Prospects are not in your sales funnel. You are in their Buyers Journey

When I graduated college, I was offered a sales position for a mutual fund company.

At that time this was the sales mantra:
ABC - 𝐀𝐥𝐰𝐚𝐲𝐬 𝐁𝐞 𝐂𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠

I don’t know exactly when, probably in the mid 2000’s, when this aggressive sales approach fell out of style.
And the reason this approach no longer worked was because of this new technology called the internet and the rise of the informed buyer.

So a new sales style took its place:
ABH - 𝐀𝐥𝐰𝐚𝐲𝐬 𝐁𝐞 𝐇𝐞𝐥𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐠

This sales approach emphasized problem solving and solution selling.
And is probably the dominant methodology for most sales teams and by extension marketing teams today.

But, I think we are entering the next generation of the sales framework.
I have no idea what it will be called, but it’s here because of another new technology: GenAI.

GenAI gives buyers immense powers to conduct research, create shortlists and build decision tables at scale.

Before, buyers were able to evaluate 1 or 2 suppliers because of the amount of hours took to
👉 Read all of those websites
👉 Read tons of whitepapers and case studies
👉 Create an excel spreadsheet to compare them all

But with GenAI, buyers can now research and evaluate a dozen or more potential suppliers before they even contact sales team.

By the time they engage with your sales team and become a part of your sales process, buyers are well past the awareness and consideration stages. They are in fact pretty close to making a decision.

In other words, before your prospect becomes your lead, your company is being evaluated and researched online by GenAI.

GenAI agents don't have access to your sales team, so it pulls data from your website. Armed with online data, it then compares your company against the competition so that it's can create its decision tables for its buyers.

So it's time to stop thinking of how to put prospects into your sales funnel.
By the time they get into your sales funnel, they are not looking to be educated on your solution - they already know what they want from their online research.

To get buyers to engage with your sales team, you need to create online content that answers their sales questions so you can be a part of their buyers journey.