Wayne Peterson has written an excellent piece about an old sales idea that has gotten new attention and refinement, the “sales funnel.”

There's a lot to be said for the funnel idea because it describes the sales process, creating order out of many sales prospects and suspects matching their needs, interests, and motivations with your sales offerings. But it tends impose the structure of an orderly assembly-line manufacturing process into sales management, and inadvertently creates the impression that sales and marketing are simple and unchaotic. The sales process is complex and sometimes difficult, but the funnel idea helps convey its basics. It does not impart the subtle aspects of the sales process.

You still need worthwhile products, appropriate pricing, and proper distribution; automating or funneling bad products might produce a positive blip in the short term but it can't be sustained in the long term. All parts of the marketing mix must work together. I've found that understanding sales and marketing processes can be helped with the insights of famous dead economist Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850), who said “When, therefore, a man absorbed in the effect which is seen has not yet learned to discern those which are not seen, he gives way to fatal habits, not only by inclination, but by calculation.”

Bastiat is explaining that the identities and natures of all economic actors, actions, and effects are not always evident or discernible, or easily understood. In economics and market research, I always worry that the way some data are presented to audiences creates illusions of precision and simplicity.

There is also a perception that data are the causes of data, that marketplaces can be captured in computer spreadsheets. Data are the recording of the decisions and actions real people make at particular points in time in the context of their overall circumstance. Data are history, and forecasting the future with historical data inadvertently becomes a forecast of the past. In much of the discussions about marketing automation I hear, I worry about the same issue.

The funnel concept and marketing automation software are critical tactical tools for today, but are best used when guided by informed strategic thinking. As we say in our book This Point Forward, marketing automation is essential for print businesses to use, and is a service opportunity for many to offer. Wayne's thinking puts it in fresh perspective and worthwhile strategic context.