B2B marketing by funnel stage

The same thirty-six disciplines, arranged by the stage of work they belong to: Strategy and Foundations, the decisions made before anything is switched on; Reach and Awareness, the disciplines that put a company in front of buyers who do not know it exists; Capture and Conversion, what happens once a buyer arrives; and Measurement and Optimization, the instrumentation that shows which of the rest is producing revenue.

The limitation should be stated immediately, because grouping like this invites a conclusion it cannot support. Real business buying is not a sequence of stages. Gartner's model describes six buying jobs — problem identification, solution exploration, requirements building, supplier selection, validation and consensus creation — and finds that buyers loop, revisiting jobs rather than completing them in order. A committee can be validating one supplier while still building its requirements, and a single visitor may pass through awareness and conversion in one session, years after first encountering the company.

Several disciplines also refuse to sit in one place. Content marketing creates awareness and closes deals. Email nurtures and converts. Website architecture is a foundation, a search asset and a conversion problem at once. Where a discipline spans stages, it is filed under the one where it is usually owned and budgeted, not the only one it affects.

Treat this page as a navigational aid, and as a way of noticing gaps: four stages, and a programme with nothing under one of them usually knows why. It is not a model of how buyers behave.