Successful Venture Scaling 10: Marketing & Sales | Customer Journey & Sales Funnel

Author: Kilian Veer

Successful Venture Scaling – the Learning Series

While the success of corporate venture building is clearly visible, it has a significant shortcoming: Founders lack guidance or a framework for the crucial later scaling stage. To address this gap, we have developed a unique framework for venture scaling, distilled into an accessible book. This book summarizes decades of experience in both corporate and independent venture building, offering a straightforward approach to scaling ventures alongside insights into all relevant business dimensions for scaling success. In our series of mini blogs, we aim to spotlight each sub-dimension of these business areas, providing a valuable resource for those seeking to navigate the complex terrain of venture scaling.

Introduction to the Marketing & Sales Dimension

In the previous set of chapters we have covered everything relevant for the foundation of your venture. Now that we have covered the foundation of your venture, it is time to come to the most critical dimension for the scaling phase: marketing, sales, and service.

To better understand, let us divide the three along a typical customer funnel: Marketing is the first part of a customer’s journey with your company. From the awareness that your venture and its product or service exist to generating a first interest in them, that is marketing. The next part is sales: matching your offering against the customer’s needs and shaping the offer in a way that the customer decides to purchase. Last comes service after the customer has purchased the product/service and starts using it. Service aims to increase customer engagement and improve the experience so they buy again or recommend your venture to other customers. In the last step of purchasing again or referring a new customer, the sales team is responsible again.

Often, the responsibilities of the three are split into three teams. Sometimes, an additional team called customer success is added or replaces the service team. The idea behind the customer success approach is to move away from a passive service approach, where your team waits for customers to complain, towards a support function that engages (pro)actively with your customers after the purchase.

Once you reach the proper product-market fit, marketing, sales, service, and customer success have great potential for standardization and automation. They are all crucial for your success in the scaling phase.

Third Marketing & Sales Chapter: Customer Journey & Sales Funnel

Your customer journey and sales funnel are prerequisites for standardizing your marketing and sales efforts. The two are often confused but are not the same.

The customer journey describes all the steps a customer takes from the first time they are aware that your venture or product exists to purchasing, using, and advocating for it. This includes marketing and sales activities across different channels, interaction with your product, and contact with your service team. Planning these steps from a customer perspective is the customer journey.

The sales funnel starts and ends at the same point as the customer journey. In contrast, it is far less detailed and defined from your venture’s perspective. It is meant to give you an overview of your current customer acquisition status.

Before automating marketing and sales processes, always define your customer journey and sales funnel. All standardizations and automation are connected by the steps taken there. A CRM system is an excellent home for your sales funnel. Ensure that every work step your marketing and sales team takes regarding customer work is tracked in the CRM system. This will help you understand the efforts required to move a customer from one phase to the next and will help you optimize your customer journey based on factual data.

Questions helping to assess the current status of your branding are:

1. Have we defined our sales funnel with at least four but not more than ten phases?
2. Have we defined success factors and goals for each of the phases?
3. How long does it take from the first phase to closing the sale?
4. Do we know the conversion rates between all phases?
5. Are we using a CRM system, and is the funnel part of it?
6. Have we defined our customer journey(s)?
7. Have we assigned all marketing and sales materials to the sales funnel phases and customer journey steps?
8. Are we sure that we cover all parts of every customer journey in our process visualization?

This excerpt is one of many becoming available on our LinkedIn page. Follow our page to never miss a mini blog post on more lessons from the book, and follow Kilian on LinkedIn as he shares his knowledge and learnings from his time leading startups successfully through the first years of scaling.