Wednesday Wisdom: Top of Funnel or, Ton of Hope

saraboostani
saraboostani Posts: 365 6senser
edited March 11 in Research Road

Hi all,

More from Kerry on “funnel” thinking — how often do we hear, read, and use terms like TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU ourselves? They roll off the tongue… a little too well 😄 But how many of us can actually define them? And how often would those definitions be the same?

It’s part of the problem. These terms are used to mean so many different things that they stop meaning much at all.

Funnels do not describe the state of mind of potential buyers. Buyers are either in a buying process or they’re not. And when they are, it’s usually because something in the business changed — priorities shift, systems become inadequate, or new capabilities become necessary. When that happens, buyers may engage with whatever campaigns happen to be visible at the time, but those campaigns didn’t create the demand. They simply intersected with demand that already existed.

Another problem is that in practice, most buyers are already well into their decision process before vendors can observe or measure their activity. What we call “top of funnel” is often just the point where buyers become visible to our systems.

At best, funnels describe seller workflows — how organizations track and manage activity once opportunities become visible. They don’t describe how buying actually begins.

Labels like TOFU can create the appearance of structure without necessarily improving our understanding of what buyers are actually doing.

In Part 1 of this two-part series, Kerry focuses on why funnel thinking conceptually leads us astray. Part 2 will look more closely at what buying actually looks like once we step outside the funnel framing.

  • Read it 👉️ here
  • So much of what we write about boils down to simple truths of life in general — the words we use matter, the stories we tell ourselves matter, and over time they become deeply ingrained in our belief systems and the way we operate. Business is no different. I love Kerry’s writing because it’s a constant reminder to take a step back and have a think.
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