The Funnelholic

The Funnelholic wraps up the week with an interview of one of the industry thought-leaders who contributed to the Focus Experts’ Guide: Sales and Marketing Pipeline and Funnel Models.

Meet Carlos Hidalgo, President of The Annuitas Group. With 15-plus years in the demand generation and lead management space, Carlos is an expert in lead management process and marketing automation. He is a frequent speaker and author on the topic of lead management, and contributes to the The Annuitas Group Blog.

The Funnelholic: Explain your approach to the funnel.

Carlos: We take a dual approach to our lead planning, which is a combination of internal - revenue-focused and external — customer engagement through nurturing at every stage.

With the internal view, it is imperative that marketing and sales know and agree on the goals. This allows marketing to know what success looks like in regard to their demand generation and also shows what their overall contribution to revenue is. All this planning is done in conjunction with sales. There are a few other benefits as well from the internal view. The first is you can now can measure every stage of the pipeline/buyer journey and identify bottlenecks or potential breaks that are causing a missed target. Secondly, having these numbers and conversion rates will enable marketing to better allocate budget to ensure these goals are attained.

The second approach is an external view, which is all about buyer engagement through nurturing. In order to properly manage your funnel, it is necessary to manage the buyer relationship at every stage and to understand this engagement/nurturing is about speaking to buyers directly where they are in the process, whether it be early stage, sales engagement stage or even after they are a customer. As shown here, nurturing should be an ongoing practice that spans all stages of the buyer lifecycle.

The Funnelholic: Besides your own, were there any other funnels that resonated with you?

Carlos: The two that stood out to me were Ardath Albee’s and Steve Woods’. Ardath captured what too many companies fail to understand, in that the management of the funnel is about the customer and is not a linear up and down approach because that is not how buyers buy today. Steve also did a great job stressing the understanding of the buying process but highlighted the revenue quotient as well, and organizations need to understand both sides are vital to success.

The Funnelholic: What did you learn from the exercise?

Carlos: There were a few things that were learned from this exercise and were more reinforcements of what we have learned over the years of helping our clients. The first would be that the proverbial sales and marketing gap is a symptom of a larger problem and not a problem unto itself. By marketing and sales collaborating on the planning and buyer funnel, the gap is closed and alignment is achieved.

The second leads to the first, and that is the importance of process in relation to lead management; this again is both the responsibility of marketing and sales. Without the proper process, it is virtually impossible to manage the buyer relationship or gain the expected value from the marketing and sales relationship. Having a defined lead management process is key to the overall success and allows for the buyer engagement that today’s buyer is demanding.

The Funnelholic: If everyone needs to create a funnel to model their business, what are best practices for creating it?

Carlos: I think for an internal view, it starts with revenue and must be determined collaboratively between sales and marketing. Having the shared goal of revenue creation allows both sides to measure appropriately and gives a true picture of success or failure. Revenue does not lie and must be one of, if not the, measuring stick by which marketing and sales are viewed.

Secondly, it is making sure you incorporate the impact of nurturing on your lead planning and understanding the vast improvement that will occur on conversions through the use of nurturing.

Join the conversation: ‘Is the funnel still a relevant metaphor for the b2b sales and marketing process?’

Today, The Funnelholic continues its series of interviews with the industry thought-leaders who contributed to the Focus Experts’ Guide: Sales and Marketing Pipeline and Funnel Models.

Meet Matt West, Director of Marketing at Genius.com and author of the Connected Marketer blog. Matt has more than a dozen years of experience managing B2B marketing and demand generation programs for technology companies. With experience in both the agency/consulting and client-side marketing departments, he is focused on strategy and committed to results.

The Funnelholic: Explain your approach to the funnel.

Matt: A few years back, we coined a term “Sales 2.0,” which at its core is about two things: acknowledging that the sales process has become a buying process; and in order to harness this new dynamic to benefit both the buyer and the organization, Sales and Marketing need to align to help the buyer navigate the buying process as quickly and seamlessly as possible. In order to truly align, organizations need to rethink and update three areas of their business: people, processes and systems.

So our funnel addresses four dimensions: 1) The all-important buyer, is the actual funnel. They interact with the company before they even enter the system; they eventually engage with the company and self-identify; the organization begins a dialogue with them; they develop a rapport; they eventually buy and ultimately buy more or advocate for the company. 2) The salespeople have a set of needs and contributions throughout the process. 3) The marketing people have unique needs and contributions throughout the process. 4) There are systems that align with each stage in the buying process. Sales is getting involved much earlier in the process, and Marketing is remaining involved much deeper in the process. This has a lot to do with the new tools and systems available, like social media, CRM and marketing automation.

The Funnelholic: Besides your own, were there any other funnels that resonated with you?

Matt: I really appreciate Ardath’s approach to the funnel. We share the common sentiment of being Buyer-focused, rather than Sales-focused. But she drives home an interesting point. As buyers work through the process toward a purchase decision, they invite additional people in their organization into the conversation. This is definitely the case with technology purchases. In the recent 2011 MarketingSherpa B2B Benchmark report, they found a trend of seeing multiple decision makers getting involved in the process. Interestingly, what Ardath doesn’t touch on in her overview of the funnel, is the implications that come of this model. Having worked with her, this is clearly what drives her marketing philosophy — it’s all about content. In order to connect with each of the parties involved, marketers must develop valuable, relevant content that speaks to each party at every stage in the buying process. I’m a huge believer in this, and companies that follow this process will be very successful.

The Funnelholic: What did you learn from the exercise?

Matt: When we were asked to create and submit our funnel, I really had to think about which direction to take. The funnel has three primary uses: an almanac, a map or a crystal ball. In other words, it’s used as an analytics tool to see where you’ve been, a snapshot of your current state or as a predictive modeling (planning) tool. I had to be careful to make sure it applied to all three of these uses sufficiently.

The Funnelholic: If everyone needs to create a funnel to model their business, what are best practices for creating it?

Matt: When creating a funnel, make sure it is usable for all three items mentioned above, a map, an almanac, and a crystal ball. The map should be relatively easy. The systems you have in place should be able to tell you how many people are currently in each phase of the funnel. An almanac may be a little more difficult if your system wasn’t set up to track these phases in the past. If it was, it should be pretty easy. The most important thing to focus on when looking historically is not necessarily the volume of people at each phase of the process, but the areas between. What were the conversion rates from one phase to the next? By combining the map and the almanac, you can make some hypotheses as to where each phase of your funnel can be optimized. In order to use it as a crystal ball, you will need to flip the funnel on its head. Start with the known variables. If you know your revenue goals and you know your average sales price, you can determine how many deals are needed to reach your revenue target. Then apply the conversion rates back up the funnel to determine how many leads are needed to reach your deal target and what each phase of the funnel should look like.

Join the conversation: ‘Is the funnel still a relevant metaphor for the b2b sales and marketing process?’

Continuing with The Funnelholic’s series of interviews with industry thought-leaders who contributed to the Focus Experts’ Guide: Sales and Marketing Pipeline and Funnel Models, today we interview Barbra Gago, Social Media Manager of Cloud9 Analytics and contributer to the Cloud9 Analytics blog. Barbra recently joined Cloud9 Analytics, and has consulted businesses on Web-content strategy, inbound marketing and social media for the past four years.

The Funnelholic: Explain your approach to the funnel.

Continue Reading »

Today, The Funnelholic continues its series of interviews with the industry thought-leaders who contributed to the Focus Experts’ Guide: Sales and Marketing Pipeline and Funnel Models.

Meet Matt Heinz, Principal at Heinz Marketing LLC and author of the Matt on Marketing blog. Matt founded Heinz Marketing to focus on sales acceleration. His career has been founded on delivering measurable results for employers and clients in the way of greater sales, revenue growth, product success and customer loyalty.

Continue Reading »