Mastering the marketing funnel: My simple 5-stage framework for the SaaS buyer journey

No matter how big or small your marketing team is, consistency in language is important.

Setting clear definitions for objectives, key results, and goals helps you communicate effectively. Definitions empower your team and business to discuss opportunities and options to influence leading indicators that have the potential to influence the ultimate goal of marketing — to drive profitable customer action.

I lead marketing at a B2B software-as-a-service company. This piece covers the marketing and sales funnel stage names and definition I use throughout the entire marketing and sales process. (Check out this piece for a deep dive on my marketing funnel tactics.)

These definitions are clearly defined and documented. Everyone in my company knows these names and definitions. It’s been incredibly helpful to have meaningful discussions without constantly explaining (and re-explaining) these funnel stages.

Simple frameworks can drive efficiency. Not just in your marketing team, but in all business units throughout your organization.

Anyway, this is how I do it.

Targets

A target is a member of our audience who hasn’t yet visited an owned web property.

This term essentially describes the people with whom I would like to share my brand, products, and services.

Target audience is a pretty well-defined term: These folks are your ideal buyers. This funnel stage is meant to reflect that industry-wide definition for my company.

Again, targets are ideal prospective buyers who haven’t discovered the brand or its solutions. Targets are at the top of my marketing funnel. This is the widest net you’ll cast to reach potential buyers. This audience type is where true marketing is the primary means to generate new demand.

Suspects

A suspect is an audience member who visits an owned website property.

People in this funnel stage haven’t given me any information. They’re simply website visitors and nothing more. So they haven’t yet filled out a form, became an email subscriber, or signed up for anything that would indicate greater engagement levels.

Prospects

A prospect is someone who has willingly provided their email address, most often in exchange for some type of free value, like a tool or downloadable template.

Of course, *free* deserves a little caveat in this definition because of GDPR. Let’s just say, prospects are email subscribers who wanted gated content, newsletter access, or similar value that is exchanged for information or data (e.g. not a monetary transaction).

Prospects empower another high-growth opportunity: Marketing automation and email marketing.

The way I see it, suspects and prospects may share the same experiences. The one difference is that I can add email to the list of channels to reach prospects.

Leads

A lead is someone who tries a self-serve product or schedules a product discovery call.

CoSchedule offers a couple freemium products: Headline Studio and Marketing Calendar. A lead is simply a freemium user for these product lines.

CoSchedule’s Marketing Suite product is best-suited for small- and medium-sized enterprises. This product line has an end-to-end sales process that requires conversations with an account executive before purchasing. A lead for Marketing Suite is someone who schedules their product discovery call.

Essentially, leads have demonstrated high levels of product interest but haven’t yet purchased.

Customers

A customer is someone who is paying for your product.

The present progressive tense in that definition is very intentional: It’s a current action, an ongoing action, and an unfinished action.

Part of marketing’s role is to attract, convert, and retain long-term, successful customers. The keyword for the customer stage in the marketing funnel is retain.

Marketers make a promise to potential customers of the value they will achieve with your product. Marketers are therefore responsible for helping customers actualize that value. Without this, there is little chance for retention.

A promise the product cannot keep means you don’t have product-market fit and/or your positioning is ill-conceived.