Don't cry little business man, we'll find you a new sales funnel...

Your sales funnel is dead, and it’s not coming back.

Here’s an outline of an inbound marketing sales funnel that I published in June:

Click to see the full view

Many companies use this sales funnel and it’s been working pretty well. But there’s a huge wrench about to take this little funnel out. And you can see it when you look closer at that “social media” part at the top of the diagram. So let’s do that.

Here’s what we see when we blow up that single section:

Click the pic to have an "OMFG" moment...

That graphic shows only 21 sources of information your customer can use to find out about your products and services. According to the Zero Moment of Truth book published by Google your customers are now (as of 2011) using 10.4 sources.

Who says that today’s consumer isn’t informed?

Let’s not forget too that people are now using their tablet computers and smart phones while watching television. Research begins at the moment of stimulus and can continue for weeks or months before a purchase is made.

These images from the Google book chart the time from purchase and level of influence a search engine has on a purchase decision. I’ve selected three categories to look at. The brighter and larger the spot the more influence the source, in this case a search engine, has on the decision.

Restaurant Purchases

Not too surprising a search engine has very little influence the farther out in time you go. I don’t know about you but living in a city with so many choices sometimes we just leave the house and head toward the food areas, making a final decision on the way or once we hit our destination.

Influence On Restaurant Purchases - Time From Purchase

Tech Purchases

Tech purchases are another matter though. Depending on what you’re buying you could be talking some serious cash. And if you’re an Apple fan like me you’re always talking a larger cash outlay.

Those purchases are influences by a search engine some months and weeks before an actual purchase.

Influence On Tech Purchases - Time From Purchase

And what about the really big purchases, for instance a car?

Automotive Purchases

Influence On Automotive Purchases - Time From Purchase

People start their research months in advance and may do some final price or sales checking a few weeks before the purchase. In this economy for many people an outlay of tens of thousands of dollars (or getting a loan that large) takes some planning.

The Tale Of The Tape

What these charts say to me is that the more expensive a purchase someone is going to make the longer they perform research. It’s at the beginning of that research that they are influenced the most.

How is the rest of the time spent? Research using other means. We saw 20 others in the graphic above, and over the course of a few months a person can gather a metric ton of information and have an experience with multiple companies.

Make no mistake – people are informing themselves with greater amounts of information and more numerous sources than ever before. And they aren’t slowing down.

So in this type of environment how do you win?

There Is No Competition

You laser focus on your ideal customer, creating helpful, informative and educational content just for them, and being in front of them in as many places as you can for as long as you can, all without being annoying.

There is no single silver bullet – you need a whole lot of them.

Is it a lot of work? I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t. But it is. However it’s not impossible.

You may only need to use a few channels or methods to be in front of your ideal customers. Perhaps search, a few social media sites and your blog are good enough. Perhaps you need to have advertisements in niche magazines along with your website. Or perhaps your ideal customers love video so YouTube is the place for you.

Whatever it may be it’s imperative that you find out where they are, what they’re asking about, and create content they can find where, when and how they go looking for it.

If you can do that, and do it you must, then your sales funnel may live to see another day.

About Robert Dempsey

CEO & Founder of Dempsey Marketing, web developer, avid reader, proud father and husband. I get a lot of stuff done.

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