It’s time for another interview with a contributor to Focus Experts’ Guide: Sales and Marketing Pipeline and Funnel Models.
Meet Adam Needles, Vice President of Demand Generation Strategy at Left Brain Marketing. Adam is a passionate marketing change agent in B2B marketing, helping companies develop more buyer-centric demand generation programs that drive revenue and build their brands in a bottom-up fashion, and he pens the blog Propelling Brands.
The Funnelholic: Explain your approach to the funnel.
Adam: Let me start by saying I have no artistic talent. So my lack of design composition skills aside, I think there is a powerful insight in my funnel.
Modern B2B demand generation is not about the marketer, it’s about Buyer 2.0. And funnels/conversions in the modern demand generation environment are not linear. That’s why I think it’s powerful to envision an iterative nurturing loop — one that we can go around and around in, having two-way, content-based dialogue with a prospect and engaging in progressive profiling, until (s)he is ready to talk to someone on our sales team.
If you have a clear Universal Lead Definition — at Left Brain Marketing, we talk about knowing at what point you have a definable Sales Opportunity — then this hand-over point is clear. And then our pattern of nurturing activities should be about building up to the point where we have a match.
This is not to say you should not have a conversion model, and in fact, over the next few weeks we will be launching a new conversion model — The Left Brain Model — that we believe is a critical model for qualifying Prospects and for delivering Sales Opportunities.
But I think it’s critical to capture the idea that modern B2B demand generation must be two-way, must place buyer education at the core, must be buyer driven and must proceed at the buyer’s pace. This may sound complicated, but this is where sound nurturing logic combined with sophisticated marketing automation can make a big difference in delivering on-demand generation that is sustainable, buyer-centric and one-to-one.
This also is the key path to predicting and managing revenue, because your insights into what works, marketing-wise, and what doesn’t, and your visibility into where you stand at a given point in time, will be the 100% accurate and closed-loop amalgamation of all of your one-to-one buyer conversations, rather than some random estimate of how you’re doing. Bottoms-up, versus top-down.
The Funnelholic: Besides your own, were there any other funnels that resonated with you?
Adam: The funnels in the book that I saw that most embrace this concept of buyer-centric marketing are those from Michael Damphousse at Green Leads and Carlos Hidalgo of The Annuitas Group. In fact, I’m pretty excited by the evolution of Carlos’ lead management diagram — something we collaborated on a bit when I was at Silverpop — because it does a good job of co-integrating the nurturing loop with the conversion waterfall from SiriusDecisions.
The Funnelholic: What did you learn from the exercise?
Adam: Two things: A.) Using your brain a lot can be tiring. B.) The funnel has flipped in modern B2B demand generation; the buyer is now at the center, and campaigns must be dynamic; however, it can be tough to illustrate this. It’s way too easy to draw a linear funnel that everyone can wrap their heads around. But this does B2B marketers a disservice. So it’s worth the challenge of coming up with a way to depict the fundamentally new approach we need to take in this Brave New World.
The Funnelholic: If everyone needs to create a funnel to model their business, what are best practices for creating it?
Adam: Start with your targeted B2B buyer. What buying stages does (s)he go through? And where does (s)he consume information during the buying process? Then you need to figure out what constitutes an ideal Sales Opportunity, and work your way backward — rationalizing qualification levels and requisite content interactions against buying stages. In fact, we think that our upcoming release of The Left Brain Model will help organizations, so I look forward to sharing that in the marketplace.
Join the conversation: ‘Is the funnel still a relevant metaphor for the b2b sales and marketing process?’
Written by Craig Rosenberg - The FunnelholicSign up to receive emails when new articles are posted
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