Are Chief Marketing Officers — CMOs — losing their relevance in the C-suite? And if so, can data and experimentation turn things around for them? Laura Patterson offers her opinion on the changing role of the CMO on the Intended Consequences Podcast
I was having coffee with an old colleague, Laura Patterson, here in Austin.
Laura advises businesses on all aspects of their marketing functions. Here at Conversion Sciences, we focus on only one piece of the puzzle, the digital channel. So, I have a lot of respect for her ability to bring together all of the pieces that make up a modern marketing effort.
Advertising. Brick and mortar retail. Online retail. Branding. Merchandising. Customer experience. Digital technologies. Messaging.
When I talk to her, I get a new appreciation of just how much CMOs have on their plates. If anybody’s going to know what’s going on with CMOs, it’s Laura.
Then she said something about CMOs that stopped me in my tracks.
Laura Patterson is the founder of VisionEdge Marketing. Like me, Laura has been focused on performance marketing and the proper use of data since before it was “cool.”
So I was left speechless when she said, “CMOs are abdicating their strategic position in their businesses.”
Laura Patterson on the Fall of the CMO
Laura is not the kind of person to jump to conclusions, so I had to take notice on the changing role of the CMO.
A few weeks later, I was on a panel with friend and fellow marketer Janet Driscoll Miller. She reminded the audience — and me — of a Fornaise Marketing Group study of 1200 CEOs that found 80% of them did not trust and were not impressed by the work done by traditional Marketers. By comparison, 90% of them trusted their CIOs and CFOs. There’s a link in the show notes.
I did some additional research and found more incriminating news. Forrester recently reported that “dozens” of major brands had eliminated the Chief Marketing Officer position altogether, brands like Johnson & Johnson, Kellogg’s, Taco Bell, and Netflix.
I wanted to get to the bottom of this. Were we part of the problem, or was data going to save the CMO? I invited Laura to join me here in the offices of Conversion Sciences and tell us what she knows.
So, why does Laura believe CMOs are losing their seat at the table in the C-suite?
Today’s CMO has New Titles
“Why are we seeing the emergence of some of these really interesting titles like Chief Customer Officer, like Chief Growth Officer?
Because we are seeing those titles beginning to emerge. And it concerns me that many times when you read the job descriptions, these are job descriptions that reflect the kinds of things that marketing leaders used to perform.”
“Companies that have a long sales cycle, that’s a consultative sell. They have a variety of people in the decision making process. That’s a B2B kind of process.
Walking through the checkout lane and trying to make a decision about whether I should get a candy bar, that’s B2C.
It might be that I have to do an extra run, but I’m not gonna get fired for that. But we do have B2B buying processes that occur in the consumer world, like buying a house.”
Advice for CMOs: Traditional Marketing vs. Digital Marketing
“I would say that the number one thing that any CMO can do right now that would signal that they are taking a more strategic stance and want to be more of a strategic partner is how they frame the marketing plan.
Many people are being asked right now to give a budget. Didn’t even have a plan yet, but they’re talking about money.
End of year budget planning and budget planning for a lot of people means they’re going to open up whatever document they used last year for their planning and their budget.
They’re going to make some decisions off the cuff about what they’re going to do next year in terms of events or campaigns. Maybe they’ll look at some data. They’re going to put a number on it.
They’re going to do some finagling and they’re going to submit a budget. That’s not a plan. It’s a budget, it’s a budget.”
Strategic Focus: The Critical Role of Customer Engagement
“Many of these marketing people may or may not even know yet what the three to five things are that the company has to do next year in order to win.
They may have some general idea they want to grow, but we don’t market to buckets of revenue and we can’t just say grow. We need to be very clear.”
The First Question: Show me the Business Growth
“My first question to any CMO is, “What are the beachheads?”
That’s a great question. And if I don’t know that and they don’t know that, how can we put a plan together?”
Signs You’re Chief Marketing Officer is in Trouble
“The signs that you’re in trouble: [the CEO and board] starts just relegating you to running programs.
“Random acts of marketing.” If you’re if you’re doing random acts of marketing, you’re probably going to see some red flags around that.”
When you get back to the office…
I’ve always seen data as a tool of empowerment, a way to level the playing field and a way to truly understand those crazy people we call customers. And who’s in a better position to access this data than the CMO?
But data doesn’t change cultures on its own. It needs a fertile soil of experimentation to take root in. Otherwise, it is just numbers that can be used when they’re going up and to the right, and discounted if they tell the wrong story.
A culture of experimentation can be pushed from the top, from the CMO down. It can also be nurtured from the bottom, from you.
It’s time for marketers to put the data we have to use. For you, it all starts with your next experiment or research. It starts the next time you log into analytics, and click beyond the dashboard report, deep into the souls of your prospects and customers.
Because, if not Marketing, then who will do this?
Experience fast revenue growth, month after month, year after year.
Sales and marketing. Two functions critical to a business’s success. They work tightly, arm-in-arm to build awareness, engage prospects and help them choose the best solution for their problem. They have common goals and cooperate closely to achieve them. The mutual respect and gratitude they have for one another is palpable.
If you’re wondering what planet I’m on, you’re not alone.
From the first time something was sold, sales and marketing have worked together.
God created desire by positioning the fruit as forbidden. The serpent closed the deal.
Marketers created the gold rush. Salespeople sold the picks and shovels.
Sears wrote the catalog. Roebuck shipped the merchandise.
Yet, not all is well in sales and marketing land.
“Marketing needs to generate more leads,” says sales.
“Sales needs to follow up on the leads we’re sending them,” says marketing.
“The leads marketing is sending aren’t qualified,” says sales.
“Sales isn’t selling the right products,” says marketing.
We are usually hired by marketing to optimize a website. We learn a lot from salespeople when we interview them.
Yet, we often don’t have access to the CRM — the Customer Relationship Management system — because “it belongs to sales.”
This gulf, this canyon, this gaping sinkhole between sales and marketing has been around for as long as I’ve been in the business. That’s why I invited Chris Wallace to be on the podcast. He is the Co-founder and President of Innerview, an agency that is totally focused on this problem.
I was skeptical at first. This problem also exists with the customer support teams and the training teams. By the time we were done talking, I knew his solution was perfect.
Find out how he convinced me.
Sales vs. Marketing
“The biggest reason organizations struggle with this is information typically moves in one direction. Information flows from the top down. And the marketers are really the ones developing the go to market strategy and developing the products. And then that gets, for lack of a better word, thrown over the wall or pushed down the funnel toward the sales organization.”
The Face of our Brand
“And what we’re finding to be the best way to sort of bridge that gap is to disrupt that one way flow and really increase the two way dialog and collaboration and really helping marketers look at their their sales teams, their front line, Iraqi sales, customer service, even technicians and even non selling roles, not revenue generating roles. And looking at those folks really as the face of their brand and an audience that they need to engage in and really win over looking at them as if we can really win their hearts and mind that tell them what to do but win their hearts and minds the way we’re out there trying to win customers hearts and minds every day. We know we can. We can. Like you said, we can build that bridge. We can we can close that gap in a significant way.”
Sales/Customer support is a channel that needs to be optimized!
Should marketing look at [sales] as another channel to get its message out? And be optimizing that channel the same way would be a Facebook advertising campaign or search engine optimization program or a paid search advertising campaign?
“We run it like a marketing campaign. We treat that like any channel that “talks” to the customers. We segment them based on how they talk to the customers and we measure how aligned they are to their brand story.”
Metrics for Marketing to Employees
“How well is your brand message — your brand story — transferring from your your corporate marketing department down to each one of these customer-facing channels? Its internal market research. So everything that we do is led by gathering the attitudes and opinions and perceptions about product service, brand positioning — all those things — and using the data that we have to target those audiences with new campaigns, new messages, in an effort to really win them over. Or fill the gap.
Don’t Tell Sales. Ask!
“They’re focusing so much of their time — and their effort and their resources — telling sales what it is that they need to do, and not enough time asking them what they think. And it doesn’t mean that you’re going to completely change a product. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to go back and completely redo your campaign.”
“But if you’re asking somebody what they think, if you understand thier starting point, if you want to get them from point A to point B, if you are constantly guessing at what message is going to resonate with them, to move them from point A to point B, and you spend all your time, effort, energy blasting that message at them. In this case, it could be product trainings or product manuals or whatever the case may be. If you spend all your time guessing and pushing messages out, you’re actually pushing your “audience” further away.”
Timing is Really Important
“The timing of this is really important. The sales team feels like you’re out in market with it before they’re even prepared to talk about it. Right. The phone start ringing before before they’re even prepared. That happens a lot. We see it all the time. But the timing is really important. But really that that the answer is ask versus tell.”
Put down the Saleshose
“Don’t try to make them experts right way, try to help them build momentum, try to get them comfortable with something. Don’t try to get them to swallow the entire thing whole. So when you talk about trying to keep it top of mind, a great way to keep things top of mind is to feed them interesting little nuggets. Bit by bit by bit over a period of time, rather than attaching the firehose to their face. Almost every organization that we come across goes with the firehose approach.”
Deliver Content like a Marketer
“We’re developing anything from webisode concepts where organizations are creating content. And I’m not talking about corporate videos, somebody sitting behind a desk telling you how important something is. I’m talking about creating content that looks more like what people are watching on YouTube and Netflix and distributing that to their frontline teams. Having themes that really engage them.”
Get Creative like a Marketer
“Instead of doing your typical product trainings, we’re developing escape room concepts. We’re working with virtual reality companies — VR. It has a tremendous application for employee engagement in front line readiness.”
Be Dynamic like a Marketer
“The way that you’re able to engage with your your customers is more dynamic — a marketer — now than it ever has been. And we look at that and say, ‘Take a lesson from that.’ Look at all those different drips and those different nuggets and channels that you’re distributing small pieces of information through and find different vehicles to get that information out to your own people.
Employees Act like Consumers
“Most people don’t look at themselves as an employee one minute and a consumer the next minute. Those habits are very similar. So take what we know about the customer and let’s leverage that for the employees.”
When you get back to the office…
Instead of using sales to learn more about your customers, learn to see sales AS your customers.
When marketers get fresh data about their market, it’s like their birthday. You need to find that same excitement learning about the sales, training and customer support teams you work with. Think about the next thing you have coming up, that you need to get right. What percentage of your sales team are women vs. men? What percentage are humanists, who build relationships vs. methodicals who persuade with logic? How do you construct the “Whats in it for me” arguments that will grab their attention and make your campaign a success? How do you equip sales and support to be successful with your product?
You may have to start working on a budget that includes this new marketing channel: the one inside your company.
We like funnels. We like them because they provide us with some sense of progress in our marketing efforts.
We have advertising programs to get people’s attention.
We use copy to build interest.
We use testimonials and case studies to build desire.
We have calls to action everywhere.
This is the classic AIDA funnel. Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. It’s a direct marketing approach that falls down in the long sales cycle reality of B2B marketing.
The demise of the funnel has been discussed for some time now. However, the discussion of what comes next has been unsatisfying to me.
The solutions that purport to step into the funnel’s place come with their own baggage. Hubspot offers up the Flywheel and customer delight. Lead scoring attempts to add value to the interactions someone has had with us. The more interactions, the more likely they are to be a prospect. But this approach treats the funnel more like a swarm of flies. People seem to swarm around our content until, finally, and unpredictably, they qualify for a call.
Carman Pirie believes there’s something better than a funnel or a swarm, and his agency delivers that something better. Kula Partners focuses on manufacturers all of whom have this long-cycle B2B sales challenge. Carman the Co-founder and he’s happy to put another nail in the coffin of the funnel. My question for him is, what comes next?
“The funnel is leading a lot of marketers — who function within a complex B2B sales environment — down a lot of really wrong paths. It’s making them think about attracting people into the universe in the wrong way. It makes them think about how to deal with people once they get into the universe in the wrong way. And it and it makes them think about how sales ought to engage with those people, I think, in a fundamentally flawed way.”
Our conversation around this question was interesting and enlightening. If digital marketing is more like a swarm, how is a swarm of bees different than a swarm of flies?
“You know that the frameworks that we use to think about our work really shape the work that we create.”
Replacing the B2B Marketing Funnel
Maybe you should develop a Firmographic profile. What kinds of companies would actually buy your product? What are the titles of the people who research and influence solutions like yours? Who else in the company are weighing in on the decision.
Then, take a few of your internal experts to lunch. Some of them would love to help you create some content that makes your prospects better buyers of your product or service.
If you’re selling tools or expertise, you’ll need to understand where your prospects are in their relation to time, interest, and expertise. Find out how my guest addresses these issues for his prospects.
I consider myself a software guy.
Bachelors of Science in Computer Science.
I wrote my own analytics package in 2003, which was thankfully replaced by Google Analytics in 2005.
I still write scripts for my data analysis.
In the tech world, we distinguish the software guys and gals from the hardware guys and gals. Mark Zuckerberg is a software guy. Apple’s Steve Wozniak is a hardware guy. Yes, I know Steve has written a lot of code in his day, but he’s undoubtedly a hardware guy.
When there’s something that needs to be done around the house — or to my car — my first thought is, “I’m a software guy. THIS is a hardware problem.”
My father, on the other hand, is clearly a hardware guy. Handy. Fixes things. Builds things.
So, when it came time to change the kitchen faucet in my house, I called Dad. Because, as a software guy, I would just start trying things to understand the obstacles. This can be an expensive approach for a hardware problem.
Hang in there. There’s a point to this.
So I called Dad and he came over. He told me what I should do to change the faucet, but I pretty much already knew all of that. However, Dad handed me a tool that I could never have imagined existed. It’s called a Basin Wrench, and it made all the difference.
There is no way, squeezed under that sink, that I ever would have gotten the old encrusted bolts off of the old faucet without the Basin Wrench. The YouTube videos I watched didn’t mention it. Imagine a raptor claw attached to the end of a long rod with a handle at the bottom.
I had to Google “faucet tool” to even find out what it was called.
I’m certain that I would have given up without it.
The moral of the story? Tools+Experience.
Now, I get pitched marketing tools all the time. Popup tools, data tools, visualization tools, email tools, analysis tools… you name it. How can I know which tools are the indispensable basin wrenches in all of this?
That is the question I had in mind when I invited Josh Thomas onto my podcast. Josh is with Outbound Engine. They sell the basin wrench of digital marketing for small businesses. They sell both the tools and done-for-you services to the kind of people who use basin wrenches daily.
Most of us see our products and services as basin wrenches. But only to those people who have a proverbial faucet to change.
So how does Outbound Engine convince hardware guys and gals to invest in a soft problem like digital marketing?
Budget and Culture
How you spend your money is also how you’re focused in terms of your time and where you want your team’s time to be spent.
High-quality content
Because we do see so many different iterations, we can see what engagement, what campaigns or content are driving engagements. We can make sure that we’re taking those lessons learned and incorporating them more and more over time. It gives us just more and more opportunities for us to learn and see what works best.
Prospecting Customers: Evaluating time, interest and expertise
Time. Expertise. Interest. I like this simple model.
These are the things that influence whether your customers will solve a problem themselves or buy a solution to fix it, a solution like yours.
Imagine mapping your opportunities onto a time/interest/expertise graph. Like this.
Rate your prospects on a scale from 1 to 5 for time, interest and expertise.
When time is tight (rated 1 or 2), prospects gravitate to those problems in which they have expertise, where they have confidence. Things are done the way they’ve always done them, and thus done quickly.
When time loosens, our prospects can gravitate to tasks that feed their interest or expertise. These are problems that need solving now that time is available.
Those with expertise but little interest are looking for tools to make things easier. The ROI is what they are looking for.
May be looking for tools.
Those with interest and little expertise are looking for experts. They are looking for expertise and tools.
May be looking for expertise and tools.
Someone with interest, expertise and time are likely to do it themselves, to solve the problem internally.
They are going to do it themselves.
Those with none of these probably don’t even know they have a problem. This is a tough sell.
They don’t even know they have a problem.
How do your clients map onto the TIE triangle? What are you doing to feed interest or expertise? To demonstrate ROI to experts and demonstrate competence to those who are interested? The two are quite different.
Marketing departments are understaffed, overworked and required to do quantitative and creative work. No wonder marketers are struggling. How does Erin Collis deal with the variety of tasks all marketers face? What can leaders do?
F. Scott Fitzgerald is credited with saying “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
But most marketers are holding dozens of ideas in their minds, many of which are in opposition. And then these poor souls are expected to be creative and thoughtful amidst all of this.
I experience it. The people that attend my seminars and workshops experience it. And I believe it is a barrier to a culture of experimentation in marketing, product development and more.
I can bring book authors or consultants or titans of the industry on the Intended Consequences podcast any day, but today, I want to help you step outside of yourself.
Erin Collis and Brian Massey on Intended Consequences Podcast
Carl Jung defined Projection as our tendency to project subconscious thoughts onto other people. He believed studying our thoughts about others would lead us to breakthroughs in our own life and work.
I want to help you see your own challenges through the eyes of another marketer like yourself or the people on your team. It is difficult to see ourselves in motion, so you’re welcome.
Erin Collis has a lot on her plate, as I suspect you do. Erin is Marketing and Communications Manager at Corradi USA. I picked her almost at random to join me and talk about the challenges of being a digital marketer in 2019.
She attended one of my full-day workshops, but we aren’t going to talk about that. Instead, I want you to listen to the advice you would give her. My guess is that this advice is exactly what you need.
As you listen, pay attention to what you are projecting onto our conversation. Would any of those thoughts apply to you?
As always, stick around after the interview for my “When you get back to the office” segment.
Marketing mix.
From these magazine [ads] we can’t see what’s happening with them, or if they’re even making an impact.
Agency digital marketing data.
The data that [the agency] sent to us, we couldn’t understand. And we didn’t see any uptick in sales or recognition.
Building and maintaining relationships (digitally).
A majority of our business currently is offline business, but the value that we have to offer our customers — our dealers — is offering them services making it easier to sell the product.
When you get back to the office…
I found our discussion about creative time most interesting. When do you get to settle in and write, or design or get curious?
For me it’s Friday afternoons and certain mornings that I delay coming into the office.
But I realized I never put that on my calendar. I never carve out time to let the competing thoughts in my head quiet down and let my curiosity take the wheel for an hour or two.
Do you do this? Should you do it more?
That’s all this week, scientists.
Transcript
Click in the content to hear that portion of the podcast.
What job description would a marketing manager write if they wanted experimenters in their organization? I think it might go something like this.
Title: Marketing Experimenter
Primary job description: Making people aware of our products and persuading them to purchase them.
You are perfect for this role if:
You are not confident in your ability to create digital campaigns that will connect with our prospects.
You fail frequently and with minimum impact.
You do not consider yourself an intuitive copywriter.
Your do not have an intuitive sense of design.
You are good at holding off helicopter executives.
You ignore the expectations of others, unless they are prospects or customers.
You can waste time strategically.
You forget past victories easily.
You are unmoved by cool agency designs.
You’ve master the tools necessary to learn how to speak to our prospects.
You are good at talking about data and sharing it with teammates.
Must be good at asking questions.
You know how to celebrate successful campaigns.
You know how to celebrate failures.
If this is you, please apply immediately.
If any of these qualifications seem counterintuitive to you, don’t worry. We are all going to have to learn to work with this kind of curious, disciplined and creative person.
Would you want people like this working in your organization. I suspect you may already have these kinds of people on your team. So the real question will be, would this person be delighted to be in your organization?
Intended Consequences Podcast with Barbara Caveness and Brian Massey
To help understand these kind of people, I invited Barbara Cavness to join me on this episode of Intended Consequences.
Barbara is the CEO of (un)Common Logic – a digital marketing agency that you might be tempted to put into the category of “Search Engine Marketing”. But this is really an organization that enables teams of talented people to do great things. Her team investigates digital marketing data to find the surprising facts that can solve their clients toughest problems.
Barbara is very purposeful in her approach to building teams, even though she encounters all of the same obstacles that we do. Learn how this former Duke University lacrosse player became the head of a marketing organization and how she fosters teamwork, curiosity, and creativity.
Fostering curiosity
You know, there are a lot of ways you can free up time and provide opportunities to learn and try new things. There are a lot of overt and subtle ways that you can nurture that.
Gone are the days of the unsophisticated digital marketer.
The vast majority of the clients at least that we serve are very sophisticated marketers themselves so they can spot a fake from about a mile away.
Data can save the day.
OK. Hang on. Deep breath. What does the data tell us.
The importance of pushing your team and investing in your culture.
We have a lot of young people on our team obviously. It is a young company, young industry etc. And so they’re sort of still finding their way when it comes to maximizing their potential. You know, it always comes back to sports for me right. You know I love also being a coach. I love pushing my team.
On doubts
Go run through that wall. You can absolutely do it.
Take a look at your work day. Write down the top five things you do in your role.
Then, for each rate yourself on a simple Experimentation Scale.
In those roles in which you are the initiator of experimentation, give yourself a 3. These are the roles in which you often say, “Let’s study that,” or “Who could we survey?” or “Do we have any history to look at?”
For those roles in which you are a preventer of experimentation, give yourself a 1. This is not a bad thing. We need people on our teams to help us focus our experimenters. This is like the control rods in a nuclear plant. They slow the activity, and are very important.
For those roles that you’re not sure about, give yourself a 2.
In which of these roles do you find yourself most satisfied. In which are you frustrated? Is there a pattern?
I’ll leave you to decide for yourself what this simple exercise means?
How is Curiosity related to Creativity? What are the barriers to your curiosity? Find out how to spur the curiosity of yourself and your team.
Experimenters. You know the type.
As children, we call them “precocious”. They’re the ones who are always asking, “Why? Why? WHY?”
In middle school, they were sometimes called “mischievous,” seeming unable to resist finding out what would happen if…
In high school, they were called “nerds” because they seemed to obsess about the most unusual things.
As adults, they brew beer, collect anvils, travel, rebuild car engines, watch birds, and join fantasy sports leagues. They seek to understand the rules of some endeavor, and then figure out what happens if they break those rules.
Yes, this is pretty much everyone. In some area of our lives, we all find ourselves obsessing about how things work, why they work that way, and what we could do to make things better.
Unfortunately, the area of our lives that we spend the most time on isn’t the one we are most curious about: our work. How many experimenters do you work with — the kind of people that make you ask, “When did you have time to do that?”
If your answer wasn’t “I am that person,” I have to ask the question, “Why?” What has dampened your curiosity?
It turns out there are four factors that limit our curiosity. My guest, Dr. Diane Hamilton documents them in her book, “The Curiosity Code.” She evaluated me, and I was surprised at what I learned about the limits of MY curiosity.
The Relationship Between Curiosity and Creativity with Dr Diane Hamilton
Dr. Diane Hamilton is an expert in emotional intelligence and behavioral science. She is an author, radio host of “Take the Lead Radio,” and creator of the Curiosity Code Index – which we will dive into on today’s episode.
Curiosity is a topic that is at the core of everything marketers do. We’re all about experimenting, discovering data, and getting answers when it comes to website redesigns, launches, and campaigns.
More importantly, I think that curiosity is a doorway into the mystical peak experiences called “Flow.”.
So anything that limits my curiosity is something that needs to be addressed. Let’s find out what the four limiting factors are and how I scored on her evaluation.
We all start off curious.
When you get back to the office…
When do you feel it’s OK to put your work down and play? Or learn something new?
For me it’s often on Friday afternoons, when the deadlines are met, and things are winding down. I’ve gotten purposeful about tapping these natural times when the bonds of my mind relax, allowing me to follow my curiosity.
The other time for me is when I’m on a deadline. I allow myself to renegotiate a deadline if I’m learning something that will improve my performance long term.
When do you find yourself following rabbits down holes?
Do you feel guilty?
Does your team support it? Do they even know about it? Why not?
How could you configure your work world to indulge these moments of exploration?
I recommend you take Dr. Hamilton’s Curiosity Code Index and see what’s in your way.
Sales funnel or full funnel conversion optimization? Which should you use and when? It all depends on what you want to understand.
Full funnel conversion optimization – or the Conversion Sciences Profit Funnel™ – provides the analysis and insights needed to help positively impact your business bottom line. Analyzing a sales funnel helps improve those issues found in a specific buying process.
There is nothing wrong about analyzing a sales funnel conversion rate or a sales funnel model for a specific segment of a customer journey. But your online business will definitively benefit from performing a Profit Funnel™ or full-funnel conversion optimization as well.
A highly experienced team of conversion experts can leverage both models when optimizing, instead of narrowing the view and hurting profits. An inexperienced conversion consultant will only see a siloed series of sales funnels, evaluate them independently and make decisions based on their own unique ROAS instead of their interactions.
Let’s review the key differences between sales funnel and full funnel conversion optimization or Profit Funnel™. We’ll begin with a great example of both models, a definition of a full marketing funnel. Finally, we’ll cover their differences in scope and the metrics used by each funnel.
Happy customers means returning customers. The starting point for full funnel conversion optimization is the customer blueprint and guess whose CRO audit services include a map of the customer journey for your online shop?
Example of Sales Funnel vs Full Funnel Conversion Optimization
Imagine an addiction treatment center that offers both low-cost at-home testing kits and treatment programs. Their at-home drug testing kit sells for $10, and it costs $5 to manufacture and ship. Their treatment programs start at $15,000.
They have an effective social media presence, paid campaigns to engage and attract their target market. And they also provide valuable resources for people with addiction problems and for their loved on their website. These range from informational articles to online quizzes to help find out whether or not one is suffering from an addiction and what is the best course of action.
Ok. Time to tackle sales funnel optimization. If they analyze their PPC sales funnel they will realize that it is costing them $20 in ad spend to convert each home testing kit sale. This added to the manufacturing and shipping costs may lead them to determine that this $10 sale is costing the company $25. But they are not looking at their profit margins, they are simply calculating Return on Ad Spend or ROAS.
Thus, they may decide to turn off the ad spend and stop this failing campaign because they “lose” $15 per sale. Or they may attempt to improve a Google Ads campaign that is already performing quite well.
But what if this addiction treatment center looks at the full-marketing funnel or Profit Funnel™ instead?
They would find that 20% of their customers have repeated their kit purchase every 3 months.
By the same token, they have not estimated the impact that their content development and social media efforts have on those conversions. And they were attributing the sale to the last touch-point.
As the buyer journey is not limited to a single channel, analyzing a single sales funnel could narrow your business focus and marketing assessment scope.
Moreover, this treatment center finds that 2% of the people who purchase their $10 test later sends a loved one to their center for a $15k treatment program. Those $20 in ad spend for each testing kit sale got the family to notice their services and inquire about their drug-rehab program. Therefore, for every 100 tests they sell, an average of 2 patients will join their treatment program generating a minimum of $30,000 in revenue.
Before I became the CMO, I was more focused on how we were spending our marketing budget than on how marketing could help drive long-term business objectives.But thinking like this holds businesses back. Marketing should be valued for its long-term potential, rather than its short-term efficiencies.
So, What is Full Funnel Conversion Optimization or Profit Funnel™ Optimization?
As we have noticed, a full funnel evaluates the 360 degree customer journey with a company or brand. Its goal is not only to acquire a customer but also to understand, nurture and improve their relationship and experience with the brand.
It focuses on not only pre but post-transaction because it takes into account how this will affect the probability of increased number of subscription renewals or sales, lower customer rotation, lower customer acquisition costs, and increased profit margins.
As we can clearly see, even though it’s called a funnel, this model looks more like an infinite loop with many potential touch-points throughout the buyers journey, over time and across a multitude of devices and online/offline experiences.
Have you even thought of people interacting with your site or buying from you via Alexa? Photo: Grant Ritchie via Unsplash.
1. Sales Funnel vs Profit Funnel™ or Full Funnel Optimization: Differences in Scope
One of the main differences between sales funnel and a full funnel conversion optimization is its scope. The oftentimes narrow span of a sales funnel is overshadowed by the number of elements or touch-points that a Profit Funnel™ considers.
Let’s check them out.
Single Path vs Infinite Loop: Are you optimizing for Omni channel yet?
The most evident difference between the sales and the Profit Funnel™ models lies in their reach. Highly restricted to a specific conversion path for the sales funnel versus a very broad view of the customer journey for the latter.
While most sales funnels are focused on a single transaction (such as a lead, sale or subscription) the full funnel or Profit Funnel™ acknowledges the entire lifetime of a potential customer or client. Its purpose is to allow us to take a step back and look at the entire customer journey or full marketing funnel and help optimize by what is most profitable without discarding the customer experience.
One Decision Maker vs Multiple Stakeholders
Have you been optimizing for a single decision-maker? Maybe you were leaving some marketing personas out of the equation. The higher the ticket price, especially for B2Bs, the higher the likelihood of having more than a single decision-maker involved in the purchasing process. Most companies will include different stakeholders’ input through the funnel and each one of them may further or delay that coveted B2B sale.
Sales funnel conversion optimization targets one person. Profit funnels recognize there is often more than one decision-maker.
Conversion Sciences Profit Funnel™ recognizes and accounts for this fact. Trying to optimize a single funnel to convert this lead is short-sighted, when understanding the 360 degree customer journey and optimizing for it, will significantly increase conversions and boost profit margins.
We often find – when auditing a client’s conversion efforts – that their sales funnels don’t include mobile customers. Addressing this gap via mobile conversion optimization efforts has increased their profits manyfold.
The Profit Funnel™ recognizes the value of determining which of those platforms holds the highest potential for each particular conversion and finding a way to best optimize each path.
Sales funnels often focus on increasing conversions on a certain page on either mobile, tablet, or desktop. Thus, leaving out the reality that customers will interact with your brand, product or service in multiple ways and through as many devices as exist.
Have you even thought of people interacting with your site or buying from you via Alexa?
Full Funnel Conversion Optimization Enables a More Personalized Online Experience
The data-driven strategy of optimizing the full marketing funnel helps you identify consumer segments. Behavioral information can be collected in-store, online, and post-visit. The insights derived from this analysis helps you craft and deliver online personalized experiences to boost conversions and increase their contribution to your bottom line. All the while deriving insights to improving your marketing strategy.
“You are engaging with the consumer on an intimate level — they are telling you what products are interesting. That customer data is one of the most important things to grow your brand.” – Kate Kibler, Timberland’s VP of direct-to-consumer.
For high-traffic sites, Conversion Sciences offers the latest martech stacks – ML and AI-powered – via the Conversion Catalyst AI™. Our Conversion Catalyst AI™ builds a predictive model that identifies which visitors are ready to buy, and delivers the perfect experience so that they are more likely to buy from you. So you can deliver the most optimized experience be it on your website, on wearable devices, voice search, augmented-reality or any of the myriad of experiences the IoT brings us.
Full funnel analysis and optimization will deliver a more cohesive personalized experience to your online customer segments.
2. Sales Funnel vs Full Funnel Conversion Optimization Metrics
It’s hard to take a look at your full marketing funnel and try to gauge how well it’s working besides ROI and profit margins. But following those metrics without fully understanding which effort or efforts made the difference, is no way to run a business either. But lucky you. Full funnel is optimized with your bottom line in mind and a bespoke full funnel attribution will help you identify what’s helping and what’s hindering your conversions.
Therefore, the difference between sales funnel and full funnel conversion optimization is that you will end up concentrating your marketing spend on those efforts who bring in profitable returns. Much better than looking at a measly conversion rate. right? ;)
Sales funnel conversion optimization targets one person while Profit funnels recognize there is often more than one decision-maker.
ROAS vs ROI
Are you narrowing your business focus down to sales funnels and conversion rates? Are you making decisions that affect your whole business by a simple ROAS? Or are you leveraging a 360 degree customer blueprint to improve your company’s profit margins?
In the addiction treatment center example, when the sales funnel was not profitable (its ROAS was negative), they could have shut down the ad campaign. But when they looked at the full funnel (in-patient treatment registrations), the ad investment was profitable and it justified the initial losses in the funnel. It had a positive ROI.
Thus, by using both metrics, you can isolate those efforts whose ROAS may be positive but not their ROI, which takes into consideration not a single digitally advertised campaign but how each contributes to the business profit margins. And you can spare from killing efforts with negative ROAS because, in the end, their revenue-generating power is much larger than the one calculated from the revenue from ad campaign/cost of ad campaign.
By doing so, you change the focus to driving business performance, not just advertising performance.
Single Attribution vs Custom Attribution
Going back to the addiction treatment center example. There are things they do that contribute to their bottom line – such as informational blog posts, quizzes, etc. But their attribution model assigned the conversion value to a single Google Ads campaign.
People have several contacts with a brand before they even consider converting on that landing page, clicking on that PPC ad or that Instagram shoppable image. Which means that any and all contributions along the 360 degree funnel, or full funnel or Profit Funnel™ must be taken into account and their value toward each of the conversions (testing kit purchase, treatment) attributed properly to measure its impact on revenues and on profit margins.
While a single touch attribution model is a fast and simple way to allocate credit to a campaign, full funnel must use a bespoke or custom attribution model to understand what is working and what is not.
It’s common yet dangerous and naive to make assumptions about which touchpoint to attribute credit for a conversion. Oftentimes these assumptions are created from unrecognized personal bias and proven false through data analysis. This is one of the biggest reasons that analyzing all metrics is vital to a company’s long-term success.
Building a smooth customer journey is key to business and revenue growth. Here’s how to create a sales funnel that works in just 5 minutes.
You may not believe you already have one or more sales funnels in place, but all businesses do. Maybe it’s not working as expected. Or perhaps you would like to make it more effective. Follow these steps to create a sales funnel in 5 minutes that will have customers buying from you in no time at all.
What Is a Sales Funnel?
But first things first. Let’s quickly refresh the definition of a sales funnel.
A sales funnel is a hypothetical or ideal journey you would like a prospect to travel to become a lead or a customer. This is why sales or revenue funnels are also called “customer journeys” or “customer blueprints”.
They can be as simple as a one step Click to Call Google Ad, where the button is your opt-in point or as complex as need be. Especially for those businesses where lots of lead nurturing is needed for prospects to convert.
Call only ads are best used when there’s a sense of urgency to the offer. Isn’t this one of the shortest sales funnels ever?
Keep in mind, while you are building your sales funnel, that the best functioning ones are those that reduce friction. That is, they do not add unnecessary barriers or hurdles to the sales process.
Ready, Set, Let’s See How to Create a Sales Funnel in 5 Minutes
One of the sales models that is most frequently used in customer blueprints and customer journey mapping is the AIDA model, which stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. Developed by E. St. Elmo Lewis in 1898, it maps how people make purchasing decisions. And, in spite of the technological developments, its importance and effectiveness has not diminished as humans have not changed their buying decision making process since then.
Whatever tactics you use to qualify leads and drive them closer to taking the desired action will change accordingly to where the lead is within the funnel: top (TOFU), middle (MOFU) or bottom (BOFU). It essential to understand how the funnel works from the moment you make the first contact (TOFU) with your ideal future customers to the moment where you convert those leads (BOFU). Keep in mind that each one of these components depends on the others.
Creating a sales funnel is as simple as defining the desired action and the target audience and then drawing the path between those two. And as complex as making it function successfully.
Here’s how to create a sales funnel (or improve the one you have) in 5 minutes.
AIDA model applied to customer journey mapping.
To Create a Sales Funnel First you Need to Generate Awareness
Attracting attention or generating awareness works best when you know your target audience media habits. You’ll be more successful if you advertise your brand, your products and/or services where the majority of your prospects already are.
These prospects may be currently looking for what your product or service provides or they may not. Those potential leads that are intently searching for a service similar to yours will notice relevant messages much more than those that are not.
For example, if someone is ready to upgrade to a new car, they will feel as if there are more automobile ads than usual. It’s because they are more aware. Generating awareness for your brand might be easier in this case. Funny how the brain works.
On the other hand, you may generate awareness amongst prospects with related needs. They are not looking for what you sell exactly. For example, while browsing their Facebook feed or reading a blog post, a person looking for a higher paying job may stumble upon a college or university they didn’t previously know existed.
Once you know where to find the vast majority of your audience, you can decide on a way to generate awareness about your brand. Usually these tactics range from PPC campaigns, TV or radio ads, billboards, blog posts, trade show participation, referrals, direct mail, email campaigns, online search results, all the way to super outrageous publicity stunts. You get the idea. Don’t craft the copy or the creative yet.
Have you chosen a tactic to introduce your prospects to your brand? Great! You’ve got the first step of your sales funnel covered. (Don’t overthink it) Move on to the next step.
Guiding customers through the buying stages: how to create a sales funnel that works in 5 minutes.
Second Step: The Interest Awakens
To create a solid sales funnel, you have to drive your prospects to click, call, download, sign-up, or visit you. And even though this happens at the last stage, you need to present the reasons why your are worthy of consideration in order to make it happen.
Do you have an eCommerce site and are offering free shipping? Is your SaaS fulfilling a productivity need that is important to your lead? Or do your cars flaunt the features your prospective buyers are searching for?
You need to know your customers and their behaviors, habits, and motivations to cut through the noise and to offer them something they recognize as useful or relevant.
This is the time to entice and convince them as to why they need your product or service.
Third Step: Pick Me! Pick Me! or the Sales Funnel Desire Stage
You presented your benefits properly and showed value to your prospect. Now it’s time to elicit desire. Congratulations! You are in the middle of the funnel (MOFU).
Keep an eye on your goal, your lead has to desire your product or service above any other.
Hence, you should keep educating and positioning your brand as the solution to their needs and problems. This is the stage where you shine a spotlight on those benefits. Testimonials, case studies, product comparisons, and customer reviews work well here.
This is also the stage where you match your product or service benefits to the prospect’s needs to clear up any barriers to the sale. This is a critical stage in which website traffic often fails to convert.
It seems to go without saying that any good sales funnel ends with a purchase. The biggest mistake people make when using the AIDA model, though, is to assume the sale will happen organically once the other steps have fallen into place. It won’t. Unlike an actual funnel, what goes into a sales funnel doesn’t always reemerge at the end. And people tend to not take action unless they’re asked. So, pay attention to your calls to action – the worst mistake sales people make is not ask for the close.
What’s your call to action? How will you prompt them to fill out the form, complete their shopping cart purchase, have a one-on-one call or meeting or do whatever final action you want them to take to complete their customer journey?
Purple mattress on exit intent pop up offer (BOFU).
Maybe you’ll offer them a free assessment, or a last minute discount if they complete the transaction right away. Take a minute to decide as the BOFU stage is the most crucial since it’s where you ask for the sale.
Ta Da! 5 minutes to build a sales funnel without writing a single line of copy — yet.
Would you rather have the conversion scientists identify your customer journeys to help you build your funnels? Then, check out our Conversion Rate Optimization Audit Services.
Sales Funnel Examples
Now that we’ve created our customer journey, let’s take a look at a couple of sales funnel examples for inspiration.
I think we covered one with the call only PPC ads example. Great for a local business like a personal injury attorney or a plumber, locksmith or any organization whose concern is to make the phone ring. Another requirement for successfully using this type of sales funnel is a sense of urgency to your product or service.
Purple mattress provides visitors with a humorously informational and convincing MOFU tactic on their landing pages with their zany videos backed by scientifically proven data. We may be a bit skewed as they also wear lab coats but go ahead, play the video and tell us what you think – unless you decide to buy a mattress first. ;)
A typical lead generation sales funnel example that remains mostly on the TOFU stage is to offer a Free Book, Research or White Paper to visitors – organic or paid. Take them to the next stages of the funnel by offering a one-time offer or a free consulting session. Keep qualifying the lead and close it with a call or an in person meeting.
What is the ultimate marketing technology stack? Join us in learning how to build a MarTech stack with Dan McGaw from Effin’ Amazing.
Dan McGaw sees the threads that connect customers to websites to campaigns to decision makers. We call these “MarTech stacks” and they are the hot topic in digital marketing these days.
We all have stacks. Email platforms, marketing automation systems, customer management systems, analytics databases… And then each of the services we work with adds to our marketing technology stacks — Facebook, Instagram and other social media, Google Ads, Amazon.
Most of our MarTech stacks come together piecemeal, one part at a time, independent and unintegrated. This means we spend hours drowning in spreadsheets as we try to answer simple questions, like, “Should I run that campaign again?” and “How many times do I have to touch my prospects before they buy?”
Fortunately, Dan is sitting down with me and I’m going to wrestle as many insights from his brain as possible. He knows all of the tools. And he doesn’t mind telling us how to build a MarTech stack.
Buckle in.
Utilizing the Vice Framework for Marketing Stacks with Dan McGaw Intended Consequences Podcast
On today’s show, we’re talking about the VICE Framework, what it means and how marketers can apply it as they experiment in their marketing teams. Dan McGaw from Effin’ Amazing will also tell you how to build a MarTech Stack to support the execution of your market strategy.
Let’s Dive into Building a Marketing Technology Stack
There’s a lot of talk about MarTech stacks at all levels. From email marketing, customer journey marketing automation, customer relationship management CRM, google analytics, tag management all the way through to search engine optimization or SEO tools.
There are dozens of options, dozens of choices and new interesting tools appear daily. This is the golden age of marketing.
Is there a common marketing technology stack that’s a good starter stack of tools that right now are best in class for most organizations? Or do you have to evaluate all the options and pick the right tool for an organization?
There’s definitely different tools and some are better suited for certain types of business. You have the all in one packages, which usually just do OK and most marketing operations can get away with that.
Think about a platform like HubSpot, HubSpot does everything. They do it about 60% well and about 40% not.
For most people 60% is good enough. For other companies, that’s not going to be enough. So we typically look at best of breed tools, MarTech stacks that pushes the limits of reality.
When you think about your normal SaaS company, there’s a plethora of options and you really need to focus on what is the outcome you’re trying to create and then start to research the different management tools that are out there.
The ultimate stack is what we recommend to all businesses that want to get started and be scalable and effective in their marketing efforts in the future.
So the big thing that companies need to understand now is this concept of customer data platforms or customer data infrastructures.
1. You need to be able to send your data to one source and that one source needs to distribute it to all of your other tools. That’s known as a CDI customer data infrastructure.
The three main players in that space are Segment, Metarouter and Mparticle. They are web tools which have client side libraries, JavaScript and then server side libraries that you can use. They also integrate with tools like Salesforce so they can consume data from Salesforce and pass it downstream to other tools.
That way you have one source to send your data to and then it’s distributed throughout the rest of the MarTech stack. And it becomes the hub of how data moves around.
2. The next thing you need to have is CEP or marketing automation tool like Marketo or Pardot’s marketing automation platforms.
3. The one tool that we recommend to everybody is a platform called Autopilot. Does email, text message, can send web hooks, other platforms integrated with Zappier, there’s direct mail and a text bot. But it really can work as a transactional system – where x happens and it immediately fires – or it can do a 16 day drip campaign.
3.a. If you’re a B2B, you need a CRM I would always recommend Salesforce.
4. And then your downstream analytics tools. Google Analytics is cool, but it doesn’t do enough. I recommend either Amplitude or Mixpanel.
That’s a primary marketing technology stack right there. So you have Segment, Autopilot and for B2B Salesforce. And then you have something like Amplitude or Mixpanel.
Tip for evaluating your Martech Stack
You’ve seen the bulletin boards in movies used by detectives to help solve a crime, covered in pictures and connected by strings tacked together.
Here’s my martech stack diagram.
You should do something like that.
When you get back to the office, bring to mind your most recent campaign. On a bulletin board, or whiteboard, draw the path of your prospects through the various systems in your stack all the way through to purchase.
Even if the systems aren’t in your control.
Draw green lines (or string) if you can track your prospects from one part of the stack to the next.
Draw red lines if you must manually move data, or if data is not available.
For us, the Marketing Scorecard is where we analyze all of the work we’ve done. There are several red lines leading into it. It’s in a spreadsheet and I manually enter data weekly to answer questions like, “How much is a new subscriber worth in dollars?” and “How has our new landing page changed acquisition cost?”
Then get to work on the red lines. Some of them are red simply because you’re not using the data. I rarely log into Sprout Social to see how our campaigns are driving new subscribers and leads.
Reach out to sales to see if you can get a regular report of sales. Figure out how to tie web campaigns to closed deals by passing campaign identifiers with form data.
Then listen to this podcast again. You’ll see Dan in a whole new light.
