Your marketing funnel is lying to you. Here's what to do.
If you could ask your Cleantech marketing funnel anything, what would you ask?
Why aren't leads gliding to opportunity?
Why can't sales close deals from my best leads?
Why doesn't pipeline grow when I up the numbers?
All these are good questions to ask, when other industries see up to 99% of MQLs going nowhere.
"Today, less than 1% of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) move through to closed deals." — (Forrester).
But funnels don't quite see the whole picture.
When we need to understand how buyers progress, interact with marketing & sales, or how MQLs become pipeline, funnels can mislead us somewhat. And not understanding these makes demand generation tougher than it needs to be.
On the other hand, getting them right can give you a competitive advantage!
So let´s spot the opportunity and use it to your advantage. But first - the elephant in the room.
How could a funnel lie to me?
Funnels are practical tools; they help navigate a messy world of demand generation. They draw a map of the buyer's journey. Like any map, they're helpful because they show the big picture.
But the big picture doesn't fit on a single page.
So we must first simplify things before we can use it. Maps are really just a simplified model. This means they change reality into something more practical, but less accurate.
“All models are wrong, but some are useful.” — George Box
In 1569, the Flemish mapmaker Gerardus Mercator drew the world map as we know it today. It was an achievement of mapmaking at the time. Today, we understand it to be inaccurate and distorted, pumping up the size of Europe and North America, while shrinking Africa, South America and South Asia.
What happened to Mercator's map? It's a little something called the mapmaker's bias.
Mercator was painting a complex world that we were still in the process of discovering. It was designed from one perspective and while it made sense at the time, it took centuries for us to realize how this map distorted our understanding of the earth.
We're at a similar stage in B2B Marketing today.
Just like Mercator, funnels have a mapmaker's bias
The classic sales funnel that has been a cornerstone of marketing strategy for over a century. It was invented by E St Elmo Lewis in 1898 and is widely regarded as the first formal theory of marketing.
Marketers build funnels to do better marketing. They're a tool, a map, built for a marketer's needs.
We want leads gliding through our funnels as efficiently as possible, and we want systems that are simple to work with. So, when we map the buyer's journey, our bias says a lot about how we wish they worked. Less so about buying reality.
This is no news to B2B researchers, who spotted the marketing disconnect years ago.
"If we were to map a real B2B buying journey, it would look a lot less like a step-by-step linear process and a lot more like a big bowl of spaghetti." —Gartner CSO Report
Things are more complex than we'd like to admit.
Every map hides a treasure
The great news is, a little understanding goes a long way.
Imagine looking into your funnel and understanding where your buyers were stuck inside them. Imagine answering their questions, solving their problems, and helping them make the right buying decision.
Even better - imagine doing all this before your competitors?
“Our jobs as marketers are to understand how the customer wants to buy, and help them do so.” — Bryan Eisenberg
Let´s jump in.
#1 Buying happens in loops, not steps
Why aren't leads gliding effortlessly to opportunity?
Leads get stuck for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes they're not interested. Sometimes they're not the right fit. Sometimes they didn't belong there in the first place.
But what about those who do belong? For those who really need your solution, there's no reason they shouldn't be moving on to a purchasing decision.
Gartner has worked with marketing leaders to better understand this problem. They've looked at purchase paths and customer journeys. And they've found that most journeys don't reduce buyer pain points: they don't give buyers what they really need.
#2 Buyers are trying to complete 6 jobs
When we talk about someone moving through a funnel, what we're really describing is a decision-making process.
The average B2B purchase comes with hair-raising risks attached. Buyers need to be certain their choice is worth the price tag, delivers value, and does not flop.
To guide this quest, buyers have 6 jobs to complete.
The first 4 are identifying the needs, solutions, requirements, and suppliers for the challenge being solved. This is a process of finding information, then making sense of it.
There are 2 things making this tricky for the buyer.
Buying jobs are revisited with new information.
Buying happens in large groups: as large as 12 people, with an average of 6.8 (Sirius decisions).
Now, it's party.
To make good decisions, buyers need to validate new information as it comes in. Then, they need to convince the group of their reasoning.
Ever planned a party for fussy eaters?
Somehow, your job is to find the dessert that makes everyone happy. I may be a Malva pudding guy, but Margeret wants a Soufflé. Scott's making noise about Pomme Palais (whatever that is). Someone inexplicably wants Trifle.
As the dessert decision-maker, you loop between guests and recipes until a compromise is found. Your job is to validate new suggestions, keep the best options on the table, and create a group consensus on the final decision. And all of this needs to happen on a tight deadline.
This is the true challenge of B2B buying. It an ongoing struggle that more closely resembles cat-herding than funnel progression.
The takeaway here is that B2B buying is not easy. And buyers are having a tough time of it. The secret is not to push buyers through funnels. Rather, we need to help them complete jobs.
Understand that it's hard for buyers, then make it easy for them.
#3 Make it easy
Google has been researching buyer behaviour for decades with an unmatched understanding of exactly how people search for information. What they've found is a research process closely resembling Gartner's loops. They're calling this the 'messy middle' of decision-making, and their model simplifies buying into the two modes buyers alternate between; exploration, then evaluation.
As new information is received, buyers loop between these two activities.
Google has found two-thirds of the learning comes from whatever information the buyer can find. Customers don’t even have a preference between sellers and digital channels, they just want access to the right information to complete their job at hand.
This is an opportunity. With better information, you can make it easier for buyers to choose you. When your content helps complete buying jobs, you win the attention bid.
Here's how to do it.
#4 Don't push buyers through funnels
Help them complete buying jobs instead!
By keeping your information relevant to buying needs, you make it easier for them to sort through what matters and keep your information at the top of the pile.
Rather than an endless generation of thought leadership, white papers, infographics and videos, content should take a focused approach on what matters to the buyer.
"...marketing leaders should rebalance their content efforts to develop and deploy information to help buyers buy." — Martha M Mathers
To do this, we need to find out what matters to them.
1. Understand their buying jobs
The buying process may seem like a mystery, but all we have to do is ask.
Since each customer and customer group is different, interviews are a great way to gather this information. The goal is to understand the jobs below as they apply to the customers' context.
These descriptions can guide you in asking for more information, but ultimately it is best to give customers the chance to tell you in their own words.
You can also add the opportunity for dialogue into your marketing. Instead of only broadcasting a message, building mini-surveys into opt-ins are a great way to give your audience a chance to share feedback on their challenge. They can help you understand where buyers are at, right from their first engagement.
2. Address their challenges in your content
Once you understand their need, you can shape your content to address their concerns and make it easier for them to make a group buying decision.
A 'job completion' checklist helps ensure relevance, effectiveness and shareability of your content.
I like the questions below.
Is it relevant?
Does this content relate to the completion of a buying job?
Is this a job where customers consistently struggle?
Is it effective?
Is it clear, simple, and informative?
Is the content easy for the customer to use quickly and effectively?
Does it inform buyers of your important differentiators?
Is it shareable?
Is it supplier-agnostic enough to be credible?
Is it relevant to the majority of our buyers?
Is it easily shareable among customer stakeholders?
Start thinking of your buyers today.
If you were buying your own product, what would buyer enablement look like?
This is an opportunity for pipeline generation that most haven't taken. Marketers helping buyers with the right information have a 3x higher likelihood of creating a high-value, low-regret deal.
"Information designed to help them advance their purchase has the single biggest impact on driving deal quality." — Gartner CSO Report
The beautiful thing is that when buying gets easier, selling gets easier too.
What's good for the buyer is good for us.
The next time their journey resembles a bowl of spaghetti, dig in and enjoy it 💪
