The Sales Funnel Approach Is Dead

The Sales Funnel Approach Is Dead

Linear Thinking Kills The Modern Company

C lassics never die, but outdated marketing strategies sure do. That is the constant, grueling battle that many businesses struggle with today. Products and services that should be booming tend to plunge into the dark, inescapable abyss of over-promised and under-delivered online advertising. There is hope and light at the end of the tunnel, but if you blink it all could be gone in an instant.

Nine out of ten businesses have been wrangled into marketing hoaxes and left for dead by online advertising swindlers.

In many ways they are right, but you won’t gain any traction by listening to one single word from them. 

Why is that? Well, they simply want to grab and drop unqualified traffic off at the gates of your business, which is at the top of your “funnel”. 

Now it’s up to you to filter through the crowd and take a stab at guiding them down that singular, bottleneck marketing strategy. 

How does a customer buy?

• Your Website
• By Phone
• Maybe you don’t even tell them how 

If you are not offering up a multitude of avenues that seamlessly guide prospects and customers through various buying channels, then yes… 

Describing how you are failing online is a slick and easy sales strategy, but few can actually dish up a reliable and logical method to turn things around. Linear thinking has become a destructive force that has crippled even the biggest names in commerce. Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon have all fallen victim to linear thinking at one point and had to adjust just to stay afloat. 

Yes, even Tesla took a dive and needed a lifesaver from linear thinking. When Elon Musk began his electric car manufacturing, he almost went bankrupt trying to build his Lithium Ion battery packs in other countries. He broke the chain and changed the automotive world when he decided to think dynamically and do things the way he wanted by building cars in-house. 

So, how do you avoid being linear? You start thinking variably.

Your customers vary in buying patterns because they are all different. With linear funnels, the customers you lose aren’t unqualified customers, so they are likely prospects who don’t like the singular channel you gave them to buy. Otherwise, they would have been a buying customer if you gave them the opportunity to comfortably choose. Instead of a funnel, think about “Plinko”!

Variable Journey Marketing is a philosophy we created that helps you meet those needs by developing strategic channels of buying. VJM is the principle of utilizing a collection of digital marketing assets for the purpose of converting consumers within their varied buying preferences.

All sound too good to be true? That’s because it is the correct and logical thing to do. 

We are sold too much as consumers today and told: what to think  – what to do –  what to buy. When you purchase something, versus being sold on it, you make a decision based on your knowledge and experience. That is buying with confidence! 

If this makes sense to you then you are already one step ahead of your competition. Now you just need to make it work! We don’t have a sales teams, we only have strategists who do the work for our clients. 

The difference between a salesperson and a strategist is that; 

a salesperson says what is right for their own company, whereas a strategist thinks about what’s right for your company.

That is dynamic thinking in our Variable Journey Marketing world.