Is the funnel dead?

I was at Econsultancy’s Fun­nel event a few weeks ago. A good event with some inter­est­ing speak­ers, but one thing seemed clear – all atten­dees and ven­dors were totally bought into the con­cept of the tried and tested Fun­nel. For many agen­cies present, it actu­ally seemed to be the basis of their busi­ness mod­els and their pitch to the market.

Com­pare this with Forrester’s mar­ket­ing event at The Grove, where the ral­ly­ing cry seemed to be “The Fun­nel is dead”.  Appar­ently, it’s now all about cus­tomer engagement.

So, were the appar­ently mis­guided Fun­nel atten­dees bas­ing their busi­nesses on a flawed metaphor? Will the event be called “Fun­nel” next year? Is the Fun­nel really obsolescent?

Or, are these new ways of think­ing just a reflec­tion of the ongo­ing require­ment for ana­lyst firms to develop new mod­els where they can re-package exist­ing prin­ci­ples to sell more white papers and ana­lyst hours? After all, you have McK­in­sey push­ing the Con­sumer Deci­sion Jour­ney (a cir­cu­lar process) and For­rester pro­mot­ing their Cus­tomer Life-cycle model (another cir­cu­lar process). To my mind, as long as you under­stand the changes in the mar­ket­ing land­scape, you can eas­ily map the phases from these new mod­els on to good old Funnel.

The con­cept of the sales Fun­nel has been around for over 100 years, and as a metaphor it has worked well to illus­trate the need to deliver a large num­ber unqual­i­fied prospects into one end of the fun­nel to get a smaller num­ber of qual­i­fied sales-ready leads out of the other. When there were fewer mar­ket­ing chan­nels and touch-points, it served us mar­keters pretty well.

But there’s a prob­lem. One of the fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples behind the Fun­nel is that it is lin­ear, and until recently, it was a rea­son­ably good model for the sales process: you’d buy a TV or press ad (Aware­ness); you’d send an email or DM to those who might be likely to be inter­ested (Con­sid­er­a­tion); once you get a response you’d get on the phone and tele-market (Pref­er­ence). Finally, you’d get those qual­i­fied prospects in front of a sales­man (Pur­chase). So, as long as you had effec­tive con­tent for each phase, the flow of ever-more qual­i­fied prospects through the Fun­nel was straightforward.

These days things are dif­fer­ent. With the pro­lif­er­a­tion of mar­ket­ing chan­nels, mul­ti­ple screens and social media, our tar­get audi­ences are no longer mov­ing uni-directionally between our pre-prescribed phases or con­sum­ing our beau­ti­fully crafted mar­ket­ing mes­sages in the order that we intend. In real­ity, prospects are no longer pas­sively con­sum­ing paid media thrust at them by big brands. Instead they’re engag­ing with con­tent on their own terms — often on social net­works — far out­side the direct con­trol of us marketers.

In my hum­ble opin­ion, mar­keters need to change the way they pro­mote their prod­ucts to prospects and con­vert them to sales. And, maybe it’s just eas­ier to adopt a new cir­cu­lar sales model touted by an ana­lyst firm. What is most impor­tant, is that mar­keters have to under­stand that the land­scape has fun­da­men­tally changed and that they need to:

1. Become more involved in the con­ver­sa­tion beyond the con­fines of the cor­po­rate web­site. Don’t have social media and mobile strate­gies. Instead, have a mar­ket­ing strat­egy, of which social and mobile are part.
2. Man­age con­tent effec­tively and cater for the fact that it needs to be used across mul­ti­ple phases of the sales cycle (what­ever model you use) and dis­trib­uted in an array of for­mats to cater for the ever-growing demand for con­tent on the customer’s terms.
3. Focus on mar­ket­ing intel­li­gence by inte­grat­ing mul­ti­ple sources of data to build a con­sol­i­dated view of what’s work­ing and ensure the most effec­tive use of scarce mar­ket­ing budgets.