ESSAY: THE FUNNEL IS THE WRONG WAY AROUND

Morning!

I’m speaking at B2B Marketing Live in Manchester this Wednesday, and I’ll be sharing a new concept I’ve been working on behind the scenes.

It’s still early. I’m not sure how it’ll land. But it’s already reshaping how we approach marketing at noticed., and influencing where we’re heading over the next 6 to 12 months.

So for the first time ever, this week’s newsletter is a bit different. No playbook. No TL;DR. Just a brief essay exploring the idea.

It’s a sneak peek into something I think a lot of marketers are completely overlooking and something I’ll be talking a lot more on over the next year. Again, this is my first time sharing it publicly, so I’d love to know what resonates, what doesn’t, and what sticks with you - hit reply and let me know your thoughts :)

Now, let me tell you why I think the no.1 most impactful thing you can do is to flip the funnel.

THE ESSAY

Before we get into this, I need you to agree with me on a general consensus. A simple fact we can agree on before we go any further. The fact that we’ve been lied to about marketing.

Gary Vee has lied to you. Steven Bartlett has lied to you. And if you scroll back far enough through my old LinkedIn posts, you’ll see that even I’ve lied to you, too.

Over the next few minutes, I want to walk you through the biggest lie we’ve all bought into, and why it’s stopping smart marketers and good businesses from getting noticed.

But first, we’ve got to rewind the clock a bit to 6 years ago.

At the time, I was 18 and posting these cheesy, terrible selfies on LinkedIn like my life depended on it.

But while I looked like a wannabe entrepreneur online, behind the scenes, I was managing the personal brands of some of the UK’s best-known CEOs. I was running over 15 personal brand accounts. Ghostwriting every post. Building huge followings in silence.

My job was simple: take their story and amplify it.

And I did it. Again and again and again.

I remember specifically working on a piece for the CEO of a £40M+/year company that went viral.

• 900,000+ views

• 1000s of likes

• Endless comments

And I remember the team celebrating another viral post we’d put out. I was on that call so happy with myself. “What a good marketer I am,” I thought.

But the reality was, it was a lie.

Those views, those likes, those comments. No matter how much we celebrated them, they simply didn’t translate into pipeline for the clients. In fact, that £40M+ CEO I mentioned… he left just 10 days after that big viral post.

Everyone told me that if you can just get eyes on you and your brand, the leads will come. But that’s the lie.

It’s the lie that leaves your pipeline dry, your team burnt out, and your founder asking, "Why isn’t this working?"

Because visibility ≠ growth.

Look at WeWork in 2019. Huge marketing presence. Valued at $47 billion. All over the press. And yet, when it came time to go public, everything fell apart and they went bankrupt.

Or Quibi in 2020. They spent over $100 million on advertising. Launched with a bang. Closed in six months.

These are companies that had all of the visibility in the world, yet it still wasn’t enough to drive new customers into these businesses - no matter how “Viral” they became.

But if visibility doesn’t drive pipeline and growth… What does?

Well, I think the issue lies in what we call the traditional marketing funnel.

It’s something we’ve all seen a million times and have referred back to 100s of times over the years. And as a concept, it’s amazing. But the issue is, humans are flawed.

(As a man from Burnley, I can say that I have been a first-hand witness to that.)

When you look at that funnel, you’ll notice that at the top we clearly set a goal of awareness.

So what KPIs do we instantly attach to that?

- Brand impressions?
- Maybe engagement rate?
- Reach or follower growth?

These are all fair awareness metrics, right?

But that’s where the major flaw lies. When we optimise our top of funnel for as many people as possible, the sad reality is that we end up with no one at the bottom. 

And the biggest irony of this funnel is that we qualify as we go down.

We put out these big awareness-focused campaigns. Then, as we go down the funnel, we start to qualify these people.

- Do they match our ICP, and are they worth passing to sales?
- Do they have the budget? Before we waste our time pitching.

And by the time we get to those questions, we start to realise that none of these people are the people we want to talk to. 

Now, earlier I asked you a question. I said, “If virality and visibility don’t drive pipeline and growth… What does?”

My answer to this is relevance. 

And what I mean by relevance is your brand being relevant to the exact crowd, the exact ICP that you’re going after. 

And to do that, you have to flip the funnel. 

You have to start your marketing process by clearly identifying and understanding the exact type of people you want to go after. 

No, that doesn’t just mean naming them and claiming you have a target audience. That means surveying them, understanding what they like (and what they don’t), why they might buy your service and most of all… where they hang out. 

Let me show you the comparison in the dating world. 

Let’s say you’re a single man in your mid-20s and you’re looking for a long-term partner. There are 2 obvious approaches you can take:

Approach A: You decide that it’s a numbers game.

- You download every dating app there is
- You even buy premium to get more swipes
- And you commit to 1 hour per day of swiping

You tell yourself that if you commit to that, you’ll start conversations with at least 50 girls/week. 

Sounds like there’s a pretty high likelihood that will work out right?

But the issue is, he’s swiping on dating apps with random girls. Barely any actually text him back because he’s not their type. Those who do aren’t his type. Every so often, he finally decides to give one a chance and go on a date with them, only for it to be terrible and for him to regret it later. 

Now he spends a lot of time and money on dating, yet still has no partner.

Then there’s approach 2: 

Rather than going on the dating apps. You decide to sit down and map out exactly what type of woman you want to date. 

• What does she look like?

• What hobbies does she have?

• What would she like to do on weekends?

• Where does she hang out?

• What would they be looking for in a man?

Then you decide to simply put yourself in places where that type of person shows up and in a way that is desirable to her. 

Maybe you want a partner who likes pottery, so you start attending pottery classes. Maybe that person you want would want a chivalrous man, so you open doors and say hi to everyone. 

Chances are, very quickly, that person will be around the type of women he wants to date and soon enough, connect with someone, he becomes a partner.

He wasn’t the most visible on the dating scene, but he made himself relevant to his target audience. 

And it’s not just dating that applies to, the stats in the business world mirror this too. 

• Companies with robust ICPs had 68% higher account win rates than companies without.

• Account-based marketing delivers 208% higher revenue than traditional broad marketing.

But it’s all well and good me saying this, but if relevance is the key… how do you achieve it?

Well, when you flip the funnel and start with a deep understanding of the accounts you’re going after, all of the “Tough” marketing questions become easy. 

• Where should you focus your marketing efforts? Well what do those accounts you want hang out?

• What type of content should we share on socials? Well what are the issues our ICP are dealing with?

• How should we look from a brand perspective? Well what would your ICP identify with?

And I want to show you a prime example of what that looks like, especially from a B2B perspective. 

So let me end with one final story.

In 2022, the NHS approached us with a problem: they needed more international candidates for senior roles. They’d already tried raising salaries, offering bonuses, and paying relocation costs. Still, people weren’t applying.

They’d spend literally millions trying to recruit them, they’d even send hordes of staff to key countries to try and recruit. But this wasn’t a recruitment issue, it was a marketing issue - and they were getting their marketing wrong.

So we came in and flipped the funnel.

We went and spoke to 350 international candidates who fit their ideal candidate profile and asked: “What would actually attract you to work in the UK?”

Ironically, their answers had nothing to do with wages or bonuses. All they kep talking about was the English culture. About safety. About the lifestyle.

That’s what would actually draw them to the UK.

So we stopped pushing salary in the marketing and started telling stories about the people, the places, and the real human experiences of working in the UK.

• We created resources

• Identified where candidates hung out (LinkedIn and Facebook groups)

• Then reached out and shared the resources with them

• And even started sharing stories from NHS leaders on social media around their experience working in the UK and the NHS

The result: 250+ candidates have come through into that programme and the NHS became one of our biggest clients.

Not because we shouted louder or got some crazy awareness. But because we flipped the funnel, got a deep understanding of the ICP, and then went after them.

So next time you sit down to plan a campaign, don’t ask “How can we market ourselves?”

Ask, “What do our ICP want?”

You’ll be surprised how simple marketing can be when you just flip the funnel.

Right, that’s all I’ve got for you today. Super curious to see how you found this. I’m sorry it was different from usual, but hopefully you enjoyed it just as much.

Give me your feedback down below and reply to this email to tell me what resonated and what didn’t.

Thanks, as always, for reading! It means the world.

— Niall

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