The sales funnel, often depicted in materials promising a path to riches, has profound flaws.
It implies two misleading concepts:
Gravity: The notion that business arrives at your door via discrete steps in a gravity-driven funnel is nonsensical.
No customer focus: Until the bottom of the funnel, where deals are signed, the emphasis is on marketing tactics rather than the customer.
Success demands that a customer is willing to pay for a need to be filled, an itch scratched, or an aspiration fulfilled that’s worth more than the price paid. Value must be created for the customer.
Even for everyday consumer goods, not everyone is in the market all the time. For most products, consumers are only occasionally in the market. In B2B sales, buyers may only appear once a decade, and they’re often not the ones who ultimately make the decision to buy and authorise payment.
These factors lead to the conclusion that the standard templated sales funnel is fundamentally flawed.
My alternative, displayed in the header, is more realistic. It shows progression through a sales process powered by the quality of attraction at each point. It starts with the customer being in the market only occasionally. At those times, you must be included on their list of possible solutions, usually weeded down to a shortlist for further investigation.
At each stage, customers face friction, go/no-go decision points, as they move towards a transaction. Your marketing collateral and overall impression contribute to overcoming this friction. For example, a potential car buyer will suddenly notice many shortlisted brands on the roads simply because they’re now aware of them.
This process is called the “frequency illusion” or its formal name: the “Baader-Meinhof phenomenon” (A scary name for those over 65.) It involves two related psychological concepts:
- Selective Attention: Once aware of something, your brain automatically looks for it, making it more likely to be noticed.
- Confirmation Bias: Encountering the thing you’re now aware of, your brain notices it, making it seem more prevalent.
Templated sales funnels tend to oversimplify the complexity of a customer’s journey towards a purchase. They rarely accommodate the differing behaviours of potential customers, lack recognition of the reasons one prospect drops out, and others circulate between stages as they reflect on the purchase. They completely ignore the impact of competitive activity and offers that may emerge, and tend to emphasise quantity over quality of prospects gathered.
By starting at the exact opposite end, where the potential customer lives, you should be much better able to craft marketing collateral and action points that reflect the real position in a purchase journey of a prospective customer.
