What the Campaign Funnel Never Told Us!

Years ago, I wrote this blog about the demand funnel: that abstract metaphor through which we trace prospects as they move through the tops, middles, and bottoms of our funnel charts.

The years pass, I'm growing crankier, and my feelings about the funnel are only solidifying.

The funnel aggregates human behaviors (clicks, downloads, registrations, etc.) into stages, calculating their conversion from stage to stage. The rise (or fall) of conversion rates and funnel volumes signal the success or lack thereof of marketing and sales actions.

Funnels are, therefore, a big feature of Quarterly Business Reviews. They're also the topic of many a blog and webinar, and an evergreen conference topic for marketing professionals. As a "leads nerd," I've often heard statements like these:

• “We need to drive more contacts through the funnel.”
• “Our leads are getting stuck at <Insert Funnel Stage Here>.”
• “I want to know what works and what doesn’t work.”
• “I want an optimization plan for every conversion stage.”
• “Here are [XX] proven ways to accelerate funnel progression.”

The funnel certainly occupies a lot of discussion, but from whence did it come?

"The first sales funnel was created in 1898 by E. St. Elmo Lewis. He designed the AIDA model, which stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action…. In 1924, William Townsend proposed the association of the AIDA model with a funnel…. Gray A. Steiner and Robert J. Lavidge expanded on the AIDA model and developed the hierarchy of effects model in 1961." (This is from the “Funnel Teacher” blog, which is fun reading at this link.)

Here's the rub.

When we speak of "getting prospects to convert" and "getting more people (or accounts) through the funnel" or "funnel acceleration," we're anthropomorphizing the funnel abstraction. And misperceptions about the funnel can prevent us from tracking and managing the most important aspects of demand generation campaigns.

Real humans and their very real businesses aren't traveling through our funnel stages like cattle through a chute. The funnel isn't compelling anyone to do anything. And marketing campaigns tasked with driving funnel conversions aren't doing what many expect either.

Funnels are Pyramids Turned Upside Down

Most students of my generation studied Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Articulated in American psychologist Abraham Maslow's paper, "A Theory of Human Motivation," in 1943 (I'm not that old; it's just a pivotal work), it said: human behavior is driven by unmet needs. It's often expressed in Maslow's hierarchical model, like the one below.

According to Maslow, our motivations are first driven by physiological and safety needs. As those basic needs are satisfied, we can move on to satisfy higher order needs, such as esteem, aesthetics, and so on.

Maslow had the best kind of insight: simple to grasp, easy to describe, and intuitively credible. Human behavior is driven by unmet needs.

But his hierarchical model is just as problematic as the leads funnel.

Yes, people are often driven foremost to satisfy survival needs when those needs are perceived to be unmet (deficient).

But have you ever known or heard of someone who put esteem before love?

Or put their own safety at risk in pursuit of an aesthetic need?

Or engage in self-sacrificial behavior (the parental need to protect their children, for example)?

Maslow's insight was brilliant. But the pyramid model is an elaboration that works better in a classroom than it does in real life. It doesn't inhibit anyone from pursuing hedonistic or ascetic needs, altruistically or otherwise, at any time or all at once. We are free to roam scattershot throughout Maslow's hierarchy, satisfying our unmet needs, real and perceived, with creativity, irrationality, rage, ardor, calculation, rapacity, and abandon.

No one is constrained by Maslow's model.

Nor are prospective buyers constrained by our lead funnels.

If the Funnel's a Poseur, What's Real?

This chart uses anonymized data sourced from CRM. It's an historical look at every marketing interaction by all contacts assigned to a given account during the account's lifespan in that database. To get to the "stair stepping" effect, each marketing interaction was assigned a lead score. But while lead scores typically zero out after periods of inactivity, here they were allowed to accumulate throughout the years of an account's lifetime in CRM.

A brilliant marketing operations team mapped this out manually for a QBR. The same analysis was performed for several other accounts, all of them ideal buyers with successful outcomes (closed opportunities with revenue).

Of the several accounts that were mapped in this manner, the pattern was the same: a series of marketing interactions occurred over an extended timeframe. Then, abruptly, a hockey stick appeared, rising rapidly until a transaction took place. At last, the accounts were being driven to the bottom of the funnel. Or were they?

What caused the hockey stick? Here are some tongue-in-cheek possibilities.

• We sent a particularly trenchant email with a subject line that sang of promise and good times to come.
• We conducted a compelling webinar with a speaker who kept viewers enthralled while painting vivid visions of skyrocketing productivity.
• We had an especially desirable trade show booth giveaway distributed by a zealous team of uniformed marketers with badge scanners at the ready.
• We funded a local partner event that boosted trust, camaraderie, and dreams of profitability, peppered with bursts of drunken skeet shooting.

While some or all of these things may actually have happened within the account's journey from ignorance (of the company's solution) to transaction, the reality is mundane. What creates the hockey stick isn't our campaigns, and it certainly isn't funnel magic. It's the buyer's awareness of an unmet need.

It isn't us. It's them.

We don't accelerate prospects through the funnel. And prospects don't choose conversion behaviors. Prospective buyers are fulfilling their own interests, often for reasons that are unclear or invisible to us.

• A new CEO arrives, articulating a new set of priorities for the business. A team of prospective buyers begin reaching out to suitable vendors.
• A legacy software product that hasn't seen real innovation for years is up for renewal -- and the company's IT team has a strategy of replacing legacy apps with SaaS solutions.
• A new corporate acquisition, the third in rapid succession, puts an enormous strain on a company as it struggles to knit together disparate systems and data. A wave of IT modernization is launched.

Here's my thesis in a nutshell:

Funnel metrics track conversion shrinkage. It's more meaningful to track content consumption growth. Our campaigns matter because they take our value proposition to potential buyers, and persistently signal our relevance and availability as a solution provider. When our buyers experience an unmet need that aligns with our solution, a hockey stick occurs.

If we're on our toes as a sales and marketing team, we'll spot that hockey stick and give that account the attention it deserves.

Relevance of our solutions = Content quality metrics

Availability of our solutions = Awareness metrics

Let's Wrap...

Should we continue to track our buyers as they take actions, unaware of the funnel we've sketched around them?

Yes, because QBR looms and we need the slides.

But our creation and distribution of great content to prospective buyers is how we can best influence them. And that, too, should be slideworthy. It's what signals our ability to meet an unmet need. When our prospective buyers begin to consider which action to take in order for them to meet that need -- our campaigns will truly make a difference.

It's not us and our funnels. It's them and their needs.

Thanks for reading.