The Positioning Funnel

Layering Positioning into the marketing & sales funnel

I hear you — ”marketing/sales funnels are soooo 2000s”.

Their common weaknesses:

  1. Reflect inside-out thinking. How a company conceptualises attracting and converting new customers, not how prospects actually experience their “buying journey”.

  2. Create massive blind spots. A prospect could have made a decision ‘not to buy’ well before entering the marketing/sales funnel (the point at which the company starts to measure success).

  3. Force a non-linear process into a linear one. Prospects jump around all over the place before making a purchase. They rarely transition through the funnel in the neatly conceptualised manner that companies define.

That’s fair criticism. But, it also does not make funnels redundant.

First of all, it is possible engineer a funnel to match the “buying journey” of the prospect — so that it’s outside-in (not inside-out), syncing with the lived experience of prospects.

Secondly, the remit of the funnel can be expanded to include measurement and actionability before prospects enter the owned and operated marketing and sales stack of the company. Addressing that pesky ‘blind spot’.

What’s in the blind spot? Perception (category and brand), word-of-mouth, reviews, competitive landscape, influencers, communities, etc.

This graphic from MarketingProfs illustrates the marrying of the marketing and sales funnel to the buyer journey:

Thirdly, it doesn’t really matter if a prospect does not transition through the funnel in the linear journey that a funnel conceptualises.

The purpose of the funnel is to ensure that all the key elements in the buyer journey are in place. To provide structure and support the journey to purchase.

So, if a prospect happens to enter towards the bottom of the funnel (e.g. through a customer referral) they can climb up and down the funnel to help build their conviction to buy.

What do I mean?

Let’s say a prospect enters towards the bottom of your pre-sale funnel (marketing & sales), through a customer referral.

Before this introduction, they have never heard of you:

At this entry point, the prospect can both:

  1. Engage with the company directly in conversation

  2. Ride up and down the funnel vertically to gather clues and signals needed to build conviction to purchase

Ideally, all of the clues and signals will have been engineered — at each stage — to match the intended phase in the funnel with which the prospect wishes to enlighten themselves.

That could mean: review sites, reading articles (favourable PR or self-published), referencing peers, watching videos, listening to podcasts, browsing the company’s website, checking out the company’s leadership on LinkedIn, etc.

Huh?

For example, if you have mapped the Awareness stage to your social media presence, it means the prospect checking that out. If you have mapped the Interest stage to your blog, it means the prospect checking that out. If you have mapped the Intent stage to an ROI calculator, it means the prospect checking that out.

You can design the funnel how you like (what makes the most sense for your unique circumstances). But, here’s a rough idea of how that could map:

I generally find that funnels are more accessible concepts to use with earlier stage startups that lack comprehensive data and tooling (particularly in B2B), whereas sophisticated buyer journey models can be built later. I am not religious about it, though.

But, whether it is a buyer journey or a funnel, they are both very tactical in nature.

They seek to engineer a series of touch points to convert prospects from targets into paying customers. Nudging them along to purchase.

For this reason, they can sometimes be overly clinical and lose sight of the broader situation: to think through a company’s competitive position from a customer perception perspective.

In other words:

  • 🌟 What makes you unique?

  • 💎 Why is that uniqueness valuable?

  • 🤗 Why does that value make you a clear choice? 

Whatever methodology you choose, buyer journeys and funnels must articulate the unique Positioning of the company, brand, and product. From start to finish. So it’s the backbone of the operation.

Case in point, I often encounter startups that excellently communicate their features, capabilities, and benefits. But, what is often missing is why a prospect should pick them over everybody else. Why the value proposition is valuably differentiated.

Positioning does this. Positioning takes into consideration the perceptions of competitive alternatives that are already present in the minds of prospects, surfacing your value proposition as the clear choice in the best context.

Positioning is your competitive advantage. How you shine.

Positioning Funnel

In order to build the Positioning into the buyer journey and marketing & sales funnel, with early stage startups I evangelise using a ‘Positioning Funnel’ framework.

This is a model that:

  1. 🤩 Provides the foundational elements needed to differentiate the startup in the minds of prospects

  2. 🔄 Does not replace the buyer journey or marketing & sales funnel, but is layered into them

The intention is to keep things simple, at the start, with three simple steps to guide prospects through:

Let’s break this down:

  • Positioning Idea. This is the unique perception and mental space (position) you wish to occupy in the minds of prospects. It is the core of your Positioning strategy. Everything anchors back to it.

  • Narrative / POV. How are you defining a problem divergently? How is your approach to the problem different? Why should prospects care about it vs. competitive alternatives? What is your unique POV?

    • 👉 Example. Airbnb articulated that travellers should be able to “live like a local” on their trips — hotels are inauthentic.

  • Differentiated Value. The realisable unique value that prospects obtain from buying your value proposition.

    • 👉 Example. Digital publishers that adopted Outbrain’s content recommendation solution turned a cost-centre into a revenue stream — a monthly $ check.

The main objectives with this framework are too:

  1. Instil buying behaviour. Claim your unique Position in the minds of prospects and mobilise their journey to purchase.

  2. Activate buying behaviour. Trigger a purchase through a differentiated value proposition — a unique ‘reason to buy’.

The key to this funnel is to start with a strong Positioning idea. This instructs the design of everything else — your narrative / POV, your differentiated value.

All three of these artefacts should be leveraged throughout your buyer journey/marketing and sales funnel. They are the driving force of differentiation.

Real life example: Blockthrough

Last week I wrote about Blockthrough, an adtech startup that grew from $0 ARR to $10M ARR in three years.

Today, I will use them as an example for how to design a Positioning funnel and layer it into the marketing and sales funnel.

Here’s their Positioning funnel, in a nutshell:

  • Positioning Idea. Programmatic ad blocking revenue

  • Narrative / POV. Circumvention doesn’t work, working together does

  • Differentiated Value. Plug and play, material revenue

Positioning Idea

Blockthrough’s core idea was to own the “programmatic ad blocking revenue” position in the minds of prospects (digital publishers).

Why? This is exactly what prospects were asking for, but no vendor had yet satisfied functionality (meaning the position was unclaimed in the mind).

Narrative / POV

This Positioning idea informed their narrative and POV. Which, was contrarian to competing vendors at the time.

How so?

In order for programmatic ad blocking revenue to be sustainable (the key problem to solve), it was essential to get buy in from both the adtech industry and ad blockers (de facto enemies). Either could break the viability of the idea.

Blockthrough threaded together a sustainable solution by leveraging existing adtech infrastructure and opening a dialogue with the ad blockers in order to utilise it.

Meanwhile, competitors were fighting ad blockers through technical circumvention or trying to build a new ad stack from scratch.

Marty (Blockthrough’s CEO) approached the debate from a different starting point: ad blocking users.

This offered more scope to be creative. To be bi-partisan. Unshackling opportunity.

Blockthrough’s ‘programmatic for ad blocking inventory’ value proposition hypothesis emanated from this point-of-view, marrying together the publisher’s motivation to leverage their existing adtech stack together with the ad blockers’ (eyeo’s) motivation for publishers to utlise Acceptable Ads (which had user consent).

This approach clearly separated their narrative and POV from all other competitors in the space. It was user-first, and therefore long-term sustainable.

Differentiated Value

Blockthrough’s Positioning Idea and Narrative / POV pointed to a radically differentiated value proposition, which mobilised prospects to buy into the solution.

That was: a plug and play, material revenue generating solution. Found dollars, that prospects did not have before (and could not get elsewhere).

It was exactly what prospects asked for: “restore my programmatic stack for ad blocking inventory!” — with a low-friction implementation.

Here’s how prospects perceived Blockthrough’s value proposition versus competitive alternatives:

To be clear, the differentiated value step does not exist to articulate the Positioning Idea (but should map back to it).

Its objective is to articulate realisable unique value. In this case for Blockthrough: a very attractive monthly $ check. This is the trigger that activates buying behaviour.

That’s it for today. I’ll be back in your inbox soon. 🤘

Martin

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