Why the sales funnel’s days as a marketing model are numbered

Dinosaur recon­struc­tion can be a tricky game. If they weren’t lucky enough to find the fos­silised skele­ton of an unknown species intact, the ear­ly palaeon­tol­o­gists had to work out which bone should go where from the pile they’d assem­bled. Edward Cope’s first attempt to piece togeth­er the anato­my of the leviathan elas­mosaurus in 1868 placed its head on its tail – he sim­ply couldn’t believe that any crea­ture would have such a long neck. Cope’s great rival, Oth­niel Marsh, rev­elled in his error, stir­ring up a feud that became known as the bone wars.

Mar­ket­ing is in a sim­i­lar, albeit less fraught, place today. The sales fun­nel, a mod­el of the cus­tomer jour­ney that’s been core to the pro­fes­sion for decades, is under attack from all sides for being the wrong shape. The most appro­pri­ate replace­ment for this out­mod­ed con­cept? Take your pick from the fol­low­ing: the messy mid­dle, the con­tent ecosys­tem, the bow tie or the mar­ket­ing fly­wheel. 

So what is going on? At first glance, the fun­nel seems log­i­cal enough. It tracks con­sumers along a route sum­marised by the acronym Aida (aware­ness, inter­est, desire and action). At each of these points, a pro­por­tion of poten­tial buy­ers will walk away – hence the nar­row­ing shape that gives it its name. 

“The sales fun­nel was invent­ed for sim­pler times – more than 100 years ago,” says Shiona McDougall, glob­al chief strat­e­gy offi­cer at cre­ative agency RAPP. “It doesn’t account for the sophis­ti­ca­tion of today’s dig­i­tal­ly savvy and mar­ket­ing-resis­tant con­sumers. Nor does it account for the pro­lif­er­a­tion of sales chan­nels and the com­plex­i­ty of mod­ern mar­ket­ing.”

Take social media, for instance. A brand may catch the eye of an anony­mous brows­er on Tik­Tok or Insta­gram. Once in a while, that per­son may nip over to the brand’s web­site and make a pur­chase. From the seller’s per­spec­tive, such a trans­ac­tion seems like a leap out of the dark straight to the end of the fun­nel.

Then there are repeat cus­tomers, who are miss­ing from the mod­el. 

“Some­times the biggest wins aren’t rep­re­sent­ed by the tra­di­tion­al sales fun­nel,” McDougall says. “Turn­ing a cus­tomer into a repeat cus­tomer and/or advo­cate can often have more impact than pil­ing more prospects into the top of the fun­nel, giv­en that more than 90% of these will nev­er make a pur­chase.” 

She argues that any sales team that’s focused on feed­ing the fun­nel from the top could be ignor­ing the rich poten­tial of con­sumers who have gone through it before. 

“Your exist­ing cus­tomers have the poten­tial to be a sell­ing army. If you lead them cor­rect­ly, they’re capa­ble of dri­ving new cus­tomer pur­chas­es beyond your wildest dreams,” McDougall stress­es. “Look at Mon­zo, Uber and Apple, for instance.”

The real path to purchases

The funnel’s lin­ear­i­ty has also been crit­i­cised for being too sim­ple. After all, a cus­tomer may show inter­est in a prod­uct, for­get it, come back with the inten­tion of buy­ing yet fail to com­plete the pur­chase for what­ev­er rea­son, but then return again lat­er. There’s noth­ing much lin­ear about that.

In July 2020, Google UK pub­lished a research paper on how buy­ing choic­es are made. Intro­duc­ing the report, two of its authors, Alis­tair Ren­nie and Jon­ny Protheroe, wrote: “The way peo­ple make deci­sions is messy – and it’s only get­ting messier. We know that what hap­pens is not lin­ear. There is a com­pli­cat­ed web of touch­points that dif­fers from per­son to per­son.” 

The term they have coined to describe this morass of chaot­ic cog­i­ta­tion is the messy mid­dle. This mod­el offers a cou­ple of new dynam­ics. 

Ren­nie and Protheroe wrote: “Peo­ple look for infor­ma­tion about a category’s prod­ucts and brands and then weigh all the options. This equates to two dif­fer­ent men­tal modes in the messy mid­dle: explo­ration, an expan­sive activ­i­ty; and eval­u­a­tion, a reduc­tive activ­i­ty. What­ev­er a per­son is doing, across a huge array of online sources, such as search engines, social media, aggre­ga­tors and review web­sites, can be clas­si­fied into one of these two men­tal modes.”

Their rec­om­men­da­tion to sales and mar­ket­ing teams is to sup­port con­sumers as they explore and eval­u­ate. Give them all the infor­ma­tion they need to com­plete their research. Ensure that your online rec­om­men­da­tions – on Google Reviews for instance – are strong to boost social proof. Help cus­tomers to under­stand your prod­uct with brief, accu­rate descrip­tions. 

There’s a clear par­al­lel between the messy mid­dle and anoth­er mod­el that’s gain­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty: the con­tent ecosys­tem. This is favoured by strate­gists such as Iso­bel Burns, founder and direc­tor of the Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Engine con­sul­tan­cy. 

“Unlike the lin­ear sales fun­nel, the con­tent ecosys­tem is designed to cap­ture peo­ple at var­i­ous stages of their buy­ing jour­neys,” she explains. “It can take some­one who knows noth­ing about your offer­ing through a process of edu­ca­tion, instill­ing desire for that offer­ing, reduc­ing scep­ti­cism with social proof and allow­ing them to become more famil­iar with it at their own pace.”

The con­tent ecosys­tem is effec­tive at retar­get­ing – that is, mar­ket­ing to con­sumers who’ve fall­en out of the fun­nel – accord­ing to Burns. She adds that the path to a sale is often far more com­plex and cir­cuitous than that rep­re­sent­ed by the fun­nel. The con­tent ecosys­tem offers a flex­i­ble approach that makes allowances for less pre­dictable con­sumers. 

“Out of 100 prospects, per­haps between two and five will con­vert to a sale. What about the oth­er 95 to 98 you’re paid to reach? The answer is usu­al­ly to retar­get them,” she says. “Favour­ing a con­tent ecosys­tem, rather than a lin­ear sales fun­nel, enables you to show peo­ple con­tent that’s rel­e­vant to their buy­ing posi­tions.” 

If they want edu­ca­tion, pro­vide it, Burns says. If they remain recep­tive, ensure that there’s an offer ready for them to snap up.

What could replace the sales funnel?

Anoth­er replace­ment mod­el for the sales fun­nel is the bow tie, which is favoured by Work­Force Soft­ware, a US-based spe­cial­ist in HR appli­ca­tions. Its chief mar­ket­ing offi­cer, San­dra Moran, explains that the firm uses a soft­ware-as-a-ser­vice (SaaS) bow-tie mod­el.

In effect, this adds anoth­er fun­nel that cov­ers cus­tomers who are com­mit­ted to a sub­scrip­tion. It tracks these repeat buy­ers as they stay with the brand, maybe upgrade and expand their pur­chas­ing choic­es. (The two fun­nels, when fac­ing each oth­er on their sides, vague­ly resem­ble a bow tie.) This is a pop­u­lar mod­el in soft­ware as a ser­vice, where to buy is to enter a long-term rela­tion­ship with a ven­dor. 

Moran can track these cus­tomers’ activ­i­ties at every point, using machine-learn­ing algo­rithms to pro­vide them with rel­e­vant con­tent. 

She explains: “As more indi­vid­u­als join ongo­ing sales cycles, we’re able to iden­ti­fy new­ly engaged con­tacts. We can learn with each suc­cess­ful sales cycle which buy­ing sig­nals are indica­tive of deals that close, pro­vid­ing sales teams with rec­om­mend­ed actions to keep those accounts on track.”

The fly­wheel mod­el, pro­posed by US soft­ware com­pa­ny Hub­Spot, is a more rad­i­cal depar­ture from the fun­nel. The antithe­sis of the hard sell, it aban­dons any attempt to shuf­fle poten­tial buy­ers along the path to a pur­chase. Instead, there is a broad­er focus on help­ing con­sumers in what­ev­er they try to do. The fly­wheel cov­ers three areas of activ­i­ty: the attract phase, as peo­ple learn about a brand; the engage phase, as they buy; and the delight phase, as they are giv­en post-pur­chase sup­port. 

Red Evo­lu­tion, a mar­ket­ing agency, is an advo­cate of the fly­wheel. The firm’s dig­i­tal strate­gist, Alex Bussey, says: “The fun­nel is a bro­ken and out­dat­ed con­cept. We need a mod­el under which we con­tin­u­al­ly engage and delight peo­ple at var­i­ous stages of the buy­ing jour­ney.” 

This means accept­ing that such a jour­ney won’t be a sim­ple straight line for many poten­tial cus­tomers. “Rather than pro­duc­ing con­tent designed to appeal to peo­ple at cer­tain stages of the fun­nel, we tend to cre­ate a blend of large pil­lar pages, which are use­ful to any­one seek­ing an overview of a giv­en sub­ject, along with sup­port­ing micro-con­tent such as blog posts or an FAQs sec­tion.”

So where does this war of mod­els leave the cus­tomer? Hope­ful­ly, in a world with less of the hard sell. Brands are giv­ing up on the idea of push­ing poten­tial pun­ters down a path and are more relaxed about los­ing prospects. The new think­ing is that they’ll be back, even if it’s not clear when. 

Life is not a straight line. Mar­ket­ing is evolv­ing as it tries to track how con­sumers tru­ly behave. The con­ven­tion­al sales fun­nel, there­fore, is sure­ly fac­ing extinc­tion.