The (marketing) funnel isn’t dead

How to map your funnel to improve your prospect & customer experience, build better relationships between GTM teams, and more easily identify & fix funnel leaks

Jun 05, 2023

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“The marketing funnel is dead,” they say. I don’t agree.

I agree the marketing funnel isn’t exactly funnel shaped–it's sort of an hourglass. And I recognize that you need to build loops, so existing customers help you get new customers. So whatever the shape, the GTM process (of getting prospects to your website, to purchase your product, to keep purchasing more of your product, and to tell other people to do the same) works best when well understood by marketing, sales, and customer success.

So, I still strongly recommend B2B marketing teams map their funnels. You need to map your prospect to customer experience (what I’m choosing to call the funnel) and use it to set up proper automation and handoffs, track the right things, and make sure you’re communicating with the right personas across the funnel. This funnel mapping process is one of the key foundational elements of your growth strategy.

Here’s a high-level “funnel” diagram I use to represent all this:

This newsletter covers:

Why you need to map your GTM process (aka your funnel)
How to map your funnel
How to map marketing activities to your funnel stages
The importance of full-funnel reporting

Why you need to map your funnel

Very few founders and marketers would tell me they don’t need positioning or they don’t need to figure out their story. Yet, people seem reluctant to map their funnels (Perhaps because of the “funnel is dead” rhetoric that’s been thrown around for the past 5ish years?). But all things go-to-market will fall better into place once you do it. I love diagrams more than the next human (you’ve probably noticed), but trust me on this one.

I typically describe marketing as having 3 parts, your foundation, your fuel, and your engine (shown below). Brand perceptions (which are the tenets of your story) and positioning are key foundational elements to fuel or content strategy. Channel selection and funnel mapping are the key foundational elements to growth strategy.

If you prefer SAT analogy style notation (and who doesn’t?!):

Brand Perceptions/Story & Positioning : Content/Fuel Strategy
Funnel Mapping & Channel Selection : Growth Strategy

How to map your funnel

Traditionally, 4 funnel stages are mentioned: awareness, interest, desire, and action. But, it’s best to use the names of stages you use in your CRM and marketing automation tool, like lead (interest), qualified lead (desire), opportunity (action in the form of a meeting or product activity) when mapping your funnel.

It’s important to not stop your funnel at “closed won” aka acquiring a paid customer. You should keep tracking through to customers becoming active, renewed, evangelists, etc. This is why the funnel is more of an hourglass–you pretty much always want to cause some form of “land and expand”.

Now’s the point in this newsletter where I tell you you need not 1 but 3 funnel maps:

A marketing funnel flowchart to keep track of rules of engagement and handoffs and I recommend creating in FigJam– this is what most people think of when they hear funnel diagram.
An inventory of marketing activities and messages mapped to your funnel in your spreadsheet or project management tool (like Asana)-- you can create these for various ICPs as well.
A full-funnel report in an analytics tool or a spreadsheet.

How to make a funnel flowchart

Map your stages

Typical stages for a sales-led GTM motion: Awareness, Lead, Marketing
Qualified Lead, Sales Accepted Lead, Sales Qualified Lead, Opportunity (w/ various sub-stages), Closed Won or Lost, and then various stages for customers to track renewal and expansion.
For product-led GTM motions: Often Marketing Qualified Leads are sign ups for the product itself—they become Product Qualified and/or Sales Qualified when they show potential to upgrade to paid and meet certain ICP qualifications.

Codify the handoffs and rules of engagement between each stages

Make sure you know who can email prospects & customers by stage–when every team can email everyone at any stage its a recipe for disaster.
You can also add key emails to the diagram and/or precise rules for what needs to be set up in your Marketing Automation and CRM.

These funnels are going to look different if you have a sales-driven GTM motion, a self-serve GTM motion, or a combo of the two. Here are some examples:

To see updated versions these flowcharts in Figma and edit them for your unique prospect-to-customer journey, subscribe to the paid newsletter.

What to do with these diagrams now?

Use them as a reference to build out your marketing automation and CRM flows. Provide them to a contractor helping you with Rev Ops or get buy-in across GTM teams before handing them off to an internal marketing ops or sales ops person.
Layer on key emails by stage, additional rules of engagement, qualification criteria, etc.
Reference these when discussing adding an additional GTM motion (like adding a free trial) into the mix. Update accordingly.
Use these to train new employees across all GTM teams on how the funnel works.
Copy and edit stages for different ICPs, including invited users in a PLG product.
And use them as a reference for the next 2 ways to map your funnel: inventory of marketing activities & full-funnel reporting.

Quick notes on MQL as a stage & why I think we should probably retire the acronym MQL

Marketing influences growth throughout the funnel. All closed customers will have some interaction with “marketing”—even if that’s just your website. So it’s not really that marketing influences just 1 stage of the funnel—this is a very dated point of view.
MQLs are leads that becomes pre-qualified through automation. So I think we should call it a QL1 (meaning stage 1 of qualification). In this case an SQL or PQL would then be QL2. I think this would also stop some of the attribution tension that exists between marketing and sales.
An MQL can be however you define it, and unlike things like “meetings scheduled” the definition can change over time. The pro of this is you can open or close the floodgates by changing MQL criteria. The con is it makes tracking over time challenging.
Some examples of “MQL” definitions
- MQL = Filled out a form + meets firmographic qualification criteria
- MQL = free user sign up
- MQL = lead score based, firmographic + behavioral threshold met (opens emails, reads content, fills out forms, etc.)
Marketing Ops Note: Make sure in your marketing automation tool all leads get “stamped” as MQL before hitting SQL, so you can track conversion rates clearly. For example, don’t let SQLs skip the MQL stage, it creates funky reporting–just have the MQL reason be “scheduled meeting” or “outbound”.
No matter what, make definitions clear and make it very obvious when you change definitions for reporting purposes.
Minor note: If using Salesforce, it’s often better to work out of the contact object rather than the lead object, I’m using MQL interchangeably with MQC here.

All this said I still used MQL throughout this newsletter so as not to confuse people.

More from MKT1

✂️ Templates for paid subscribers: Paid subscribers can find all templates here, including our funnel map flowcharts, funnel stage tracker, inventory of content by funnel stage, and full-funnel reporting spreadsheets.

🧑‍🚀 Job board: See roles from the MKT community. Paid subscribers can add jobs to our job board for free.

📖 Keep reading: Paid subscribers get access to the rest of this newsletter which includes how to create an inventory of marketing activities by funnel stage and the basics of measuring your funnel.