The sales funnel is obsolete. As early as 1904, the model was illustrated as a chart, with each stage influencing and leading to the next stage. Enter the marketing lifecycle It’s time for a new sales model, one that aligns with content marketing, soft skills, and real buyer journeys in the internet age. So, why a marketing lifecycle? How the marketing lifecycle works, and why it’s more relevant to today’s buyer The talk in the marketing circles I’m in, from Mark Schaefer’s latest blogs about trust to LinkedIn conversations with executives and marketing teams, is about how slimy, cold sales tactics in marketing are falling by the wayside. How can you tie together content marketing with the marketing lifecycle and the buyer’s journey? Aware of your brand What will appeal to leads at this stage? If your targeted content has worked well at the other stages (filling information needs, answering questions, building authority, building trust), and your product/service is strong, this stage is where it all pays off. Primed and ready to purchase What will appeal to leads at this stage? Regular follow-ups Thank-you gifts Email marketing with content updates Releases of new products or offerings Combination of great service and great products Marketing lifecycle is a better framework for online buyer’s journey Which model would you rather have as part of your marketing strategy: (1) One that’s 120 years old and speaks to buyers making purchase decisions in person or (2) One that directly correlates to the online buyer’s journey, that aligns with the warmth of content marketing, and guides you on what to create to keep prospects in your circle?
The sales funnel is obsolete.
In fact, it has been obsolete for a long time.
Bold statement? Yes, but when you look at the facts, it’s obvious.
The sales funnel doesn’t help predict anything about buyers: Not their mentality, not their movement through the buyer’s journey, and not when they might make a purchase.
Modern buyers are too unpredictable. They have way, WAY more information at their fingertips influencing how they shop and buy.
In a recent Think with Google article, Lisa Gevelber, Google’s vice president of marketing for the Americas, discusses these new consumer behaviors and puts them in context:
People can’t remember what it was like to not be able to learn, do, or buy things when the need struck by reaching for the device in their pocket.
She goes on to name three new buyer behaviors/types:
- “Well-advised” consumer – Buyers want to make the right decisions, no matter how small, and they’re using their smartphones to get informed.
- “Right-here” consumer – Buyers expect mobile experiences, including shopping, to tailor to their physical location.
- “Right-now” consumer – Buyers want purchasing power no matter the time or place.
But how do they fit on the old marketing charts?
The answer is no longer cut and dried. The sales funnel is too rigid to accommodate the modern buyer’s journey, and too cold to represent the nurturing stance of content marketing. That’s why we need a more fluid, holistic model.
Enter the marketing lifecycle.
From sales funnel to lifecycle marketing: a (brief) history
Before I get into the marketing lifecycle concept and why it works, let’s go back in history. The concept of marketing stages originated with the AIDA model – awareness, interest, desire, action – developed by E. St. Elmo Lewis in 1898.
As early as 1904, the model was illustrated as a chart, with each stage influencing and leading to the next stage. Here’s how it looked in the 1904 January-June issue of Salesmanship: A Magazine:
The idea of a “funnel” didn’t come into play until about 1924 when William Townsend wrote about it in his book, Bond Salesmanship:
The salesman should visualize his whole problem of developing the sales steps as the forcing by compression of a broad and general concept of facts through a funnel which produces the specific and favorable consideration of one fact … The funnel has helped many salesmen to lead a customer from Attention to Interest, and beyond.
Unsurprisingly, this sounds nothing like what we need to do today to win a sale. This may have worked nearly 100 years ago, but the question remains:
Why are you relying on a century-old sales model in a post-internet world?
The reliance on the sales funnel might have something to do with hard skills vs. soft skills.
What the heck am I talking about? Dale Carnegie’s updated book, How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age, delves into this. Here’s the gist:
Soft skills include ones that are harder to quantify, like empathy, kindness, etc. Meanwhile, hard skills like aggressiveness, pushiness, and assertiveness are quantifiable (you SEE the results from using those hard skills – maybe because they make you as intimidating as an angry gorilla) – and that’s why bosses love them still.
But, in the end, hard skills alone are bad for business. A study on failed CEOs revealed their businesses sank because they had only hard skills and no soft skills.
You can’t measure kindness for your customers, including the way you relate to them (listening, allowing them room to think, building a relationship – all soft skills). You can measure pushy tactics (the read rate on your overbearing emails, your close rate on rehearsed sales calls). The sales funnel aligns with that approach. After all, hard skills push your prospect through the funnel by force (or should I say, “by forcing of compression”?)
Soft skills don’t gel with the sales funnel. But they do gel with a marketing lifecycle.
Enter the marketing lifecycle
It’s time for a new sales model, one that aligns with content marketing, soft skills, and real buyer journeys in the internet age.
This is the basic lifecycle chart I came up with after brainstorming, researching, and collaborating with my team.
The idea of a marketing lifecycle is not new, but it’s newer than the sales funnel. Ardath Albee, who has been a longtime pioneer in our industry, spoke about “lifecycle marketing” on the Marketo blog.
She talks about shifting from “buying journey funnels” to “full-on customer lifecycle management.”
The difference is clear. A funnel focuses on squeezing your prospects into narrower and narrower stages, which ignores their freedom of choice and even their personal whims – both…
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