What a marketing funnel actually is, without the diagram

5 days ago
3 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Introduction

The word arrives attached to a diagram — a cone, four or five labelled bands, arrows pointing down — and the diagram is the least useful part of it. Owners see it, recognise nothing about their own business in it, and conclude that funnels are something for companies with marketing departments.

Underneath the diagram is something plainer and genuinely useful. A funnel is a count of how many people are at each step of buying from you, and how many make it to the next one. That is all. Its value is not the picture; it is that once you can see the counts, you can see which step is losing people, and that is a question no amount of general marketing effort will answer.

1. What a marketing funnel actually is, is a set of counts

Not a strategy.

How many people became aware of you, how many enquired, how many were quoted, how many bought. Four numbers for a month. The gaps between them are the information.

2. It exists whether or not you have drawn it

The important point.

Every business that sells anything has these stages, because buyers pass through them regardless. Drawing it does not create it; it makes it visible, and invisible stages are where money is lost.

3. The stages should be yours, not borrowed

Where most attempts fail.

Copying awareness, interest, desire and action from an article produces stages that do not match anything you observe. Use the steps your buyers actually take: enquiry, site visit, quote, follow-up, order. Real stages are countable.

4. Each stage needs a definition anyone would agree with

Otherwise the counts are fiction.

"Qualified lead" means different things to different people in the same business. A stage boundary should be an event that either happened or did not: a form submitted, a quote sent, a deposit paid.

5. The useful measure is the drop between stages

Not the totals.

Two hundred enquiries producing forty quotes and eight orders tells you where to look. The forty is not interesting; the fact that four out of five enquiries never reached a quote is.

6. A funnel tells you where, not why

Its limit.

The counts identify the step that loses people. Finding out why requires asking them, listening to calls, or reading the enquiries that went nowhere. Skipping straight from the number to a solution is how the wrong thing gets fixed.

7. It is not the same as a customer journey

Two different tools.

The funnel is your view: counts and conversion. The journey is theirs: what they experience, in what order, and how it feels. Both are useful and they answer different questions.

8. Most improvement comes from the middle

Contrary to instinct.

The reflex when sales are low is to generate more enquiries. Raising a middle-stage conversion rate from twenty per cent to thirty is usually cheaper, faster and more certain than increasing the top by half.

9. Start with four stages and one month of data

The practical beginning.

Count what you can from records you already have, accept that the numbers are rough, and look at the biggest drop. That is the first real funnel, and it takes an afternoon rather than a project.

Be careful about treating the model as a description of how buyers behave. Real buying is not orderly: people re-enter, skip steps, disappear and return. The funnel is a counting device, not a claim about psychology, and it stops being useful when it is defended as the latter.

Conclusion

Treat it as counts at each step, because the counts are what show you where buyers are lost.

Define your stages from the steps your own buyers actually take, make each boundary an event nobody could dispute, look at the drop between stages rather than the totals, remember it tells you where and not why, keep it distinct from a customer journey map, look for the improvement in the middle before adding volume at the top, and start with four stages and a single month of the records you already keep.