What to Fix in Your B2B Sales and Marketing Funnel

If you have already taken steps to establish a true B2B sales marketing funnel to capture SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads) AND MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads), congratulations! Many companies focus only on SQLs (people that are ready to buy now or soon). Those businesses are missing out on the power of building and nurturing a marketing pipeline that can feed into Sales on a predictable and scalable basis.

When you build a well thought out customer journey that speaks to the people who will be your customer six months, a year, or two years from now, you are creating a much more resilient business growth strategy.  So, great job on getting started with your funnel. However, if you haven’t seen an increase in marketing leads, lead quality, or revenue impact as a result of your funnel efforts, it may be time to reevaluate your strategies. That’s precisely what we discuss in our podcast episode, “What to Fix in Your B2B Marketing Funnel.” We are sharing those same practical tips here, too.

First, Let’s Dive Into All the Parts of a Well-Performing B2B Marketing Funnel

There is a psychological element to a B2B marketing funnel. This have to think from your audience’s perspective. Understand how they want to make progress toward their goals, and then create the ideal buying journey that helps them do just that. When you take a fully customer-centric approach to your marketing funnel, prospects are most likely to respond by taking their next step to a “yes”. 

Psychological Components

• Validation – grab their interest by validating the difficulties they are experiencing (or use humor or other triggers to capture attention)
• Mirroring – delve into their pain points, show you know exactly what they are going through (show that you specialize in THEM and their problem, not just that you are a subject matter expert on the thing you sell)
• Progress – move your customer toward a solution that will help them solve their problems (help them make the next right step)

The Exchanges

In your B2B sales and marketing funnel, you need to know all the exchanges you’ll need to get from your audiences. 

1. Attention – this is the most difficult to get from people since they are so distracted
2. Time – this is the most difficult to give since everyone is short on time these days
3. Money – this is where you need to remove fear from their buying decision

Get the first 2 exchanges (paying attention and spending time), and you are well on your way to producing a pipeline of prospects who are ready to make the final exchange (money).

Now, Let’s Look Common Mistakes Made in a B2B Sales and Marketing Funnel

If your marketing funnel is not producing the results you want, you may be looking at one of these issues. 

1. Wrong targeting – You might be targeting the wrong personas or through the wrong platforms. This is where a deep dive into target audiences is vital. Understand who they are from as many angles as possible and know where they go for information.
2. Wrong offer – This comes back to that progress component. We want the users to take a next step, but if the offer or call to action you are pitching is not what they think they need or what they want, they won’t go for it. For example, not everyone wants to download a white paper.
3. Wrong message – If your message isn’t resonant, the audience won’t be attracted. You need to capture their interest by keeping their needs top of mind, not your product or service. Don’t talk about what YOU want the audience to know until you have talked about what matters to them.
4. Lack of follow up – Your B2B marketing funnel needs to be a seamless journey, friction-free. For example, if part of your process is sending out a newsletter after a user subscribes, make sure that newsletter is in their mailbox and offers the valuable content they signed up for (delivering value at every step is what keeps people from falling out of your funnel).
5. Unclear attribution – This is an important one. If you don’t have a system to track performance from initial brand exposure all the way to closing, you cannot know what part of your funnel is worth leaning into and what part of the funnel is not working. No tracking system is perfect, but you should know what you are trying to test in your funnel and have SOME way of knowing if it is working.
6. Unclear on success – You need to have goals in your B2B marketing funnel with measurable metrics. Understand that the goal may not necessarily be closing sales…yet. The goal may actually be getting more marketing qualified leads (MQLs), that pool of people who now know your brand and are thinking about purchasing, perhaps now or in the future. They may even recommend you to others before they buy themselves. You can also get sales qualified leads, a smaller pool of people who are ready to purchase now, but don’t underestimate MQLs who may very well be most of your sales in the next quarter or the next year. 

Doing this due diligence on your B2B marketing sales funnel does take time and effort, but it is well worth the investment when you suddenly have a much larger pipeline of potential customers eager to interact with you – just make sure you meet them where they are and offer value at every interaction. 

Think you may want some help establishing your B2B marketing funnel? The Marketing Blender is happy to help. Fully thought out funnels are one of our specialty areas. Contact us today to learn how we can get yours going.