A marketing funnel for a business with long sales cycles and few buyers

Your sales head says the funnel is empty because the website brings no leads. But you sell to about forty plants and win a handful of contracts a year, and no website was going to bring them. A business that wins a few large contracts does not need a funnel that is wide at the top. It needs a named list of buyers, a dated plan for each, and a way to show the buyer the right thing at the right moment. The funnel becomes a sheet of accounts, a calendar of moves and a few proofs, and the measure is how far each named buyer has moved.

Why the usual funnel does not fit

The standard funnel assumes volume: thousands of visitors, hundreds of leads, tens of customers. You can read percentages off it because the numbers are large.

Your numbers are small. Take an invented Jamshedpur automation integrator that sells control upgrades to steel and allied plants and wins a handful of contracts a year. The buyers are maintenance heads and procurement at a few dozen plants. A "conversion rate" of one in ten is meaningless when ten is the whole population. And a sudden jump in website traffic from students writing a project tells you nothing.

So drop the percentages and treat each buyer as a person.

Step one: the account sheet

List the forty firms you could realistically serve. For each, record the following.

Two columns matter more than the rest. The trigger tells you when this account might move: a planned shutdown, a new line, a breakdown that made the news inside the plant. The next move and date make the list a working document rather than a wish.

For where the names come from, see how to build a qualified B2B prospect list.

Step two: five stages in the buyer's words

Use stages that describe what the buyer knows, not what you did.

1. Unknown. They have not heard of you.
2. Aware. They know your name and one thing about you.
3. Familiar. They have met someone, read something or seen a site.
4. In conversation. A meeting or a requirement has been discussed.
5. In evaluation. A proposal, a trial or a site visit is under way.

Move an account forward only on evidence: a reply, a meeting, a name introduced. A stage is a fact about the buyer, not a hope of yours.

Step three: the calendar

For each stage, decide what you will put in front of the buyer and when. A buyer who is unknown gets a short, specific note. One who is familiar gets a relevant piece of work: a short case from a similar site, a question about their upcoming shutdown. One in evaluation gets what reduces their risk: references they can call, a pilot, a clear changeover plan for the shutdown window.

Put the moves in a calendar, one or two per week, so the list is touched steadily. Long-cycle selling fails by silence, and the calendar is the cure for it. How to map a buyer journey for a purchase that takes covers what to send in the quiet stretches.

An invented example, and its slip

Return to the integrator. (The firm and details are invented to show the method.) Their old routine was a brochure mailed to forty plants in January and a call two weeks later. Replies were few, and the owner concluded that marketing did not work for them.

The slip was the one-time blast. A plant whose shutdown is ten months away is not shopping for integrators in January. Under the sheet, the firm sorted accounts by shutdown date and wrote to the six whose shutdowns came soonest. It kept the other thirty-four on a light, quarterly note with something useful in it, such as a checklist for reviewing an integrator's changeover plan.

Say three of the six replied. One maintenance head asked to be put on the quote list when the shutdown work was scoped. Another wrote back that the plant had just renewed with its current integrator for three years, which was useful to know and moved that account to the quarterly note. Whether the first becomes an order depends on price and timing, which no marketing sheet controls.

What proof should be ready

Because the list is short, the proof must be good. Prepare, before you write to anyone:

• two or three short accounts of past work, with the client's permission to name them or a plain description;
• a one-page capability note;
• a person the buyer can phone who has used you;
• an easy answer to "who else do you work with in our line?"

Do not invent references. If you have few, offer a small paid pilot and say so honestly.

When this approach is not enough

If your buyers are numerous, such as dental clinics or retailers, it is the wrong model; a standard funnel with some volume is correct.

It also struggles when the list is thin because the market itself is small. Then the work is in widening the list, with nearby sectors or neighbouring cities, not in polishing the moves.

And it needs one person to own the sheet. If three people each hold a piece of the list, accounts get touched twice or never.

The weekly twenty minutes

The sheet only works if it is read. Once a week, the person who owns it sits with whoever sells and goes down the rows with a next date in the coming fortnight. For each, ask three things: did the move happen, did anything come back, and does the stage change? Accounts with no next date get one before you leave the room. A row untouched for two months is either dropped or given a reason to stay.

Setting it up

The sheet, the stages and the calendar can be built in an afternoon. The discipline is in reading it every week with the people who sell. If you want help turning your own list into this sheet, see marketing funnel design, and the marketing hub for the wider picture. To start from your own list of buyers, tell us what you need.