The Leaky Funnel: Earn more customers by aligning Sales and Marketing to the way businesses buy

Great read & well worth going through the hypothetical business & sales process from the beginning & encountering all the challenges any normal company would face.

Hugh Macfarlane, who has declared his 20 year goal to be the leading global authority on B2B Marketing, shares his experience and thinking through the vehicle of a riveting story of a board who seeks higher performance and the leadership team who designs and delivers. Written from a refreshing Australian viewpoint (Christmas is in the summertime) this easy to read story contains both quantitative and soft skill insights to measuring and improving the Sales and Marketing Value Stream. If you liked the Lean books The Gold Mine: A Novel of Lean Turnaround or The Lean Manager you will enjoy this story as well! If you are looking for ways to dramatically increase your sales and marketing effectiveness, this work is definitely worth a read.

More useful, more practical than an academic, theorised work, The Leaky Funnel shows both the need and methodology for an aligned customer-supplier buying-selling journey. An easy read, and capable of simple, effective implementation into an organisation which has consultative or enterprise selling requirements.

Entertaining, grounded and revelatory. A must read for B2B sales and marketing professional.

The other reviewers must have read a different book than I read. The one I read is boring and trite. Written as a story of a fictitious plastics company in the UK who is trying to figure out how to sell more, the book fails miserably. Why on earthy would the author choose a commodity vendor to write about, why not a company that sells something a bit more interesting. Ok, you sell tones of raw plastic material that your customers melt down and use to make their products. And, the big breakthrough? Nothing more than investing in the capability to provide prototypes for your customers. Gee, very innovative. And, if you're in the good old USA you'll probably be put off by the UK oriented writing. I got a bit tired of "whilst" and the inept attempts at humor. Sorry, I just didn't get it. I've followed McFarlane's company and get their newsletter and find it excellent. That's probably why I expected more from the book.

After reading both this book and the other reviews, I have to say I agree with everyone to some extent. However, some of the principles espoused by Macfarlane do not translate well to consumer businesses, though I can see their application in B2B marketing and sales. My primary complaint is how slowly it moved, through seemingly endless fictitious business meetings of the Hardbits management team. These "workshops" were nearly as tedious as real-life meetings would have been. I frequently found myself thinking - as I do in actual, interminable meetings - "cut to the chase so we can all get out of here and get some work done!" Also, I found the many cute Aussie colloquialisms distracting. For me, they definitely took away from the real meat of the message, which was useful overall, just too long and boring.

A tech writer who thinks he's Ernest freakin Hemingway... Wow. Soo annoying.

Macfarlane is one of the few sales writers to truly look at the issue of selling from the customer's perspective. His discussion of the 'customer's journey' is both enlightening and practical. Through The Leaky Funnel Macfarlane clearly states his argument, and backs it with a series of practical examples.

In "The Leaky Funnel" Hugh Macfarlane brings a fresh perspective to managing the B2B sales cycle - he shows us how to focus on facilitating our prospect's buying cycle. Every sales funnel leaks, and Hugh's approach is tremendously helpful in getting more of the right sort of opportunities into the funnel in the first place, accurately determining where the buyer is in their decision-making process, and tracking progress through the funnel by paying careful attention to how long opportunities take to move from stage to stage, how and why they stall or fall out of the process, and what to do about it. He also makes a compelling case - since taken up by many other authors on the subject - for lead recycling. A slim book, and a great read. Highly recommended.

A riveting mini-story of an industrial company which was doing it wrong and how they solved their revenue generation by focusing on customer needs and bringing sales and marketing together. Wearing disappointingly well - few companies have solved these common problems in the 10 years since the book was first published. Highly recommended as an easy to follow primer on what is going wrong in sales and marketing departments everywhere and how to fix things.