What is a Marketing Funnel?

Business leaders will often talk about a ‘Sales Pipeline or Funnel.’  The sales pipeline is a process by which a sales person will identify early prospects, qualified prospects, interested prospects, proposed to prospects, and closed deals.

Manufacturing will have a ‘Delivery Funnel’ where products being sold or built for inventory will be identified in the various stages of production.

HR even has a ‘Talent Funnel’ that tracks recruiting, assessing, interviewing, hiring and on-boarding activities.

But what is a Marketing Funnel?

A Marketing Funnel is multi-faceted and covers many aspects of the business. It is often referred to as the ‘Crystal Ball,’ ‘Ouiji Board’ or corporate ‘Dart Board.’

Good strategic marketers will have multiple funnels that identify and communicate back into the organization.  The Marketing Funnel identifies:

1. The Product. Strategic Marketers will identify – sometimes a year or more in advance – what products need to be developed to serve a changing market.  Apple Marketers, for example, will have a detailed Product Funnel that identifies what new products need to be developed way beyond the current year as Product Managers will often need two or three years to design, test and get into production the latest iPhone.
2. The Program. These are the communications to the market.  What is scheduled to go out, to whom, when, how and what the ‘Call to Action’ is going to be.
3. The Life Cycle. Every product has a life cycle.  Strategic Marketers will identify what stages in a production adoption curve that they will focus on and for how long.  Typically, when a new product launches, good marketers will know that there is about 15% of the market that ‘just gets it’ and they will want to be the first movers on the product.  Then they will forecast when to move on to the mainstream market (the 70%) and then when to sunset or discontinue a product.

Marketing funnels are all about planning and forecasting to give the business some sense of direction inside the walls of the business and some sense of predictability to the outside world of customers and investors.

Marketers are the ‘Mad Scientists’ of the business world of funnels.

Robert Murray is a Vancouver, BC based Business Strategy Consultant, #1 Best Selling Author, and International Keynote Speaker. For further advice, insight and inspiration on how to unlock your inner leader, follow Robert on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

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