Analysis and perspectives on marketing, customer management, innovation and business transformation.
Three questions about your funnel
In the previous article, I said something slightly uncomfortable: the number of leads is not a result. The most common reaction was, “Fine, but what should I look at then?” Fair question. So, just as I did with positioning, here are three questions to ask yourself about your funnel. On your own, looking at the real numbers, not the ones on the end-of-month slide.
The first is almost obvious, which is precisely why almost nobody can answer it on the spot: how much does a customer cost you, not a lead? Everyone knows their cost per lead. It is in the dashboard and looks impressive. Far fewer know their customer acquisition cost — how much they spend overall to win one customer who actually signs — because that means dividing expenditure by real contracts, not email addresses. If you do not know this number, you are not managing lead generation. You are being managed by it, hoping the figures add up at the end of the month.
The second question hurts more: exactly where do your leads die? Not “they get lost along the way”, which is what people say when they have not looked. I mean the precise point. Out of one hundred people who raise their hand, how many are actually contacted? Of those, how many within an hour rather than three days? How many receive a proposal? If you cannot say at which step most of them drop out, you are pouring water into a bucket without knowing where the hole is. And, just to be safe, you end up adding more water. In other words, more budget.
The third is the most uncomfortable because it touches the pride of two departments at once: is the message you use to attract leads the same one you use to close them? Almost never. Marketing promises one thing to get the form completed, sales tells a different story on the phone, and the lead — who is not stupid — notices the gap and cools off. You did not lose them because they were cold. You cooled them down somewhere between the promise and the phone call.
Three questions, three different points in the same pipe: what a customer really costs, where the flow becomes blocked, and whether you are telling the same story from one end to the other. None of these problems is solved by generating more leads. All three are solved by looking at what happens to the leads you already have — the least exciting and most profitable exercise in marketing.
If even one of these questions made you think, “Hmm, I should check”, that is an excellent sign: you have found the step worth examining. If you want, we can examine it together. Send me a DM with the word “funnel” and two lines on how you currently acquire customers, and I will tell you where I think you are losing the leads you have already paid for. In the best-case scenario, we discover that your pipe does not leak anywhere. Unlikely, but it would be excellent news.
Lead generation is not a campaign. It is a system.
In the previous articles, I took a few things apart: volume that is not pipeline, the cheap lead that turns out to be the most expensive, and the channel receiving credit it did not earn. Now it is time to put the pieces back together. Lead generation is not a collection of tricks — a campaign here, a form there — but a system. If one component does not communicate with the others, the result gets lost in the handover. I will explain it without revealing everything; otherwise, we will have nothing left to discuss on the phone.
It starts with the target, and that is not a formality: it is the decision that determines every other decision. If you do not know, with almost irritating precision, whom you want — not “manufacturing companies”, but who makes the decision, what problem they have and at what moment — every downstream choice becomes a shot in the dark. Most weak campaigns are not badly written; they are badly aimed. They shoot extremely well in the wrong direction.
Then there is the message, the element connecting this series to the one on positioning. If you do not know why people should choose you, no amount of advertising will help. A good message does not describe what you do. It tells the right reader, “You have this problem, and I can remove it.” If you could swap it with a competitor's message by changing only the logo, it is not a message. It is paid noise.
The third component is the landing page and the offer: the point where the lead decides whether to raise their hand. An embarrassing number of people are lost here for very ordinary reasons: you ask for too much, promise too little, or present a form that feels like a mortgage application. The rule is simple: friction must be proportional to the value offered in return. You want my phone number? Give me a reason worth my phone number.
The fourth, and the one technical profiles feel most strongly, is data and consent. A lead generation system is also a data management system, and in European B2B that means treating GDPR as infrastructure, not an inconvenience. Properly collected consent, clear purposes and clean tracking are not just bureaucracy. They are the difference between a database you can work with for years and one that blows up at the first inspection. Building on dirty data is like building on land you do not own: sooner or later, someone will ask you to leave.
The fifth and final component is measurement, which closes the circle: if you defined the right target at the beginning, you can measure the right outcome at the end — customers by channel, not likes. This is where the system comes alive, because you stop guessing and start moving budget to where the numbers, rather than opinions, tell you to put it.
Five components — target, message, landing page, data and measurement — and the crucial point is that they form a system. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and the weakest link is usually not the one you are watching. Companies optimise advertising when the hole is in the landing page, or rebuild the website when the real problem is that they are speaking to the wrong people.
If you want to know the weakest link in your system, send me a DM with the word “system”. Tell me in two lines how you currently acquire customers, and I will tell you where I think the chain is breaking. I will not rewrite your campaigns in a message — that is a different job — but I will point out the issue costing you the most. In the best-case scenario, I will tell you everything is already running smoothly. Unlikely, but it would be excellent news.
The best positioning is not built. It is discovered.
Across five articles, I explained that the wrong positioning is expensive, that you cannot see it from inside the company, and that price is almost always innocent. All very interesting, you might say, but ultimately just words. Fair enough. So I am closing this series with a real case, without a company name because the name is not what matters to you.
A manufacturing company in north-eastern Italy, producing industrial machinery, had generated solid revenue for years but lived with an irritating feeling: every negotiation ended with a discount. The sales team always came back with the same phrase — “we are more expensive” — and the response was always the same: trim the price, squeeze the margin, secure the order. More of a ritual than a strategy.
On the website and in sales presentations, they said what everyone else said: lower consumption, environmental responsibility and finishing quality. All perfectly valid. And very similar to what the other six competitors were saying. Then we went to listen to real customers, and when you ask customers why they chose you, they say things marketing would never dare to write.
They did not talk about the environment. They talked about money, but not the money in the quotation: real money. Less wasted material, machines that stopped less often, service that arrived before downtime became costly, and used equipment that still retained value at the end of its working life. Once everything was put in sequence — purchase, operation, maintenance and disposal — total cost of ownership revealed what the price tag concealed: these machines were the most expensive to buy and the least expensive to own.
The remarkable thing was that this information had always been there, in plain sight. Inside the company, however, nobody saw it as a value worth communicating. They considered it normal. “But that is the minimum; that is simply how our machines work.” This is the best positioning a company has and fails to use: the advantage it takes for granted because it experiences it every day, while for the customer it is precisely the reason for paying more.
Repositioning did not require a new product or a new brand. It was more straightforward: they stopped selling what everyone else sold and started selling the reason customers genuinely chose them. The message was rewritten around total cost rather than purchase price, sales materials were rebuilt, and the offer was packaged so that the advantage became visible before the quotation, not afterwards. In short, they stopped apologising for the price and started explaining what was inside it.
The results after six months: the average discount fell by 20 percentage points. The closing rate rose from 10% to 20%. Cost per lead decreased by 30% because the message finally attracted the right people rather than everyone. And, not a minor detail, the sales team stopped coming back saying, “we are more expensive”.
The point is not that we were particularly clever. The company already had everything: the competitive lever, customers who recognised it, and even the numbers needed to prove it. What it lacked was someone outside the company who could point it out, because from the inside it looked obvious. That is almost always how it works: the best positioning is not built; it is discovered.
This concludes the series. If these six articles have made you wonder whether you are also taking for granted the very thing customers choose you for, send me a DM. I will review your positioning and tell you where I believe the unused lever may be. In the worst-case scenario, I will confirm that you are already doing everything right. Unlikely. But it would be excellent news.
