The funnel seems kind of wobbly these days. Here’s why:

No buyer wants to think he’s in a funnel.
It doesn’t align with how buyers feel like they approach a purchase. Can we say a model is good if the protagonist of the story dislikes it?

You’re not in charge.
In a market characterized by information surplus and driven by search, social and rich content signals, the buyer owns the rhythm. Not the seller.

Buyers don’t proceed. They swirl.
The stages in the funnel (defining a need, drawing up a shortlist, etc.) just don’t sync with purchase journeys anymore. Buyers don’t do linear. They circle.

You don’t have time for mapping.
The funnel model assumes that there are some absolutes, that the ground isn’t shifting underneath the market. In fact, all is in flux.

Buyers’ journeys don’t just end.
The funnel assumes that there’s a pool of people called the market who don’t know you, and that your job is done once they’ve bought your product. “Plop! You’ve gone through the funnel.”

There are smarter people than me who have been saying much the same thing for years, like Steven Noble of Forrester, MarketingProfs and countless others who say the sales funnel is dead. They replace the funnel with flows, maps, nets, circles and webs – everyone wants to own the next model.

Does the death of the funnel apply to the big B2B decisions? Yes. We have piles of information from trillions of sources – this applies just as well to the professional as the personal world. Industrial tumult is just as strong as consumer tumult, if not stronger.

The funnel was a model for storekeepers. The top of the funnel was the street. Then the funnel led into their shop, browsing, comparing, asking questions and then going to the register. The current model needs to be crafted on an Italian piazza. Consumers bounce in and out and all over the place, asking countless questions, listening in to conversations, examining and gossiping.

Funnels don’t do bouncy very well.

So what’s the fallout of a post-funnel world?

If the funnel doesn’t fit well with buyer behaviour, then the tools based on this model won’t work. Prospects who don’t act like they’re in a funnel will get treated in ways that don’t suit their actual intent. Vendors seem to be racing to address this, but it’s a tough move, as many were built up on the foundations of funnel thinking.

Funnel-based content will start to feel funny. That one case study that applies to that one particular part of the theoretical buyer journey goes flat. It feels faked, forced, one-dimensional and lame to buyers who have a three-dimensional view of the market.

Efforts to push prospects through a funnel process meet resistance. Marketers who push themselves on webinar attendees to read the next piece of corporate literature fail. Prospects can see through tired funnel-driven tactics. They’re not buying escalation.

That’s a start anyway.

So what would I do, post-funnel?

I’d start by thinking facilitation. No matter where you think you have a prospect, you don’t. You. Don’t. Have. Them. They’re in charge. You’re just facilitating them. Help them. Don’t push, and don’t play games. To hell with your sales quotas. But do get serious when they get serious.

Build out your non-linear expeditionary forces. Buy a blogger breakfast. No joke. These independent expert-istas are the developing gauge of influence in a noisy market. They are the conversational coin in the new media bazaar. And don’t send them emails studded with your opinions and product news. Buy them breakfast. Lunch? Drinks? Then chat.

Think non-competitive business development. Start partnering with people who are in your space, but who you don’t compete with, to develop content, events, staff trades and such. A pretty clever marketer named Joe Chernov said: “When you are the only one tweeting about your infographic, you probably blew the execution.”

Assume you don’t know where people are coming from. When someone lands on a page of your website, do not think you know why they came there, or that you know what they’re looking for. Be humble. Offer choices. Like this:

Those are my ideas anyway. Do you have any of your own?

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, marketing funnel, marketing models, sales funnel

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Our friend Stephanie Tilton (one of the Savvy B2B Marketers) and the folks at AG Salesworks have just published an excellent eBook on the subject: Gear Up For Success: 8 Steps to Get Sales & Marketing Cranking in Unison:

This stuff is important and the eBook does a great job of explaining why — and how to start aligning now.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, sales alignment, Sales Enablement, sales funnel

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According to the BBC, undercover US researchers, or white hat spammers, have finally unearthed the secret economics of a 21st century boogie man: the junk mailer.

In the name of research, they sent out millions of spam messages from thousands of hijacked home PCs with an offer from a bogus pharmaceutical web site.

The scale of the operation delivered returns well in excess of $2 million per year even with a response rate of 0.00001%.

Are you shocked by the figure?  I am.  And I’m not talking about the loot.

It tells me that many legitimate email campaigns should have no expectations of response rates much above the spammer’s one in every 12.5 million.  Why?  Because, computer jacking aside, separating the crass from the criminal can prove tricky for all but the untrained eye.

Too many firms are postmarking their campaigns in the suburbs of Spamalot.  Emails might promise “much cheapness” but the market filters out, one way or another, poorly conceived, rendered, executed or measured campaigns.

Unfortunately, the honest, if unsophisticated, mailers cannot, spammer-style, dodge costs and will see their investment disappear in a flash of one-size fits all 0.01p bundles.  A good campaign, particularly in B2B, is personal from start to finish.

The journey from Spamalot to email’s Holy Grail begins with a five simple steps.

Personalise – An email should be a personal message.  You are not talking to a list of IT directors stuck to PCs in large multinational organisations.  You are talking to Christina.  She’s a real person who, by the way, prefers her BlackBerry.

Specialise – What’s your firm’s history with Christina?  Acknowledge her status: profitable customer, lapsed customer, new prospect or hot prospect.  Your communication should reflect any special relationship.

Energise – Get active and move the relationship forward.  Take the opportunity to drive the relationship based on individual needs.  Use interesting triggers to interact with her regularly for sales, information or service.

Dramatise – Email is a real-time medium.  If you hear of industry issues that Christina is likely to be facing then tell her how you can help.  Don’t stick to a dull monthly schedule.  Be dramatic and talk when she needs you.

Synergise – Your campaign is only a cog in your marketing wheel.  If it’s not linked with your databases and web analytics, it will fail.  Every interaction with Christina, from introduction to conversion, can be automatically logged, updated and used.

The ability to communicate personally and meaningfully with customers can deliver spectacular results: way in excess of standard response rates of two per cent.  The path to the Holy Grail of one-to-one marketing is, across the sales funnel, being built rapidly in the digital era.

Spamalot, on the other hand, is a dangerous place.  As the research shows even real spammers are struggling to generate the volumes required to turn a profit.  Monty Python’s suicide squad trained to end it all in less than 20 seconds.  That’s 20 seconds more life than many of today’s ill-fated email campaigns.

You have two options to generate email returns: 1) become a professional spammer or, 2) take the personal journey towards more professional email marketing.   Not much of a choice really.

Go the extra mile.  You can rest assured that it’s not very crowded there at the moment.

© neilstoneman for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, B2B email email marketing, B2B marketing, email, email campaign, personal marketing, sales funnel, Web Marketing

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