Defining the Funnels

The basics of the sales and marketing process.

The premise of business is simple – do something of value and get paid for it. The challenge becomes what to create and how to find people that want it.

Some sectors are straight-forward – make a sandwich and sell it to someone hungry (huge market). Others are more complex – take years developing software that does something very specific and convince the few people in the world that it is worth their time and energy to use it (small market).

The dynamics of selling have changed greatly over the last few years. Once upon a time, an outreach to the right person garnered immediate interest and the sale went through based only on need and contact. With the proliferation of technologies and companies focused on the selling process itself along with the ease of contact (i.e. mass, automated email campaigns), the seeming supply of people reaching out to decision makers has muddied the market and created more difficult sales processes.

On the marketing side, the explosion of social media and other channels to reach highly-targeted individuals along with larger audiences simultaneously has watered-down the truly market in a way that is detrimental to those with a real, worthwhile product.

Both sales and marketing have funnels – paths to track and monitor people (leads) from initial touchpoint to the end sale. Each funnel is different and difficult to execute for its own reasons, from understanding what is working (attribution) to making sure the messaging is working and consistent across platforms and channels.

Typically, sales and marketing teams sit in separate areas of the business, along with other teams like product, engineering, finance, and management. This siloed approach provides autonomy to management – letting the experts do what they do best (closing deals, launching products, making key business decisions). However, it also fractures interactions key to a holistic view of the company. It can hide key answers (why did this lead from Facebook convert to a deal) and cause friction among the teams (who really is responsible for the deal).

Since the sales and marketing teams are integral to the successes of each other, it is important to understand what is working and why. This can be hard to do while focusing on the day-to-day responsibilities of each team. Imagine trying to do a look-back and analyze the data from previous campaigns or deals while actively trying to implement a multi-channel social media plan or negotiating with a customer’s legal and procurement teams.

Looking at the funnels at their most basic levels and expanding to more complex strategies is important for many reasons. Defining the funnels simply is also important to know where one ends and the other begins. The truth is that in practice they should be connected and not disjointed – sharing wins, information, and progress with each other so both can do their jobs better in the long run.

At the foundation, the funnels look similar, both containing steps to move forward towards a pre-defined goal. For example:

Marketing Funnel:

• Total Addressable Market

  • Companies who would benefit from your product

    • Contact at the target company (Lead)

Handoff from Marketing to Sales

Sales Funnel:

• Lead (provided by marketing or internal sales process like SDR outbound emails)

  • Qualified Buyer (BANT sales technique or something similar)

    • Customer

Throughout the process there are many actions to take and touchpoints from your company to the target company. Influencers, experts and academics have studied how people buy and the best way to convert someone from a lead to a customer. Those are topics for another day, and many additional resources can be found easily.

The main purpose of what is above is to understand that there are many ways to do things to find someone and then to have them buy what you are selling. Taking the time to strip away the complexity and truly know what is happening in your business is an important way to the drive future strategy, increase revenue, and keep your teams happy and productive. Building on that simplicity creates efficient, happy teams all pulling in the same direction and allowing each member of the team to be at their best.