Newsletter | Entre Nous...Reflections from a marketer

I keep coming back to the same question over the past few months: is the traditional B2B lead funnel actually dead? Everywhere I look, I see signs that the B2B lead funnel is on life support.

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Think about your buyers behaviour, how do they engage with your business today? Consider all the research they do before they even think about speaking to your sales team. What does that mean for you as a marketer? What does it mean for your campaigns, programmes?

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Traditionally, B2B marketing programmes were designed to pull leads into the funnel and push them towards sales qualification and win. But isn’t it time for B2B CMOs and marketing leaders to pause and look at the data and ask honestly if that funnel is still working or is it time for something new?

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From what I see and hear, I think that businesses need to implement programmes to support and engage their customers differently during their unique and personal buying journey. It is time to increase marketing personalisation, improve customer experience (CX) and provide support, information to your customers when and where they need it the most: during their evaluation phase.

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And then there is AI.

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There is a fear that AI will make marketing teams redundant. To me that is a scary thought but not a valid one. It reminds me of when we transitioned into digital marketing. Back then people were worried too. But it turned out to be a huge opportunity for marketing teams to retrain, restructure and thrive.

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We, marketers, are at a similar turning point now. It is a chance and a responsibility for CMOs and marketing leaders to show the way forward. To help their teams, organisations to learn and adapt. To bring more insight into the business, reimagine what customer engagement looks like adopting a data-driven marketing strategy.

If the lead funnel is no longer effective we must focus on personalised experiences. What are your customers really looking for? What information helps them make their decisions? It is less about pushing and more about building relationships.

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What if AI could map hundreds of micro-journeys and show us where we are losing customers? This is where AI could be a real marketing ally. It can help understand and support multiple customer journeys, not just a single linear funnel. But we will need to gather the right data and keep asking what we can offer our potential customers along their individual paths to help them choose us. 

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Entre Nous... this is only my two cents!

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So what do you think? Is the B2B lead funnel still alive or are we holding onto a model that no longer fits?

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