Day 0 Marketing: Laying out your Funnel Plumbing

Preamble: Such simple physics, yet so much chaos!

If you’ve ever spent twelve minutes in a marketing bay, you probably have a decent idea of funnels, why they exist, and what they do. In fact, the topic of funnels seems so foundational, fundamental, and honestly, a bit over-discussed that in the times of non-linear analytics and AI-driven content, I feel a bit awkward even writing this (and hence this rambling preamble).?

But then again, I find a decent foundation in understanding “Funnels” critical to most subsequent fun things you should be doing to drive growth. And, in corollary, I find most problems plaguing growing marketers - proving budget accountability, making strategic investments, resolving frictions with sales, charting out growth paths - almost always comes down to a either a weakness in understanding the funnel themselves, or not championing the leadership and rest of org around it.?

So whether you’re refreshingly new to the world of marketing, markops, and funnels, or know enough to just about be dangerous, I hope you will find this useful. And if you are a seasoned funnel plumber that knows the tricks to pump, divert, and unclog your marketing engine at will, I hope this will at least be a refresher to the more detailed pieces I should be adding soon. And also, please teach me your ways, master!

What is your Marketing Funnel?

Simply, this is the flow of your audience, starting from the universe of people whose lives you could change if only they realised their pains, all the way through to when they experience, have paid for, and continue to derive value from your product or service.?

Of course, I didn't write my first novella on LinkedIn here to tell you something "simply", so here's the rest of this post.

But isn’t the Marketing Funnel dead?

Funnel. Fly-wheel. Flowchart. Cycle. Electric scooter. Call it what you will.?

If there’s one thing we Marketers love more than raising billboards, its setting down gravestones.?

If you've ever imagined or reported on a metric that says X% of denominator did numerator, you’re playing with funnels. Call it a Bildungsroman, call it whatever - it’s a funnel!

Your funnel describes the pathway your prospects take in knowing, learning, researching, experiencing, qualifying, and buying your product. Once you’ve got the hang, it isn’t a huge stretch to take this beyond, and create feedback loops. I’ve reported just as easily beyond the acquisition phase - on retention, growth, reactivations, and referrals, because they all feed into the same funnel!

Why is understanding your funnel so critical?

I can think of a hundred reasons, but I’m going to list the most obvious:

1. Metrics & operational visibility: Every stage in your funnel is a metric worth knowing. And if it doesn’t impact your funnel, it isn’t worth showing.?
2. Diagnosis & Leaky buckets: Visualizing data flow across the funnel surfaces leaks and their downstream consequences.
3. Growth opportunities & investments: Should you focus on conversions and sales enablement? Is it time for a shiny new homepage??
4. Sales handoff: Negotiate the sales-marketing handoff instead of yet another game of “he said - she said”..
5. Communication gameplay: Why are we focusing on brand and content visits when we need to deliver pipe? Here’s why!
6. Optimization Zones: Nurture drips? Squeeze pages? Knowing your funnel lets you describe which part you want to optimize for, and prove it with metrics.?

But most important - if you don’t know your funnel stages and at least a ballpark of conversion trends within, you’re shooting in the blind and likely leaving a lot more on the table than you’d like. Also if you don’t internalize your funnel, I don’t think you really get your business…

How to construct your funnel

Start at the beginning, and go on till the end. Then stop...

Really, it’s that simple. You could start at the absolute beginning with unknown unknowns in your TAM.

Likely though, the first point where you know any self-reported personal information about your prospect is when they signup for one of your gated assets. Let’s call this the “Lead”.

From here, we can keep working our way “down”. A subset of these leads fall into your definition of an “ideal customer”. Either because of who they are (company, role, expressed needs), or what they did (content consumed, pricing requests, chat engagements). You could say, that’s a good day’s job by the marketing team - getting a bunch of unknown folks to demonstrate a decent quantum of interest. So let’s call these leads folks that have been qualified by marketing, or “Marketing Qualified Leads”.

*For the greater majority of my career, I actively advocated for stricter MQL definitions - to include only leads that have explicitly thrown a Sales Handraise by either signing up for the product or requesting a sales call. Over the last few years though, as I’ve played targeted outbound and smarter ABM games, and enjoyed richer data in the form of “intent” signals, I’ve had to re-calibrate my definitions and sales handoff rules. I’ll be talking about this later, so now back to the barn…

While MQLs demonstrate a good enough amount of intent to pass on to sales, it’s likely not all those are truly ready to be “sold to”. For sales to consider a lead qualifiable, you’d need to demonstrate saleability. Are they looking to solve the problem you are actually solving? Is this the right person within the org? Does this prospect seem like they could afford your solution? Once you have an acceptable answer here, you’re ready to designate this lead as a “Sales Qualified Lead”.

Again, I’ve played a wild spread of SQL definitions. If you have a defined SDR team, this would be the point of handoff between Demand and SDRs. In early stage enterprise workflows without a sophisticated SDR layer, and a reasonably small enough pool of MQLs up top, I’ve also had MQLs directly handed over to AEs to create opportunities and entirely skipping the intermediate. I just think that’s a terribly bad idea if you can avoid it…?

Post this, you’d have some SQLs that are quantifiably sellable - perhaps having a finite implementation timeline, or a resonant pain point. At this stage, you might want to call them an “Opportunity” and attach an expected dollar value to the sale.?

This is typically the north-star success metric that I recommend for most demand functions that I work with. So much so I recommend the team re-christening themselves from “Demand Generation” to “Pipeline Marketing”.?

From Pipeline to Closure, you’d typically have the funnel squeeze through sales stages like Propositioning, Discovery, and Negotiation. While it seems fair to just leave this black box out for the sales ops guys to fight over, I still find it useful to map these out on my funnel for diagnosis, and surfacing blocks or objections early.?

Building on: Intermediate stages and the basic Inbound Funnel flow

The real fun, at least for me, only begins once you’ve built your basic funnel. Like any pipeline, the point of defining your funnel is to identify choke points to unclog, or opportunities to bypass.?

Any area that sees a (significant) drop-off is a good place to double-click and break down the funnel. For example, at Chargebee I remember a time when our MQL to SQL flow was leaking over 50% of the leads coming in. So what do you do? Dive into what happens at that part, and break down the funnel further.?

For us, from the point of MQLs, our SDRs had a cadence to contact leads over email and phone. At this part of the funnel, our MQLs swam through being “New”, to “Open” (email sent or attempted calling), to getting “Contact Established” (response received), before being Sales Qualified (or disqualified).?

At this point, the funnel guides the diagnosis and resolution path from there.

For us, this came down to two facts. (1) Since we could only get usable feedback on lead quality if our teams actually spoke to the leads, the funnel point between “Open” and “Contact Established” became interesing. (2) This was where a majority of the leak for us happened as well (duh!). So instead of pointing fingers, our internal teams had the data to actually work together to better call scripts, emails, and auto-nurture sequences that actually drove higher responses!

Of course, for an inbound funnel, there’s a huge latent step up top that’s super critical: Page Visitors.?

When I first started my marketing career at Zoho many moons ago, this was a bit of a vanity metric. After all, these were “hits” on the site that you knew nothing else about.?

But in the intervening decades since, quite a lot has changed. Most marketing and attribution platforms are able to stick cookies and track these anonymous visitors, eventually connecting it back at the point of lead creation. A wealth of behaviour info that would have been lost to time otherwise. I remember the time a Marketo sales guy was pitching the platform to me at Freshworks, and I could feel my jaw hit the floor.?

Today you can do a lot more than just geo-tag visitors with their IP. You’re 3 Zaps away from mapping Company, potential personas, their social footprint, and targeted communications.?

Breaking into sub-functions in the inbound demand flow, you might want to gauge the denominator for your performance team with the number of ad impressions, or your organic team against search volume. Sometimes I find it useful to just zoom into a specific part of the funnel and focus on the impact of a specific channel or campaign.?

More Layers for the future: Outbound, ABM, Lead scores & Intent

A primary difference with an outbound flow is that it starts with a list that you want to open conversations with. That means a couple of things: first, done right, your MQL > SQL > Opportunity conversions should be significantly better than what you see inbound (since you’ve already pre-qualified and validated leads when you were building the list. Of course, you could play it easy, just buy a list off eBay, and wonder why your abysmally low conversion trends exist. Well…). The big game here, then, is to get your potential Target Accounts into the door and up to a point of sales intent. With an Account Based Marketing approach, I see it as the same, except for an additional complexity of viewing the aggregate funnel across multiple leads in the org.?

Somewhere between a purist inbound funnel and an outbound flow is the insane world of “Intent Signals”. Providers like G2 share org-level information on who might be shopping in your category. This provides a feeder into potential accounts that are “warmer” than cold outbound (since they’re shopping), but colder than inbound (since they haven’t explicitly come to you yet). A world of really fun connections and magics to play with!

With high volumes and a pure inbound/ PLG funnel, strict MQL definitions make sense. Until a lead signs up or requests a sales demo you still need to nurture it.?

When you start blending in outbound and intent funnels though, this starts getting blurry. A majority of pipeline may no longer be truly “Marketing Created”, as much as “Marketing Enabled”. At this point, I prefer having a more adaptive and fuzzy MQL definition.?

For an embarrassing bit of time, I used crude Lead Score heuristics - set a specific score for each user action, and trigger an MQL state change when the score jumps a specific threshold. This is perhaps just me, but I haven’t been able to derive a convincing correlation though between the scores I defined (or most of my buddies across SaaS) and the conversion metric it was supposed to predict.?

A more experimental model (if you have the marketing & rev ops maturity for it) is to have an intent based hand-off. In this funnel, leads are marked “Low Intent” - Unaware of the solution; “Mid Intent” - aware but not yet sales ready; and “High Intent” - shown a sales handraise.?

Marketing hands a blended mix of Low, Mid, and High Intent, while continuously working to push incoming leads towards higher intent levels. I like this approach especially for cracking enterprise markets since it allows marketing to provide targeted air cover while smart BDR functions drive personalized, intelligent outbound. To be fair, this has been a pipe dream (huh, I made another pun!) but some of the organisations I work have have been able to take strides in the direction.?

To the lionheart Pipe-Gen folk, wizard level MarkOps, and slightly insane marketing leaders that helped me make these magics possible: Sharan Suresh Mrigesh G. Avinash Ravinder Shri Mithran Siddharth Srinivasan Aslam B Ajay Suresh Anirhudh Sridharan Prasanna Kumar Vijay Srinivas

PS: I still feel a bit embarrassed for talking about funnels. It’s probably 92% of stuff you already knew - perhaps way better than me. But as I listed out the things I did want to discuss, a primer on funnels seemed critical…?

PPS: If this made you smile, here are a few toys that should make your inner marketer go Wee Wee Wee all the way home!?

• Clearbit/ Zoominfo/ B2Brain: Automated Enrichment intelligence
• Zapier / Tray.io / : Connectors
• Influ2/ Metadata.io: Targeted ads
• Outreach/ Klenty: Outbound engagement
• G2: Intent data
• Factors.ai: Attribution?
• Hubspot: Marketing Automation
• Google Analytics/ Search Central