The marketing funnel is the staged journey from awareness to purchase. Top of funnel (ToFu) is about generating awareness and reaching your ICP. Middle of funnel (MoFu) is nurturing interested prospects and building intent. Bottom of funnel (BoFu) is converting high-intent prospects into sales conversations. Most B2B startups over-invest in BoFu (demos, trials) and under-invest in ToFu — which eventually starves the entire funnel.
For example, a healthy B2B funnel might look like: 10,000 ToFu touches per month → 300 MQL → 60 SQL → 12 closed-won deals — with each stage having a clear conversion rate to optimize.
We audit funnel conversion rates at every stage to find the leakiest point — fixing a mid-funnel problem often has 10x the impact of adding more top-of-funnel spend.
Relevant Cactus Services
We implement Marketing Funnel strategies for B2B tech startups every day. Book a free 30-minute call to get a concrete plan for your situation.
Book a free strategy call →Demand Generation
Demand gen is the full-funnel marketing strategy designed to create awareness, generate interest, and drive pipeline for your product.
Lead Generation
Lead gen is the tactical activity of capturing contact information from potential buyers — gated content, webinar registrations, demo requests, contact forms.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
ABM flips traditional demand gen: instead of casting wide and filtering, you identify a list of specific target accounts and run personalized marketing just at them.
Intent Data
Intent data tells you which companies are actively researching topics related to your product — reading articles, comparing vendors, downloading relevant content — even before they fill out a form on your site.
Dark Social
Dark social refers to the sharing and discovery that happens in private channels — Slack communities, DMs, WhatsApp groups, private Discord servers, word-of-mouth — that attribution tools can't track.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
CAC is the total cost to acquire a new customer, including all sales and marketing spend.