The funnel and pipeline have become obsolete
Leads no longer enter funnel and pipeline
Funnel and pipeline have been legacy for most companies as it still seems to function for most of them.
However times and attitudes have changed, especially with buyers, decision makers and their influencers.
Instead of addressing to a company for requesting information people search on the Internet. This can be in various type of websites: company website, forums, reviews and social media.
- They have no intention to become a lead
- They won’t fill out an online form to request information
- They will not send a reply card
- They will not call you
- They will not send you an email
Thus they don’t enter your funnel or pipeline as they don’t identify themselves for requesting information.
Remainders of the past: funnel and pipeline
Even worse: up to a certain level in their purchase process:
- They will not take your sales calls
- They will not be interested in an appointment
Instead of spending half an hour on a phone call with a salesman, an hour in a webinar or over an hour during a meeting, they will find themselves more effective by searching the Internet and posing questions on discussion boards and forums for getting less biased responses from peers.
As identifying, qualifying, appointment setting, tracking and managing the relationship have become impossible, the funnel and pipeline have become obsolete: they are remainders of the past.
No sales meeting but technical meeting
Only once they have taken their main decision that a purchase of a certain solution is required, they will invite a limited number of companies with apparently matching solutions they have selected during their purchase process. They are not so much interested in meeting the salesman as due to their research, investigations and discussions they probably know more than the average salesman. Hence they are more interested in meeting the sales engineer, the product manager, the project manager or even the CTO for getting information and explications about technical or implementation matters.
As it is only then when you can qualify your lead your funnel and pipeline are very short as the moment of purchase decision is apparent.
So what’s the value of an ultra short funnel or pipeline where leads will only briefly be present and have only two or three stages:
- First meeting
- Price quotation given
- Deal closed or deal lost
Do you still make your monthly funnel or pipeline?
Is it still relevant to predict your business and revenue?
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true, the internet has greatly changed marketing, but it’s still marketing.
Using Search Intent in the keyword discovery and content marketing will help capturing people in different stages of the conversion funnel.
Some that are only searching will land on pages that are mostly informative and cover research keyphrases. At each of these informative pages there can be a link to a page that leads deeper in the conversion funnel, eg. a product comparison chart or alike. This product comparison chart will in turn capture search traffic from product-related search queries.
Lastly, you can always add technical and product-specific data on the product page where people can Buy Now.
So, the string of actions/hops is still there, online, and the site can do quite well in converting visitors into buyers. So the funnel still exists, it’s just not as rigid as before.
yes , true tomany cases, now a days, customer know every thing before we open up our presenation, he starts cross Q us about limitation, we need to aswer those limitation in understable manner to customer, if he convenced about them , he may take call on sale else, he will search for new product which solves his problems to optimum level. price also play in indian market . he may compramise with lower quality if price half lower than the brand. so amny changes in internet era, we need to rewrite our sales line. surely for 2011 , we dont know about 2012, sales rules are for 1 year max, it may change any time.