3 Reasons Why the B2B Funnel is the Wrong Marketing Metaphor
Join me in the Way-Back machine. I once heard a VP of Demand Gen say this about the marketing funnel. “You pour money in the top, and leads come out the bottom.” This unfortunate gastrointestinal reference accurately reflected the thinking of the time during the 20-teens.
But I just learned something even more shocking. The AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action) sales model still in use was developed in 1898 by Elias St. Elmo Lewis. He believed that the fourth stage, Action, would naturally result from movement through the first three stages.
So, hats off to Mr. Lewis. His 19th-century insight lives on in the 21st century. But Mr. Lewis could not have imagined the digital age of distraction that’s our new normal. Marketing and product teams are shifting from the funnel metaphor to a true journey model, which like life, is full of surprises, twists, and turns - a loop that has no end.
The Story is the Human Journey
Stories are innately human. People far smarter than me, like Jonathan Gottschall author of The Storytelling Animal, proposes that stories are like a simulator used to train pilots, a low-risk situation to learn new things. But he goes on to say that shared narratives are also how we construct meaningful social connections with others. And that stories, though we may lose ourselves in them, are also how we find ourselves.
How Storytelling informs B2B content
While I don’t recall who said it, I’ve always liked the saying that stories are how we alleviate the tedium of life. So, it’s a storytelling framework that helps me balance the need to create marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) and the need to write compelling content for the various experiences that are part of the customer journey. Here are my three go-to journey storytelling structures.
The Hero’s Journey is a storytelling framework writers often use when writing fiction. Hercules, also called Herakles by the Greeks, was cursed with madness by the spiteful goddess Hera which caused him to murder his wife and children. In some versions, the Greek god Apollo told Hercules to atone for his crimes by performing seven great labors (tasks) for Eurystheos, king of Mycenae. His first labor was to kill the dreaded Nemean lion.
The hero’s journey begins with the current state of things, the situation, or the status quo. In the case of Hercules, this was a happy marriage and a loving family. A crisis sometimes called a pivot, occurs, and changes the situation. And usually not in a good way. Just as Hera’s curse caused the madness that changed everything for Hercules.
This reversal begins the hero’s journey. It’s a journey through the physical world where the hero gathers knowledge and finds companions to accompany him, often acquiring magical tokens that help him succeed.
The hero’s journey is also an interior experience of personal growth toward emotional maturity. Or, it can be a journey into anger, bitterness, and madness. I’m talking about you, Darth Vader.
The journey ends with the hero’s transformation for good or evil or some murky indeterminate state of being. This change results from entering unfamiliar or terrifying situations, surviving them, and gaining a deeper understanding of themselves and the world.
In B2B content marketing, a future customer is the hero. We (the business or the product) are the faithful companion that helps the customer triumph over their problem. If we’ve done our job well, cue up the happy ending with a customer for life.
The Quest Is another storytelling device
From Jason and the Argonauts to The Lord of the Rings, or Luke SkyWalker’s dreams of leaving Tatooine to join the Rebel Alliance, the quest shapes aspiring heroes who will fail many times before they succeed.
These ‘failures’ are the reversals that keep the action moving forward, hopefully in surprising ways that keep readers and viewers engaged. A future B2B customer may seek a product to help them overcome a situation like outdated technology. Future customers purchase our products when the status quo is so inefficient it’s limiting profitability and killing cash flow.
The quest is also an adventure of achievement, of overcoming insurmountable odds to serve a greater purpose.
And as B2B storytellers, we play the roles of Gandalf the Wizard, Professor Albus Dumbledore, or Obi-Wan Kenobi. We are trusted advisors who understand the dangers that lie ahead. And we guide our future customers through quest scenarios that help them overcome the obstacles they face and find success with our products.
kill the monster is another storytelling framework
It’s fascinating that two classic horror stories, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and John William Polidori’s The Vampyre, began at a Villa on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland in 1816. The horror genre has flourished with authors like Edgar Allen Poe, Stephen King, Anne Rice, and countless others.
The monster scenario can be effective in B2B storytelling. The big, bad, ugly-scary thing can be rising insurance rates, an outdated access control system, inflation, inefficiency, AI, or any situation where the danger, aka monster, must be confronted and overcome.
As with any story structure, bad things (reversals) happen.
My favorite movie, based on the epic poem Beowulf, includes the hero Beowulf and the monster, Grendel, in the title. The story takes place in 6th century Denmark, where King Hrothgar and his men kill a troll whose son, Grendel, vows revenge.
Hearing this terrible tale, Beowulf and his men travel to Denmark from their home in Geatland, possibly in southern Sweden, to hunt and kill the monster and burnish their reputations as mighty warriors.
The poem tells us that Grendel is descended from Cain and has a mother who avenges his death. But like all great monsters, Grendel is something apart from our normalized viewpoint. He is other. And that’s the only requirement to be deemed a monster, even when human behavior is far more monstrous.
When we succeed in helping prospects complete their quest for a solution, they become valued customers. But we’re not done yet.
As in life, the journey continues as we help our customer become the ultimate hero, a brand evangelist.
Once our customer heroes are triumphant with our solution, they are often willing to share their success to help people on the journey they have already traveled.
That’s what heroes do. And this heroic behavior drives high net promoter scores (NPS), essential to the SaaS model of recurring revenue.
So, for me, the marketing funnel is the wrong metaphor for B2B marketing. A storytelling framework is an innately human way to form a relationship between a business and the people they serve on their life journeys.