Mapping the Funnels
What is a Funnel and Why is it Important?
Understanding how someone starting as a company, job title, and background input in marketing turns into a buyer in a few weeks or months is key to running a business. By replicating successes, you drive revenue growth and achieve customer satisfaction at scale.
The process of taking a large audience and turning it into individual buyers roughly fits the shape of a funnel, large at the top and smaller at the bottom. You want to control the flow in ways to keep it efficient while also keeping it flowing and productive. Making sure the right people end up at the bottom (i.e. qualified leads or buyers) is difficult and takes constant adjustment and learning.
Most Go-To-Market teams develop sophisticated processes and programs to get to the end goal. Each team has its own goal – marketing wants to generate leads, and sales wants to generate deals and revenue. Since the two teams work closely but not in exact harmony, figuring out what is working in each and what is transferrable is key.
Funnel Metrics
The basic way to measure a funnel is through numbers – like how many people did you reach out to and how many achieved certain criteria. In your social media marketing campaign, did you keep the audience small and focused on specific titles and companies, or is it a broader effort designed to reach the most people possible? As an SDR, did you reach out to everyone that fit a certain persona or do you have a named list of accounts?
Measuring outputs allows you to determine what is working and what needs work. Especially in the case of marketing, the lack of qualified leads could lead to less deals in the coming months. At the same time, the abundance of unqualified leads could also lead to less deals. Quality matters and is often unmeasured when benchmarking against high-level goals like total number or individual outreach emails.
The Handoff
Often handoffs happen at an email level – an automated blast is sent to a junior sales team member with name, title, company, and perhaps what initial questions were answered by a prospect. With this information, the person must get in touch with the prospect and either (A) set up a meeting with an AE or (B) jump right into the sales process and achieve the greatest thing ever – the one call close.
If your company is analytically focused, you might have a lead score attached. How valuable do you think the lead is compared to other leads in the past and the ideal customer profile? While this tells one story, it also has the chance to be wrong because of a whole host of factors. The prospect might have a new role, they might be working on a project outside their job title, or they are in fact the right buyer despite a misleading title. If enough lead scores come through to sales, there is even the possibility they are ignored completely by the sales team. However, if at the end of the month the questions is asked to marketing about the number of qualified leads generated, each side has incentive to purposely be vague about the potential of success of the leads.
Without sales understanding the reason the lead came into the company – from a webinar or LinkedIn ad – little can be done to learn from the accomplishment of the marketing team. Without sales feeding back to marketing what worked in a deal and what language caused the prospect to become a customer, little can be done to improve processes across the company.
Funnel Cohesion
The key to successfully connecting the funnels and driving revenue is funnel cohesion. While the marketing and sales funnels run independently, sharing information back and forth will cause tweaks and modifications to the ways things are done to achieve a better result.
Let your teams talk, let them meet, and let it be informal. Giant team meetings discussing how great each team is can be valuable for morale, but there might be tension simmering just beneath the surface. “How can marketing be so good when none of us salespeople are hitting quota?” “Why can’t sales close anything we send over, we’re doing our jobs…”
Figure out the levers you can pull and the changes you can make together. The best opening to an AE’s outreach might be the copy from a Facebook ad from three months ago. A late night email close from an SDR might draw in exactly who you want from your next eBook. Take the two funnels running in their entirety and realize that they work closely together.
How Funnels Influence People
As a manager, you probably measure everyone individually, and that is great for helping your teams run better with the right people. Now take those numbers collectively for teams, groups, and other pods to determine what is best overall. Here are two interesting questions: How would your best SDR do as a marketing manager focused on copywriting? How would your VP of Marketing do as an AE, selling deals from leads their team generated?