The Reality of Modern Marketing Funnels

Living in the Pacific Northwest, I’ve come to appreciate the tenacity of salmon. No, really. Salmon will swim hundreds or even thousands of miles upstream. Why? To ensure the survival of their offspring.

In my interview with Stas Balanevsky, we chatted about when it comes to marketing funnels, the salmon have it right. Swim upstream to keep your sales alive.

Work your funnel from the bottom up to get better sales

I always hear the questions, “How do we look at the marketing funnel? How do we look at it in a critical way, in a way that we can do things that impact the numbers?”  These questions make it seem like you’re trying to take a funnel to a straw. 

I actually think people should do the marketing funnel in reverse.

Hear me out on this one.

When you look at the funnel, it goes down all the way through the sale and stops with support at the bottom. But if you work backwards and go up the funnel, you’re going to clean up your sales process. The best part of doing that is you’re going to realize which clients closed and which type of client you really want.

See what I mean?

As you’re fixing your sales pipeline, you’re learning. You start at the base of the funnel with questions like:

• What kind of white papers do we need?
• Do we need comparison guides between us and our competitor?
• What do we need at that level?

From there, you start working up.

Most people go the other way and they think they just need all the leads, but here’s the thing…they’re crap. These leads annoy sales because they’re the ones on the call with the junk leads. A marketing person might be thumping their chest and saying, “I’m getting all these leads,” whereas the salesperson is saying, “I’m getting corpses.”

End the cycle. Go back up the funnel starting with the sales process. Not only will it go 10x faster, you’ll actually get leads that are worth a damn.