Why it’s time to abandon the marketing funnel

The marketing funnel was first developed in 1898 to understand how businesses could convert a physical visitor into a customer.

There have been many iterations of this model and it is still being redeveloped by leading organisations such as Salesforce and HubSpot.

While the funnel provides marketing teams with a measurement for success, it can also be misused, given its mass-marketing focus. For example, “I must get 100 people into the “awareness” stage, therefore I must send 100,000 thousand emails because I have a 0.001% click-through-rate on average.” We have all unsubscribed from mass company emails that were sent as a result of this approach.

Marketers with this funnel mindset think of paying customers as a data point – not as thinking, feeling beings. This is a mistake. Salesforce found that 80% of customers now consider their experience of a company to be as important as its products.

It’s not that the funnel is unimportant or ineffective; it is a useful tool for mass marketing. We should, however, move away from this mass marketing approach and focus more on our customers than we have in the past.

Many of our clients at Momentum ITSMA have realised that the funnel is too basic and that their customer interactions are highly complex. They need our sophisticated marketing insight to map out their customers’ experiences.

Understanding the customer journey lets a sales rep figure out the best ways to interact with prospects and marketers map out the most effective outlets to reach them.

Customer journeys should reflect the complexities of enterprise buying, involve all departments of an organisation, and be updated frequently to reflect organisational changes.

Whilst this is a complex process to map in B2B interactions, the process does one important thing for clients: it helps you see the process in the way that your customers experience it.

You should use this tool if your organisation has:

1. A simple value proposition

2. A maximum of three* clear persona profiles for prospects/customers

3. A tangible product rather than a professional service

4. A maximum of three* departments involved in the overall customer journey from start to finish

Mapping a customer journey when you have more than this is a lengthy, complex task that can turn out to be futile.

According to the Spring 2021 Momentum ITSMA Customer Buying Index survey of over 2,000 enterprise CxOs, just under two-thirds of decision makers said that vendors’ understanding of their company is “essential” or “very important” to the buying process.

This is a call to arms for B2B marketers to stop focusing on your marketing KPIs and funnel metrics, and instead obsess over your customers’ needs and your relationships with them.

Now more than ever your customers’ needs are changing and at a moment’s notice. Uncovering unmet needs is critical for sustainable growth. It pushes boundaries and can help stretch a company into a new category with new solutions.

Why not go one step further and focus on shared value. A Gartner study of 1,500 global CEOs concluded that “the most successful organisations are those that co-create products and services and integrate customers into their core processes”.

This isn’t possible for all your customers, so focus on your key accounts. Design high-profile interactions and make investment in reaching your key audiences with a tailored message.

What do your individual customers care about? What is their strategy? What solutions will help them reach their organisational goals? These are crucial questions to answer.

Discover more about key account insight