9 Nov, 2026
Fix the Offer First: What to Offer at Every Stage of the B2B Marketing Funnel
“Book a demo.” “Start a free trial.” Every competitor in your category is making the same two offers, which gives a buyer no reason to pick yours over anyone else’s.
Most teams respond by spending more. More budget into LinkedIn, more into Meta, a new channel to test. The channel only decides who sees the offer, so a weak one reaches more people and still gets ignored. Fixing what you put in front of people at each stage of your B2B marketing funnel usually does more than a budget increase.
Ryan James, our Founder, and Jamie Skeels, our Head of Strategy, worked through the offers that do that job on episode 119 of SaaS Marketing Weekly.
What is an offer in B2B marketing?
An offer is something of value you give a prospect in exchange for something of theirs, whether that’s their time, their contact details or their money. Every stage of the funnel has one, and most businesses never stop to design them.
“What you offer is often the biggest predictor of success in what you’re doing.”
Jamie Skeels, Head of Strategy, Rocket SaaS
Jamie’s argument is that this is one of the biggest levers available to you, and it sits upstream of the channel. Work out the offer before you build the campaign, because creative and targeting can’t rescue an offer nobody wants.
What are TOFU, MOFU and BOFU offers?
TOFU, MOFU and BOFU are the top, middle and bottom of the funnel, and what changes is how much you can ask for. At the top nobody knows you, so ask for a little time and no money. In the middle they know you, so ask for more time. At the bottom, ask for a meeting.
That gives you one rule to apply at every stage: ask for minimal time and give maximum value in return. Get that balance wrong and the offer fails, however good the thing behind it is.
Plenty of B2B SaaS businesses crowd everything into the bottom, which leaves most of the B2B funnel unused. Episode 109 makes the wider case for why top-of-funnel content is crucial to building pipeline.
Top of funnel offers that make people care
“Five ways to do LinkedIn ads” is a perfectly reasonable webinar. Nobody clears their diary for it, and any of your competitors could run the same session next week.
We ran a LinkedIn ads webinar of our own and positioned it around the result instead: how we generated £2 million in pipeline from LinkedIn ads. Same subject, same hosts, a completely different reason to attend.
Ryan’s addition to this is to promise people what they walk away with. Say they’ll leave with a playbook they can put to work that afternoon, then bundle a workbook you send through afterwards. Our post on 350 webinar sign-ups with $0 spend covers how we promote them.
The psychology behind a good offer
Jamie frames offer design around what makes people care, which comes down to a handful of principles that persuasion research has tested for decades. Cialdini’s seven principles of persuasion are the reference point most marketers already know.
Social proof and results do the heaviest lifting in B2B. A number someone else achieved is more persuasive than a description of what you’ll cover, which is exactly why the £2 million framing beat the “five ways” version.
Authority works alongside it. Tie an offer to a recognised name in your market and take-up rises, because people want time with that person specifically.
Scarcity is powerful where it’s real, and obvious where it isn’t. Only use it when the limit exists.
Then there’s the labour illusion, from Buell and Norton’s research at Harvard Business School, which found that people valued websites more when they could see the work going on behind them. If a report took six months to put together, say so.
The customer growth story webinar
Ryan’s favourite play for clients is to pick your biggest or most successful customer and build a webinar around how they grew from X to Y, with your product appearing as one of the steps along the way.
It works because most of your prospects want to be where that customer is now. A founder or CFO will give you 45 minutes for a growth blueprint from a company they recognise. They won’t give you 45 minutes for a product demo dressed up as a webinar, which is where a lot of our clients start.
Treat your lead magnet as an offer
A lead magnet is anything you give away in exchange for contact details or time, and the same layers apply. Lead it with a result rather than a topic. Attach a name with authority behind it. Show the work that went into it. Bundle something tangible the reader keeps.
A report built on your own campaign results asks for the same email address as a generic guide to B2B advertising, and only one of them is worth handing it over for.
The cold email that got a 25% response rate
Ryan’s best top-of-funnel offer was an outbound play that predates AI. He set up a Google Alert for articles containing “SaaS” and “funded”, so any funding announcement triggered a task. A virtual assistant logged the company, the article and the amount raised in a spreadsheet, then found the founder’s email through Apollo.
The email congratulated them on the raise, named the article, and said he’d spotted some conversion issues on their website. Would they like a Loom video walking through the fixes? Reply yes or no.
We sent around five a day and got roughly a 25% response rate, which Ryan still rates as the highest he’s seen on any cold campaign. His estimate for the same email ending in “can we jump on a call?” is under 1%.
“You can’t ask for time when they don’t know who you are.”
Ryan James, Founder, Rocket SaaS
The difference is what the prospect has to spend. Typing “yes” costs five seconds. A call costs 30 minutes with a company they’ve never heard of. AI has since made personalised openers common, so the specific play is harder to pull off now, and the principle behind it holds.
Middle of funnel offers: events, workshops and consultations
An event sits in the middle of the funnel because of what it asks for. A webinar wants 45 minutes at a desk. A live event wants travel there and back, an evening, and 90 minutes in the room. People only give you that once they know who you are.
People come to events to meet each other, and they stay away when they expect to be sold to. Ours run like a live webinar, with a presentation and an action plan people leave with, plus the networking around it.
Jamie’s example from outside B2B SaaS is Alex Hormozi’s one-day workshops in Las Vegas, where attendees put their own business problems to the room and his team works through them live.
Both versions lean on an authority figure, which is the part most businesses don’t have. If there’s nobody in your company with that pull yet, pay someone credible in your market to co-host with you and borrow theirs.
The free strategy call that became our number one offer
Our website used to say “request a quotation”. You filled in a form, got a sales call, and received a quote afterwards, which is the same offer as every other agency.
We changed it to a free SaaS marketing strategy call with Ryan. He looks at your marketing plan, goes through your website, shares his screen and digs into your LinkedIn ads, and you leave with free advice whether or not you work with us. We only run five a month.
That’s still our number one offer and where most of our leads start. It works because it sits higher up the funnel, where the funnel is wider, and more people are still problem-solving rather than shopping for a supplier. You can book a free SaaS marketing strategy call if you want to see it from the other side.
Group consultations
One-to-one calls have two problems. You need somebody who can advise properly and sell at the same time, which is a rare combination, and they don’t scale when customer lifetime value is low.
The group version fixes both. Get a room of prospects together, present, then take questions on their own businesses while everyone else listens and learns from the answers. Keep direct competitors out of the same room.
Ryan’s example is an AI provider selling workflow tools to charities. Invite charity leaders in, present, then work through a real onboarding problem live. His estimate is that at least 10% of that room would want a sales conversation afterwards.
Bottom of funnel offers beyond “book a demo”
The demo and the free trial keep their place at the bottom of the funnel. The job is making them a better offer and adding alternatives alongside them.
Start by selling the demo properly. Plenty of B2B SaaS sites put a heading and a form on the page and leave it there. The good ones tell you how long the call takes, show a photo of the person you’ll be speaking to, list 3 to 5 things you’ll learn, carry social proof, and bundle something in, like a PDF playbook sent afterwards.
Foot-in-the-door offers
Carve off a piece of what you sell and give it away. Jamie ties this to reciprocity: give somebody something and they’re more inclined to give something back.
Cognism’s free data sample is the clean version. Rather than asking a prospect to swap suppliers and learn a platform, they hand over real data to use. The AI provider from earlier could do the same by offering one onboarding agent free, or for £100.
The free audit that won our business
We bought this way ourselves. While we were weighing up ISO certification, a supplier offered us a free high-level audit. It skipped the deep dive into our systems and analysed what they could see publicly, with a report and a score at the end.
It cost us almost no time, so we said yes. We then paid them a lot of money to take us through the full process.
Build your B2B marketing funnel around the offer
Specific beats generic. Tie your offer to a result someone achieved, a person with authority behind it, or something that happened.
Then match what you ask for to where people are. Little time and no money at the top, more time in the middle once they know you, a meeting at the bottom when they’re ready to talk.
Check the offer before you put budget behind it. Our LinkedIn and Meta ads work starts there for exactly that reason.
Models split the funnel differently, and five-stage versions usually run from awareness through to purchase. The labels matter less than what you ask for at each stage. A prospect who has never heard of you can’t be asked for the same commitment as one who’s been reading your content for six months.
Map an offer to each stage rather than running the same demo request at all of them.
TOFU, MOFU and BOFU are the top, middle and bottom of the funnel. At the top people don’t know you, so you ask for a little time and no money. In the middle they know you, so you can ask for more time. At the bottom they’re ready to talk, so you ask for a meeting.
Top of funnel reaches people who aren’t looking for a supplier yet, so the offer has to give value with almost nothing asked in return. Bottom of funnel reaches people who are ready to buy, so a meeting is a fair request.
The mistake is running bottom-of-funnel offers at a top-of-funnel audience and concluding the channel doesn’t work.
Content made for people who have a problem and aren’t yet shopping for a solution. Webinars, guides, podcasts and posts that teach something useful on their own, without requiring anyone to buy anything.
The test is whether somebody who will never become a customer would still find it worth their time.
Start from a result rather than a topic, then layer on what makes people care. Put a name with authority behind it, show the work that went into producing it, and bundle something tangible the reader gets to keep.
Ask whether you’d hand over your own email address for it. Most lead magnets fail that test.
A benchmark report built on real campaign data, a playbook or workbook from a webinar, a free audit of the prospect’s website or setup, a template, a data sample, or a recording of a customer growth story.
The strongest ones carve off a real piece of what you sell, because they prove the expertise rather than describing it.
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