Fuck the funnel. It’s a pipe.

Marketing is just a longer sales pipe

I have spent a large part of my career in marketing, and it took me embarrassingly long to realise that marketing is mostly just a longer sales pipe. This is probably obvious to anyone who has actually sold anything, but less obvious in marketing, where we have spent decades inventing increasingly elaborate diagrams to avoid admitting that eventually somebody needs to buy some shit.

The diagrams are particularly funny because people don't buy things the way our diagrams say they do. Nobody wakes up thinking, Today I shall identify an unmet need, familiarise myself with the competitive landscape and evaluate several differentiated value propositions. You see something and want it. Your friend has one. You like the person selling it. You've heard the name somewhere. It feels expensive in a good way or cheap in a good way. Your boss wants the problem gone. The old one broke. You're bored, horny, hungry or having a midlife crisis. The shop happens to be open. Emotion, moment, ease and opportunity line up and suddenly you own a new thing.

Then your brain's PR department gets to work explaining why this was an entirely rational decision.

This gets funnier the more expensive the purchase becomes, because the amount of rationalisation seems to increase roughly in proportion to the amount of money involved. Nobody buys a €60,000 car because they wanted the fucking car. It has excellent residual value, the safety features are important with children and, actually, once you look at the financing, it would almost be financially irresponsible not to buy it. And no executive team ever chose the €800,000 consultancy because they liked and trusted the people in the room. There was a rigorous process. There were procurement criteria. There was a matrix. Thank God for the matrix.

Of course rational reasons matter. If the car explodes every Thursday or the consultancy consists entirely of idiots, desire has limits. But rationality is often less the engine of the decision than its extremely hardworking lawyer. This is also why the traditional separation between marketing and sales seems increasingly silly to me. Marketing operates further away from the transaction and sales closer to it, but both are trying to influence the same irrational primate who would very much like to believe they make decisions by spreadsheet.

Good salespeople already understand this. They read the room, understand timing, tell stories, notice hesitation and know when to shut up. They understand status, fear, desire and the enormous human need not to feel like an idiot after spending money. A good marketer needs to understand exactly the same things, except further away from the purchase. The job is to make someone recognise the name, remember the stupid jingle, vaguely like the company, desire the object, trust the people or simply have you floating around somewhere in their head when circumstances change.

And salespeople should think more like marketers too. The person sitting opposite you did not materialise in the CRM as a qualified lead. They have a history. They have seen things, heard things, forgotten things and formed opinions about your company before you opened your PowerPoint. Marketing might have started that sale three years ago with an ad they barely noticed, followed by something a colleague said six months later and an article they cannot remember reading.

Then one Tuesday something happens. A budget appears, a CEO changes, a boiler breaks, the company expands to Germany or somebody turns 47 and decides that life is too short to drive a Skoda. Suddenly a pile of half-remembered associations becomes commercially relevant. Attribution dashboards are terrible at this. Human brains are excellent at it. We carry enormous quantities of commercial debris around until the right circumstance gives some of it value.

That is the longer sales pipe. Marketing and sales aren't two different processes joined together by a CRM and a quarterly meeting where everyone politely blames each other for the quality of the leads. They are different parts of the same messy business of getting humans to choose something. Marketing works on memory, emotion, expectation, availability and opportunity over time. Sales works with all of that when the money gets close. Somewhere in there it also helps to have a decent product, which remains annoyingly difficult to solve with a campaign.

Then somebody buys something and everyone involved constructs a beautifully rational explanation for why it happened.

Marketing is just a longer sales pipe. Maybe we should start acting like we all work in the same plumbing company.