Who Owns the B2B Marketing Funnel?
Who owns the B2B funnel? This was the focus of a discussion at last week’s FUNNEL B2B marketing event in London. One speaker noted that marketing owns the top of the funnel and sales owns the bottom of the funnel. But another speaker suggested that the customer owns the funnel. “In other words the way we ought to be measuring progress through the funnel is not what sales or marketing do but what we observe the customer doing.” The buying process isn’t typically linear, so a prospect might exit the process completely, stay in one spot for a long time or reassess their earlier decisions. This means that it might be useful to consider that responsibilities for nurturing a prospect might shift from marketing to sales, and maybe back to marketing again. A speaker recommended that companies get rid of the hard line in the funnel where marketing hands things over to sales. “It’s a joint effort all the way through the funnel.” (Econsultancy)
