnel is outdated, it prompts internal debates and de-humanises potential customers as Leads that need to be converted.
Let’s look to how we influence the Flow of Engagement with our customers.
Learn more about the Profit by Design book here.