The B2B CMO’s Guide to Unlocking the Funnel

Posted June 14, 2024
B2B CMO Funnel Guide

Table of Contents

Executive leadership has been using funnels for years to give marketers lead-generation goals. But what you may not know is that savvy revenue operations professionals have also figured out how to optimize processes, including lead gating and routing, to fix broken systems and serve as an internal tie-breaker for which side of the sales and marketing coin has work to do.

That’s why we’ve developed a guide, written by CMOs for CMOs, to help you take control of your marketing strategy and optimize your processes for better results. By downloading this guide, you’ll learn:

  • How to effectively convert your marketing channels into pipeline
  • How long it takes sales to pursue leads
  • Which customer profiles convert (and which ones don’t)
  • Whether volume or quality should be the focus of your marketing efforts.

 

Our guide also covers the likelihood that your systems are sabotaging your pipeline generation, and how to fix them. With this information at your fingertips, you can take control of your marketing strategy and align it with your sales organization for maximum efficiency and productivity.

Don’t let sales leaders and CROs dictate your marketing strategy. Take control today with our CMO guide and maximize your marketing efforts for better alignment with your sales organization.

What To Expect in B2B CMO’s Guide

Here is a general overview of what you can expect to find in our B2B CMO’s Guide to Unlocking the Funnel:

  • Setting the Scene: We’ll give you a high-level how-to with a tactical guide to pass on to your operation team, teach you how to use funnel data for your purposes, and even help you get more out of your operations team.
  • What Every Marketer Needs in a Funnel: Dive into the steps you need to take to create the perfect funnel.
  • Work With (Not Against) Operations: Unless you have funnel analytics already available to the wider organization, your analyst will hit hurdles when creating funnel reports. There are several things you can do to make both of your lives easier.
  • Reading the Tea Leaves: Learn about the limits of what you measure, what to expect, and what a “good” conversion rate funnel looks like.
  • What if the Numbers Are… Bad?: We discuss common reasons why conversion rates may be “bad”. From “neutral issues” to “marketing-controlled issues”, we cover it all so you can evaluate efficiently.
  • Now What?: There is always room for improvement! Use the recommendations given in the section above to accelerate your pipeline growth even more.
  • Additional Resources: Need to learn more about funnels? We have a resource guide for you! 

Funnels Impact

Just in case you need more information, here is a small example of a section within our guide:

As a CMO, I know that sales needs 4x pipeline coverage to meet their bookings goal (in other words, at the beginning of their quarter, they need to have access to four times the bookings’ number in pipeline to hit quota). And I know that using our average sales price per deal, we need to create 90 new
opportunities two months from now to hit the next quarter’s number.

If I know my current lead mix converts to opportunities at a 15% conversion
rate within days of lead creation, I know that I need a minimum of 600 leads
that month of the same mix to produce 90 new opportunities.

Yikes. Or Yay! Depending on how much volume we usually produce. But if I
know which tactics convert the fastest and most efficiently into opportunities, I
can change my spend and multiply my output.

Here are the channels (my mix) I’m using and the rate at which leads convert
into opportunities:

    • Chat: 25%
    • Paid Advertising: 6%
    • Webinar: 18%

 

Let’s look at that same information from a different angle:

Improving our conversion rate by 2% led to a 12% decrease in lead volume
needed to hit our opportunity goal.

If we still produce 600 leads with this improved conversion rate, we could
create 102 opportunities. If we keep our production volume the same, we will
have a 13% increase in opportunity volume.

This guide will help you benefit from the compound impact of incremental changes in your funnel. There’s a multiplier effect! It’s about as close to a magic growth hack we can give you in B2B marketing.

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