17 Aug, 2026
The B2B Marketing Funnel: Fix Yours From the Bottom Up
Some businesses that we speak to open the conversation with the same line.
“We’re not getting enough inbound leads.”
You’ll have a dozen people on LinkedIn telling you to build an AI thing, or to pour your budget into a channel you’ve never used before. So you start something, stop it a few weeks later when nothing happens, and move on to the next big thing.
Our founder, Ryan, recommends that you zoom out and look at your whole business as one B2B marketing funnel, with a top, a middle and a bottom. Then fix it from the bottom up.
On episode 106 of the SaaS Marketing Weekly Podcast, Ryan talked through the order he fixes funnels, and why the order you make the fixes in matters more than the fixes themselves.
Listen to Episode #106: Need more leads? Fix your funnel from the bottom up.
What is a B2B marketing funnel?
A B2B marketing funnel is the path a buyer takes from first hearing about your business to becoming a customer. The funnel is split into three stages. The top is awareness and educational content, the middle is consideration assets like case studies and lead magnets, and the bottom is your website, pricing and demo pages.
Most businesses already have some version of this written down somewhere. Where it goes wrong is the order they work through it in.
Why you should fix your funnel from the bottom up
Nearly every funnel guide walks you from awareness (tofu) down to conversion (bofu). They tell you to build an audience, nurture them, and then convert them. Ryan sees it the other way round, and that comes from thinking about B2B demand generation rather than a neat buying journey.
The reason is the 95-5 rule.
Only about 5% of your market is in a position to buy at any given time. The other 95% aren’t ready to buy anything right now, and they’ll need educating over time before they are.
Now think about what that 5% does. They don’t want to read your guide or sign up to your newsletter. They move past every piece of content you’ve ever published and go straight to your pricing or demo page, because you are the solution to a problem they need to fix today.
So if the people who arrive ready to buy still don’t buy, you arguably don’t have a working business yet. Putting more effort into your top-of-funnel content while the bottom of your funnel is a bucket full of holes just loses you leads.
The order we fix things in is simple enough:
- Bottom of the funnel first
- Then the middle
- Then the top
Start at the bottom of the funnel
Bottom-of-funnel marketing is everything a ready buyer touches. Your pricing page, your demo page, your case studies and your sales deck. Someone who arrives ready to buy will land on one of those and decide from there.
Before you touch any of them, start with your messaging, because it’s what all of those pages sit on top of. Fix the pages first and you just get a clearer version of a confusing message.
The messaging test you can run
Before you change anything, find out whether people understand what your business does.
Get a group of people to look at your homepage. Friends, family, existing customers, prospects, or a paid service if you’d rather hear it from strangers. Once they’ve gone through it, ask them these four questions:
- What does this business do?
- Who is it for?
- How does it help them?
- What makes it different from competitors?
If the answers come back muddled and nobody can say clearly what you do, that becomes your first priority. The good news is that it costs nothing but time. Rewrite it, test it on a fresh group, and keep going until people can tell you what your business does without hesitating.
Remember that this messaging is pulled onto every other page on the site, your sales deck, your ads, your newsletters, and whatever your salespeople say on calls. If the homepage isn’t clear, the rest will sound confused too.
The rest of the list
Here’s what else to check at the bottom of your funnel.
- Dated website design that makes you look smaller and less established than you are.
- Thin social proof, where your case studies and testimonials don’t say anything specific enough to be useful.
- A demo page that’s nothing but a form, which is a red flag on any site.
- Missing industry pages, so a prospect can’t find themselves anywhere on your site.
- Raw product screenshots dropped in where proper visuals should be.
- A pricing page that raises more questions than it answers.
Then there’s your sales deck. If every slide is filled with 200 words, has no visuals, and the design is dated, improving that on its own can lift your sales.
Each of these is a job in itself, and we have written about how to work through them in our guide to website conversion rate optimisation. If you would rather watch than read, our webinar on what makes the best B2B SaaS websites convert covers the same ground.
When to turn your ads back on
If your ads aren’t working and the pages they point at don’t convert, turn them off.
We sell paid media, so that’s an awkward thing for us to say, but it’s still the right call. Paid traffic landing on assets that can’t convert is throwing money down the drain.
So move the money. Take it out of your Google Ads, LinkedIn and Meta Ads, and spend it on improving your website or filming an explainer video instead.
Once the bottom of the funnel is genuinely good, Google Ads goes back on first. That’s where the in-market 5% are searching.
By that point you have a slick site, clear messaging, real product visuals, proper case studies and industry pages, with traffic arriving from people actively looking for what you sell. The leads should follow.
What if it’s fixed and leads still don’t come?
If you’ve fixed everything at the bottom of your funnel and the leads still aren’t landing, there are two other factors worth looking at.
The first is your pricing. It might be too high for the market you’re selling into, or it isn’t clear what the buyer gets for their money. Our own pricing page sets out what you get at each level, if you want an example of the format.
The second is product-market fit. That one is harder to hear, and worth sitting with properly before you go looking for another channel to blame.
There is also one thing worth doing regardless of which of those two it turns out to be. Go back through your closed-lost deals. If one was lost because the timing was wrong or the brand didn’t feel right, reach out again. With new messaging and a rebuilt site behind you, deals that were never really lost on substance can reopen.
Then fix the middle of the funnel
The main things that live in the middle of the funnel are case studies and lead magnets.
Around 9 out of 10 websites we look at have case studies nowhere near as good as they could be. They say a version of “we worked with this company, and they were happy”, which tells a prospect nothing. What works is specific numbers attached to a named client, in an industry your reader recognises. You can see how we handle ours on our case studies page.
Lead magnets are the other half of the middle. Webinars, guides, ROI calculators, interactive demos, scorecards and assessment audits all work. The job is to give the 95% who aren’t ready to buy something genuinely worth their time, and to get them into your CRM while they’re still deciding, so that you’re the business they think of when they are ready. Ours all sit in one place in our resources hub.
Top of the funnel comes last
The top of the funnel is your educational and brand awareness content. Your podcast, the blog, thought leadership posts, and anything else that helps your audience solve a problem before they’re ready to talk to you.
This is where your tips and your culture content live. It is the content that gets your brand in front of people and keeps you in mind when they are not yet buying.
The reason it comes last is that it only pays off once the people you’re talking to have somewhere to go when they’re ready to buy.
How the three stages feed each other
Once all three stages are working, they stop being separate projects. Marketers call this tofu mofu bofu, and the part that starts to matter is the handover between them.
Your top-of-funnel content points at something in the middle, usually a lead magnet. Your middle-of-funnel assets point at something at the bottom, like a landing page or a demo booking. So someone reads a blog post this month, downloads a guide next month, and books a demo the month after. None of that happens if a stage is missing.
What good looks like
Gong is worth a look if you want a benchmark. They show their product clearly, the messaging is direct, the social proof is strong, and the site tells you what the product does within seconds of landing on it.
Ours is a work in progress, and our own search data shows it. Rocket SaaS ranks first in the UK for the commercial terms that matter to our business, because those were the pages we fixed first. Our educational content ranks for very little so far. That is the order in this article playing out in real time, and the top of the funnel is the part we are building now. This blog and the podcast are that work.
Start with the four questions
If you take one thing from this, run the messaging test before anything else. Show your homepage to ten people and ask them what the business does, who it’s for, how it helps, and what makes it different. It costs nothing and takes a couple of hours, and it tells you whether the rest of your plan is pointed in the right direction.
For the full detail, listen to this episode and others on our Rocket SaaS podcast channel – SaaS Marketing Weekly, or take a look at our B2B SaaS lead generation service if you’d rather work through it with us.
Frequently asked questions
B2B demand generation is everything you do to create awareness and interest in the problem your product solves, across your whole market and not just the people who are ready to buy today. It covers your content, your ads, your podcast and your organic social.
You measure it on whether the market knows who you are when it does start buying, which is why it’s usually the first thing cut when budgets tighten and the last thing that should be.
Demand generation creates awareness and interest in a problem you solve, across the whole market including people who aren’t ready to buy. Lead generation captures contact details from the people who are. Demand generation feeds the top and middle of the funnel, and lead generation converts at the bottom.
The practical difference is what you measure. Lead generation is judged on form fills this month. Demand generation is judged on whether the market knows who you are when it enters the marke
The five stages are awareness, interest, consideration, intent and purchase. Some models add retention or advocacy on the end, which takes it to six or seven.
We work in three instead, top, middle and bottom, because grouping them is what tells you where to spend. Five stages describe what the buyer is doing. Three tell you which part of your marketing to fix first.
The 95-5 rule states that only 5% of B2B buyers are in the market at any given time, and the other 95% aren’t in a position to buy at all. It comes from Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, published with LinkedIn’s B2B Institute in 2021.
Demand generation covers anything that builds awareness and interest before someone is ready to buy. Educational blog posts, a podcast, thought leadership on LinkedIn, webinars, guides, ROI calculators, interactive demos and paid social all count.
The test is whether it helps someone who isn’t buying yet. If it only makes sense to a person with budget already approved, that’s lead generation doing the work.
Top of funnel is where people first come across the problem you solve, so your blog, your podcast and your social content. Bottom of funnel is where someone who’s ready to buy makes their decision, so your pricing page, your demo page and your case studies.
The middle sits between the two and holds your lead magnets. We fix the bottom first, because that’s where the 5% who are ready to buy land.
Get free ✨ SaaS marketing strategies and campaign ideas in your inbox every Thursday
Free SaaS marketing strategies & campaign ideas in your inbox every Thursday
Receive actionable SaaS marketing ideas to implement in your business
