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.

What does a customer really cost?

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.

Where do leads drop out?

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.

Do marketing and sales tell the same story?

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.

From funnel checks to decisions

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.