The latent pipeline concept that I layed out last week is one that sounds good on its surface, but as a German colleague of mine would say, "where is the detail?" The key to operationalizing latent pipeline is having a really good grasp of marketing from the customer's perspective, that is, online. What I call this (and this is my term) is online topography. I call it this because it reminds me a lot of a topographical map. You have features on the map (mountains, streams, trails) and you also have altitude, a scalar field that permeates the whole two-dimensional plane.

This is similar to what a fully fleshed out online topography looks like. To make one, you need three things:

1. A use case, for example, moms searching for nursery schools in Washington, DC
2. A pipeline, from the customer's perspective
3. A map of all the places customers go to achieve this use case

Then, you sum all of the customers up (i.e. integrate the function) and you have your topography. There's a lot of math that can go into this, and there's a lot of research that must, but at its simplest, we're still just talking about a graphical representation.

I've included a B2B-relevant use case below, in this case "IT Professionals Purchasing Blade Servers." I totally made this up, and it's based on 30 minutes of research, but it gets the point across. Notice, it uses the same type of graphic as we used to describe latent pipeline:

On the left-most side of the pipeline are "company sites". This would include all of the places customers go on specific companies' sites. I also threw "tele" and "field sales" in there. Notice this is a small piece of the pie. Then there's "relevant public universe" which is where all the pretty icons are. These are the topic-specific sites that customers use to research, price, discuss, and decide through the buying process. These are important for two reasons: (1) you can get on these properties, either through PR or straight advertising, and, (2) you can cookie users on these sites and retarget them on the third slice, "other public behavior." This is the long tail that I discussed in detail in this post.

What's not shown in this visual is the importance of each area of the map, the "altitude". For example, I've got Google on here, which would disaggregate into all of the search terms people use for blade servers, which might be the highest mountain on the map by a long shot. I have mixed display and search together here, because I think that's OK. This is not an internet taxonomy, it's a map, which is different. We'll do taxonomies another time.

So, once a marketer has a topography, it becomes possible to start thinking about marketing mix optimization from a whole different perspective, that is, from the customer's perspective and totally digitally. New dimensions of targeting also open up when you think of your site, relevant internet, and audience non-relevant internet together, but linkable via cookieing.

B2B marketers are intimately familiar with the concept of a funnel or a pipeline. Whichever term you use--you might use both--the ideas are the same from company to company. A lead is entered into a system at some point in time. It might be someone inquiring on the web site, or it might even be a name from a list. From this point onwards, that lead can either move forward, do nothing, or drop out of the system. The resulting graphic looks like a funnel.

Having covered that ground, let me state up front that this post is not about pipeline management, acceleration, nurturing, systems, or email marketing. This post is about a fundamental problem with the funnel concept as operationalized at most B2B marketing organizations today, and what I think is a pretty seminal idea on how to fix the problem.

The problem with funnels is that they're missing a lot of the folks that are actually going through the purchase process. This is because we as marketers are dependent on our own internal systems to track these folks. Our own websites; our own emails; our own sales reps; you name it. However, we know there are many individuals with needs that are going down an awareness / consideration / trial / purchase process that we are completely oblivious to. I call this the latent pipeline. For analytics geeks, this should be a comfortable term. It is the implicit pipeline that we don't have information about but that we know exists.

I'd argue that the latent pipeline can be broken into two parts. The first part is the upstream part of the funnel that could be defined as "pre-company web site". This is when latent prospects are starting to think about their needs and what they're going to go do. Today, this is going to be largely addressed via search, assuming that we can intersect people when they type in search terms. There is no question that this is a powerful tool for intercepting prospects, but I'd argue that there's an even more powerful way to target them. More on that later.

The second part are the folks that are going through our stages, as defined via our systems, that we don't know about. So, when we have 10 leads that are "qualified", there are another 50 leads out there that are being qualified by other companies. We don't know about them, so chances are, we'll never get to pitch to them. Ouch! That's pretty harsh.

So, we've defined a pipeline that has an explicit and a latent component, that will look something like this:

This fundamentally changes the concepts of B2B marketing, when you think about it.

• Acquisition marketing really becomes about understanding the top of the latent funnel
• The scope of CRM can be expanded to include not just leads / opportunities in our CRM system, but to leads / opportunities in other company's CRM systems

I'm not suggesting that we all go do industrial espionage and steal other firm's CRM data. I'm suggesting that through online audience ownership, we can extend the CRM layer from the explicit to the latent, via display advertising. I already posted on this once, so read that one. Basically, I'm arguing that we need to take a few steps to own the latent pipeline:

1. Understand our audiences
2. Map their typical B2B Internet behavior and map their pre-buying cues
3. Build analytical models to tag them
4. Target them via display advertising before they ever come to our site
5. Keep doing search marketing

In other words, create a rich, targeted online tapestry that is always on, and no longer shackled to company web sites and email. B2C marketers are ahead on this, but B2B has so much more potential.

I know this needs more detail. Next post will be on how one might do the steps above and make it work.