The (marketing) funnel isn’t dead
How to map your funnel to improve your prospect & customer experience, build better relationships between GTM teams, and more easily identify & fix funnel leaks
“The marketing funnel is dead,” they say. I don’t agree.
I agree the marketing funnel isn’t exactly funnel shaped–it's sort of an hourglass. And I recognize that you need to build loops, so existing customers help you get new customers. So whatever the shape, the GTM process (of getting prospects to your website, to purchase your product, to keep purchasing more of your product, and to tell other people to do the same) works best when well understood by marketing, sales, and customer success.
So, I still strongly recommend B2B marketing teams map their funnels. You need to map your prospect to customer experience (what I’m choosing to call the funnel) and use it to set up proper automation and handoffs, track the right things, and make sure you’re communicating with the right personas across the funnel. This funnel mapping process is one of the key foundational elements of your growth strategy.
Here’s a high-level “funnel” diagram I use to represent all this:
This newsletter covers:
Why you need to map your GTM process (aka your funnel)
How to map your funnel
How to map marketing activities to your funnel stages
The importance of full-funnel reporting
A brief interlude to tell you about our upcoming happenings…
MKT1 Events
Our lineup of summer events and the next cohorts of our flagship course–Building B2B Marketing–now with cohorts just for marketers and just for founders/other business leaders are open for applications as well.
Here’s the schedule:
2 Hour Workshop: How to hire your first few B2B marketers
Jun 15, 9 - 11 AM PT
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4 Week Course: Building B2B Marketing — for early-stage founders & Business Leaders
Jul 12 - Aug 2 on Wednesdays
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5 Week Course: Building B2B Marketing — for early-stage startup marketing leaders
Oct 4 - Nov 3 on Wednesdays
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And more - 2 Hour Workshop: 3 drivers of marketing strategy on 7/19 & 2 Day, 4 Hour Workshop: B2B Startup Website Conversion on 8/9 and 8/10.
We now have an events & courses page on our website, for more details on all these events, check it out.
Why you need to map your funnel
Very few founders and marketers would tell me they don’t need positioning or they don’t need to figure out their story. Yet, people seem reluctant to map their funnels (Perhaps because of the “funnel is dead” rhetoric that’s been thrown around for the past 5ish years?). But all things go-to-market will fall better into place once you do it. I love diagrams more than the next human (you’ve probably noticed), but trust me on this one.
I typically describe marketing as having 3 parts, your foundation, your fuel, and your engine (shown below). Brand perceptions (which are the tenets of your story) and positioning are key foundational elements to fuel or content strategy. Channel selection and funnel mapping are the key foundational elements to growth strategy.
If you prefer SAT analogy style notation (and who doesn’t?!):
Brand Perceptions/Story & Positioning : Content/Fuel Strategy ::
Funnel Mapping & Channel Selection : Growth Strategy
How to map your funnel
Traditionally, 4 funnel stages are mentioned: awareness, interest, desire, and action. But, it’s best to use the names of stages you use in your CRM and marketing automation tool, like lead (interest), qualified lead (desire), opportunity (action in the form of a meeting or product activity) when mapping your funnel.
It’s important to not stop your funnel at “closed won” aka acquiring a paid customer. You should keep tracking through to customers becoming active, renewed, evangelists, etc. This is why the funnel is more of an hourglass–you pretty much always want to cause some form of “land and expand”.
Now’s the point in this newsletter where I tell you you need not 1 but 3 funnel maps:
A marketing funnel flowchart to keep track of rules of engagement and handoffs and I recommend creating in FigJam– this is what most people think of when they hear funnel diagram.
An inventory of marketing activities and messages mapped to your funnel in your spreadsheet or project management tool (like Asana)-- you can create these for various ICPs as well.
A full-funnel report in an analytics tool or a spreadsheet.
How to make a funnel flowchart
Map your stages
Typical stages for a sales-led GTM motion: Awareness, Lead, Marketing
Qualified Lead, Sales Accepted Lead, Sales Qualified Lead, Opportunity (w/ various sub-stages), Closed Won or Lost, and then various stages for customers to track renewal and expansion.For product-led GTM motions: Often Marketing Qualified Leads are sign ups for the product itself—they become Product Qualified and/or Sales Qualified when they show potential to upgrade to paid and meet certain ICP qualifications.
Codify the handoffs and rules of engagement between each stages
Make sure you know who can email prospects & customers by stage–when every team can email everyone at any stage its a recipe for disaster.
You can also add key emails to the diagram and/or precise rules for what needs to be set up in your Marketing Automation and CRM.
These funnels are going to look different if you have a sales-driven GTM motion, a self-serve GTM motion, or a combo of the two. Here are some examples:
To see these in Figma and edit them for your unique prospect-to-customer journey, subscribe to the paid newsletter.
What to do with these diagrams now?
Use them as a reference to build out your marketing automation and CRM flows. Provide them to a contractor helping you with Rev Ops or get buy-in across GTM teams before handing them off to an internal marketing ops or sales ops person.
Layer on key emails by stage, additional rules of engagement, qualification criteria, etc.
Reference these when discussing adding an additional GTM motion (like adding a free trial) into the mix. Update accordingly.
Use these to train new employees across all GTM teams on how the funnel works.
Copy and edit stages for different ICPs, including invited users in a PLG product.
And use them as a reference for the next 2 ways to map your funnel: inventory of marketing activities & full-funnel reporting.
Quick notes on MQL as a stage & why I think we should probably retire the acronym MQL
Marketing influences growth throughout the funnel. All closed customers will have some interaction with “marketing”—even if that’s just your website. So it’s not really that marketing influences just 1 stage of the funnel—this is a very dated point of view.
MQLs are leads that becomes pre-qualified through automation. So I think we should call it a QL1 (meaning stage 1 of qualification). In this case an SQL or PQL would then be QL2. I think this would also stop some of the attribution tension that exists between marketing and sales.
An MQL can be however you define it, and unlike things like “meetings scheduled” the definition can change over time. The pro of this is you can open or close the floodgates by changing MQL criteria. The con is it makes tracking over time challenging.
Some examples of “MQL” definitions
MQL = Filled out a form + meets firmographic qualification criteria
MQL = free user sign up
MQL = lead score based, firmographic + behavioral threshold met (opens emails, reads content, fills out forms, etc.)
Marketing Ops Note: Make sure in your marketing automation tool all leads get “stamped” as MQL before hitting SQL, so you can track conversion rates clearly. For example, don’t let SQLs skip the MQL stage, it creates funky reporting–just have the MQL reason be “scheduled meeting” or “outbound”.
No matter what, make definitions clear and make it very obvious when you change definitions for reporting purposes.
Minor note: If using Salesforce, it’s often better to work out of the contact object rather than the lead object, I’m using MQL interchangeably with MQC here.
All this said I still used MQL throughout this newsletter so as not to confuse people.
How to map marketing activities to your funnel stages
As I mentioned, to be most effective, marketing focuses on the entire funnel. Marketing’s job is to work with sales, customer success, support, product, etc to create the best possible customer experience and to drive growth. Marketing does this by assisting with messaging, creative, and 1-to-many communication throughout the funnel.
Check out this newsletter for more on why marketing should take a full-funnel approach, and not just act as a service organization sales.
Given the large purview of marketing, it's helpful for planning and prioritizing to inventory the key things that are happening at each stage of the funnel. I prefer to do this in a spreadsheet. Things get a little visually chaotic if you try to do this on top of your funnel flowchart. Do this on a quarterly basis if not more frequently.
Mapping marketing activities, messages, personas, marketing goals, etc. against funnel stages will help you see where you have gaps and overlaps. And once you have full-funnel reporting set up, the combo makes it easy to figure out how to stop your funnel leaks.
Here’s what I recommend including in this inventory of marketing activities by funnel stage, this example also includes rules of engagement:
For a template version of this in a Google Sheet, upgrade to a paid subscription.
As you map out activities throughout the funnel:
Remember: If you can create a loop off the funnel (does that make it a bugle shape?), you will grow faster. Meaning, make sure new customers are encouraged to spread the word to others in their company or outside the company.
Make sure invited users then receive follow-up marketing materials—as they often come into the product blindly, having skipped tofu (top of funnel) without having built up awareness and knowledge of your solution. We saw this a lot at Asana, and had custom email drips and onboarding for invited users. It can be helpful to create a separate table just for invites with a self-serve/PLG GTM motion.
Turn your funnel into an hour glass. Don’t ignore the funnel after a prospect becomes a customer. New revenue is not the only goal, expanding within companies is a big lever too. So, focus on the 2nd part of the hourglass and drive up contract value.
The basics of measuring your funnel
How to track full-funnel metrics is a whole other yet-to-be-written MKT1 newsletter, but here are the basics for now:
If you have a leaky funnel, you waste a lot of time bringing people into the funnel who just fall right out. Conversion goals and tracking by source throughout the entire funnel are the key to spotting and preventing this.
If you already track your full funnel by source, you might find it impossible to believe that other startups don’t. But I’ve even seen late-stage companies in the last 6 months that can’t connect the dots between web traffic and revenue–among other things. Connecting web traffic to your funnel is essential.
Here are the basic things you need to track–there’s a lot more you can track, but start here:
Web & Blog Analytics: Views, Sessions, New session, Bounce Rate, Conversion Rate, Reports by Page, Sources & UTM Codes
Funnel Reporting - Track totals and also each metric by source: Total in Each Stage, Conversion Rate Between each Stage, Time In Each Stage, Growth Rates, LTV, CAC, Payback (eventually)
Attribution: First Source, Last Touch at MQL, Campaign Influenced, Most Recent Activity
And then slice and dice and group these reports by: Inbound vs. Outbound, Organic vs. Paid, Inbound Source (track throughout funnel), Last Touch at MQL (track throughout funnel), Cohorted Reports, “In Month” Reports.
Funnel reporting can be tracked in BI tools or a good old-fashioned spreadsheet:
A quick note on lead source: Lead source is often not the right way to track attribute revenue to activities, but it can still be helpful for identifying the success of different channels:
For example, if you do a lot of prospecting and add lead lists to your CRM, lead source becomes a fairly ineffective way to measure the success of GTM activities.
Imagine if a lead gets added via a prospecting list, doesn’t ever open an outbound email, and later comes inbound after searching for your product.
That would have a lead source of “list” instead of “SEO” if you are using first touch attribution.
To get around this, I like using last touch at MQL & “influenced” reports that map to campaigns.
To see an example of what you need on a full-funnel report in spreadsheet format, upgrade to our paid newsletter.
Conversion: Focus on it!
I mention tracking conversion between funnel stages, this can’t be overemphasized.
As I write in my goals newsletter, I get really peeved when I see KPI goals that are just numbers. The real measure of growth success is increasing volume into a funnel stage, while maintaining or even improving the conversion rate to the next stage.
In practice, this means you should never set a volume target for a funnel-stage, without including a conversion rate target. Here are some examples of KPI goals:
Top Down Sales Model: Increase qualified leads to #, while maintaining x% conversion rate to opportunity
PLG / Freemium / Bottom Up Model: Increase signups to #, while maintaining x% conversion rate to activated product user
If your funnel-based goals in marketing don’t look like the examples above, reset them now.
To build the proper foundation for your growth engine, you need to map your funnel. Your funnel will likely look a little more hour glass shaped and have some loops coming off it, but regardless you need to map the GTM process clearly and have a shared understanding of what it looks across your company.
Once you have that funnel flowchart it’s much easier to get organized on rules of engagment, hand offs between teams, inventory and report on full-funnel marketing activities, and increase conversion throughout your funnel. Even from early days, the funnel provides so much clarity.
Reminder: We’d love to have you in an upcoming course or workshop—next up is our 2 hour workshop on hiring your first marketers. Register here.
The rest of this post is for paid subscribers only. It includes template links for Figma funnel diagrams, marketing activity by funnel stage spreadsheet template, and a full-funnel report example. It also includes discount codes for courses and workshops. Plus other top secret stuff!