Welcome to Flatten the Funnel. While the marketing world still talks about filling the funnel, sales want high quality leads that convert. We have a perfect storm where the drive to balance out the CPA cost (due to the influx of spend, the limited impression space, the need for better targeting and the issue of people knowing their data has value) sees a lot of marketeers dumbing down content. The problem is this dramatically degrades the lead quality, and sales needs digitally qualified people to call, not just a bucket of people that once engaged on a vision piece and didn't provide a phone number (because you took that off your form as your CPA increased).

My personal blog is dedicated to the principle of flattening the funnel - and that is about accelerating your pipeline at any given point to connect a sales person to a prospect, with the right information and intent data to move the prospect forward. Integrating sales with marketing to deliver the best results from your campaign investment. In this website we break the content down into something to read, something to learn and our recommended tools to you use at the 'Warm up' stage (CARE), the 'Building Engagement' stage (CONSIDER) and 'Vendor selection' stage (CHOOSE).

Understanding that a prospects marketing journey doesn't start at the form, but the form represents the last stage of their engagement with your content and the first stage of their engagement with your sales teams.