Content & Closing – WTF Is Next

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Funnel Fallacy

Last week, I was working with a client and they wanted a formal “content strategy”.

They are smart folks, and in prep for our call, they sent all sorts of great questions, like “What’s our pillar content?” and “What’s our TOFU approach?”

I sent them this image:

The Content Funnel Is Outdated

The content funnel is an old paradigm. It just doesn’t represent how buyers buy today. We’ve talked about content depth and core theme repetition in issue 66, the need to “flood the zone” with content in issue 57, both in service to how modern buyers buy in issue 53.

The content funnel is built on the understanding of Google search as the PRIMARY discovery mechanism for goods and services. While Google is still REALLY important, what’s more important is to think about your content as the liquid that slakes the thirst of “the buying committee”. (And everybody has a buying committee, even if you are selling to solo decision-makers….)

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The Buying Committee Is Thirsty AF

You need to understand the business mechanics and competing needs of your prospects. (See my video on ROU - Return on Understanding - it is a foundational business growth approach.) In larger businesses, a “buying committee” is made of up business functions that have an opinion or stake in whatever purchase or engagement is being considered…even if your “buying committee” is just a single decision maker, whatever decision they make has to be approved by all the ways that they think about their business - financial, growth, operational, sales, etc.

All those decision makers need information about your offer through a slightly different lens. The CEO lens might be thinking about the impact 12 months from now, the ops manager might be thinking about how it will impact workflows 12 days from now, and the marketing lead might be thinking about budget changes that need to be made BEFORE an agreement can be reached.

All of the roles involved in approving your sale need the information they need.

Think of it this way - each buying committee member loves a different drink…and if you give them a Guinness when they were expecting a Cosmo, your deal is dead.
 

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It’s No Longer About Distance From A Decision

That TOFU/MOFU/BOFU idea is really a description of decision distance. The idea is that your content should be shaped by a prospect’s understanding of your solution. They need to become aware of your solution (TOFU), evaluate your solution (MOFU), decide on your solution (BOFU).

Since buyers are problem-centric (their current state) and not solution-centric (your service), the “everyone through the funnel” mindset falls apart. In the TOFU/MOFU/BOFU world, you’d have to create generic awareness content for every role on the buying committee - the CEO, CFO, CMO, Ops lead, end user, and so on, as if they all start equally far from the decision.

Very few members of the buying committee are at that maximum distance. Most committee members already have some understanding of what’s possible, what they need is role-specific clarity on how you’ll solve their version of the problem. You don’t need to build a full funnel for each role. You need to anticipate their decision criteria and bake that relevance into every touchpoint, whether it’s outreach (content), a discovery call (content), follow-up materials (content), case studies (content), etc.

When you frame content this way, you stop wanting to drag everyone through an artificial journey and start delivering exactly what each decision-maker needs, exactly when they need it. The start of shared thread is simple: “Here’s how we solve this problem,” and as members of the buying committee join the discussion, you adapt to the lens of each person at the table.

Content is an accelerator of understanding that creates sales velocity & keeps that horrendous killer of deals, the IRRELEPHANT away.

OK, So WTF Do I Do Now?

Start with identifying the members of the buying committee and their lens of understanding.

For instance, your committee might look like this:

With this knowledge, you can start thinking about who is the actual operator of the committee - you already know who this is…who do you sell to now? That’s them. Now think about who shares in that decision (even if you’ve never spoken to that person - ever).

Quick story - at my last agency (we worked with multi-channel retailers with lots of locations), I discovered that the customer service head was almost ALWAYS involved in the marketing discussions. I never spoke to them, but I started building sales content that addressed their concerns…

Take all of the pitches that have worked, all of the objections you’ve overcome and all of the moments when your clients said “OMFG - that’s amazing!” and get them into 1 spot.

Those are your content themes.
Now look at each one of those themes as they relate to each of the roles on the buying committee - what is the different perspective that you need to understand. Is your value proposition clear through their lenses? If not, that’s where you start.

Use ChatGPT as a synthetic audience.
Take a sales call or your best LinkedIn posts and ask ChatGPT to think like a specific buying committee role at your target company type. Ask AI what’s missing from the information that you’ve delivered. What else might that role need to understand?

Get that support content ready.
You probably aren’t going to publish the CFO’s guide to retention marketing (though who know, could be a hit…), but you can be ready to talk about the margin impact of amortizing customer acquisition costs over 4 purchases rather than 1.

The Power Really Happens When You Feed Your Buying Committee Their Favorite Drinks BEFORE They Ask

Content can’t be a founder-only game. It’s a team effort.

As a CEO or founder, it’s easier for you to think the way a client CEO might think.

Your Head of Services or Strategy probably has a great understanding of what the senior operational leader faces every day.

Your account manager has a front row seat to what their client-side counterparts think about on a Tuesday afternoon.

You need to leverage that understanding and get that out into field NOW so that base of quality content is there and so that your multi-threaded, deep understanding of client problems is VISIBLE and effectively communicates your value.

Relevance Means More Closes

We’ve talked so much about ROU (Return on Understanding) and its impact on the sales process. But now with idea that you satisfy the role specific needs of your buying committee, the very element that draws opportunities to you - YOUR CONTENT - becomes a relevance accelerant. The faster you build relevance to the needs of the buying committee, the more trust you develop with your prospect. That allows for deeper exploration of their problems, which gives you more information to feed the committee what they need with deeper understanding.

This is the heart of my GEN+ program. Your team has all of the understanding of your impact on your clients. That is fuel that powers relevance. And relevance create deeper opportunities where the prospect isn’t buying your “offer”, they are buying your understanding of their need.

Want to chat about GEN+?

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