In the world of marketing, much of the conversation revolves around PPC, SEO, traffic, and lead generation. But what happens after the click? What happens once someone fills out a form or lands on your site? More importantly, how do we prove the value of marketing to the people who control the budgets – your finance teams?
Speaking Finance: Why Marketers Must Adapt
Marketing teams have long championed metrics like traffic volume, cost per click, and lead generation. These are important. But they’re not enough. If marketers want to protect – and grow – their budgets, they need to start speaking the language of revenue, profitability, and ROI.
That means understanding what finance teams care about. And no, it’s not just MQLs.
This realization came after a personal experience with a CFO. Walking into a marketing budget meeting confident and armed with web metrics, I was hit with the dreaded question: “But how much money did we make?”
I didn’t have the answer.
It wasn’t because marketing wasn’t performing – it was. But I lacked the system, the data, and most importantly, the translation between marketing success and business outcomes.
That’s when everything changed.
The Shift: From Marketing to Revenue Operations
To bridge the gap between marketing and finance, I moved into revenue operations. Our team at Future Group helps businesses – often by untangling messy HubSpot setups – build systems that track performance from first click to closed deal.
The truth is, while brand awareness, traffic, and conversions are all valuable, they are inputs. Finance teams want to hear about outcomes: customer acquisition, retention, revenue growth, and ROI.
So how do we make that shift? How do we create a measurable system that connects the dots between marketing activity and business value?
Introducing the Bow Tie Funnel
Enter the Bow Tie Funnel Methodology, popularized by the book Winning by Design. This model reimagines the traditional sales funnel to emphasize not just acquisition, but post-sale customer value: retention, expansion, and advocacy.
The Bow Tie Funnel splits the customer journey into two parts:
- Left Side: The traditional marketing funnel – awareness through to closed deals.
- Right Side: The post-sale journey – repeat business, referrals, renewals, and evangelism.
This framework encourages equal effort in both halves of the journey, pushing marketers to consider not just how to bring customers in, but how to keep them coming back.
Building Your Own Bow Tie Funnel
To implement this model, you need three foundational elements:
- A CRM: A single source of truth like HubSpot (though others work too).
- Lifecycle Stages: Clear definitions for each phase of the customer journey.
- Unified Criteria: Agreement across teams on what qualifies someone as a subscriber, lead, MQL, customer, loyalist, or advocate.
Step 1: Scoring Subscribers
Begin by defining your ideal customer profiles (ICPs). Use lead scoring models to assign points based on behaviors (e.g., page views, downloads) and fit (e.g., job title, company size). When someone matches your ICP and engages meaningfully, they become a subscriber – fully owned by marketing.
Step 2: Identifying Leads
Increase their score as intent rises. Registering for webinars, engaging with pricing pages, and clicking emails all move them toward lead status. When they show high buying intent – like giving a phone number – they qualify as MQLs, ready to hand off to sales.
Step 3: Sales Qualification
Sales then qualifies the lead, ideally providing feedback on any rejections. This feedback loop helps refine marketing’s targeting strategy. If a lead is accepted, it becomes a sales qualified opportunity.
Closing the Loop – and the Deal
Here’s where sales often swoop in to claim credit. But with a complete bow tie funnel and integrated tracking, marketing can prove its contribution to the deal:
“This lead started as a subscriber via our campaign. We nurtured them with newsletters, retargeted ads, and webinars before handing off to sales.”
This transparency not only credits marketing, but highlights the collaborative nature of revenue generation.
Beyond the Sale: Retention and Advocacy
But the journey doesn’t end at the first sale.
After a customer converts:
- Measure loyalty through repeat purchases.
- Encourage advocacy by tracking referrals, case study participation, or reviews.
- Define evangelists as those who actively promote your brand and drive new business.
Each of these stages requires clear criteria in your CRM, enabling better segmentation, communication, and personalized engagement.
The Payoff: Proving (and Growing) Marketing’s Value
With this model, you can identify bottlenecks and areas of velocity throughout the customer journey. Whether it’s a drop-off between MQL and SQL or between closed deals and repeat business, you can now measure, test, and optimize.
This level of insight doesn’t just help marketing perform better – it helps justify budgets, secure investment, and position marketing as a revenue driver, not just a cost center.
Final Thoughts
Marketing is about more than clicks. It’s about commercial outcomes.
By adopting a full-funnel approach like the Bow Tie Funnel, marketers can:
- Speak the language of finance
- Track revenue impact
- Earn strategic influence
Perhaps most importantly, we can ensure the work we do is recognized and rewarded.
