"The image of the world around us, which we carry in our head, is just a model.”
We are all enabled and constrained by our mental models. They shape our thinking and influence our actions. While these explanatory models generally give us greater clarity, sometimes they merely hold us back.
One such model, I would argue, is the conventional sales funnel. In the realm of B2B marketing and sales today, it is the defining model – the one that guides strategy, planning , organization, action and investment.
Unfortunately, it seems to misdirect our energies and misallocate our resources. The sales funnel, as I see it, also erects needless barriers in our organizations, contributing to excessive compartmentalization and value destroying silos.
Strong charges I suppose. But hear me out.
B2B research from CSO Insights suggests that the sales-marketing alignment issue has not been addressed. The firm found in a recent study of 298 companies that four in five marketing groups see no problem with the quality of their leads. Seven in ten marketing organizations feel the same way about lead quantity. However, more than half (51%) of all sales executives disagree and argue that marketing must improve.
But what if the alignment problem didn’t end there? What if the larger problem is that marketing and sales are going to market with an incomplete offering – one that falls short of customer expectations and objectives? What if the alignment problem also encompasses the services organization?
Thomas Lah, author of the forthcoming book Bridging the Services Chasm, argues that “the traditional product sale is an artifact of the past. Enterprise customers want to consume business improvement—not product features.”
As he sees it, “the internal service organizations within the product company are the fundamental source for enabling product adoption that leads to business impact. Whether the service organization delivers a service directly or enables service partners, it must own the identification and development of offerings that unlock product potential.”
With this in mind, it may make sense to begin thinking beyond the conventional sales funnel and sales cycle. Instead of concentrating on the sales cycle, we should now be focusing on what I’m calling the customer success cycle.
Our mental model, in other words, needs to shift so we see the full continuum of a customer’s experience and organize ourselves around the achievement of customer success. Not only will this ultimately drive more sales, it will enable us to more productively leverage our talent and resources.
Right now, we are extraordinarily focused on the transaction itself – where money changes hands. That’s where the conventional funnel ends. If I’m in sales or marketing and my mental model is the standard funnel, then it implies that’s where my responsibility ends.
Some folks over the years have argued that we should think in terms of the “buying cycle” – aligning ourselves with the customer’s decision and purchasing process. They argue that we get too focused on our own needs and issues when we think sales cycle and they offer this as a more empathic alternative. But, again, the problem with this thinking is that our core organizational process seemingly ends when money changes hands.
We need to think more systematically and more expansively.
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