CRM Buyer Talkback

Re: The 'Flat Funnel' Marketing Myth
Posted by: Matthew Quinlan 2009-09-10 16:30:51

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The concept of "the funnel" is a sacred cow in marketing. The basic concept of leads progressing through a series of steps of escalating interaction until they finally make a purchase is intuitive. At the macro level, it is fairly easy to model the funnel and assign labels to each step -- awareness, interest, consideration, evaluation, commitment, advocacy, etc. However, the model's accuracy decays rapidly when marketers attempt to predict the behavior of their prospects by cutting each step into ever smaller slices.

Marketing Automation Funnel
Posted by: Kevin Joyce 2009-09-15 08:18:40 In reply to: Matthew Quinlan

Good article Matt. It is very difficult to visualize the funnel when prospects engage with you at many different levels at different times in the sales cycle. The concentric rings is a nice idea. Another approach is to do an X-Y scatter diagram with the sales cycle on the horizontal axis, and the various types of interaction on the Y axis. If you just plot this for all contacts involved with opportunities, you end up with a beautiful image of which marketing programs engaged them most at what stage of the buying cycle!
-Kevin