Middle of Funnel

For a long time the funnel had two halves and nothing in between. The top brought people in, the bottom closed deals, and the stretch between them belonged to nobody.

Month-end reviews kept stalling in the same spot. Marketing would report 3,200 new leads — a lead being anyone who handed over a name and an email address to get something — and sales would answer that twenty of them picked up the phone. The list grew every month, the contract count didn't, and each side privately concluded the other one wasn't doing its job.

What was missing wasn't effort. It was a slot in the model. Someone who downloads an ebook has just learned that their annoyance has a name; they are not going to ask for a quote the next morning. Between those two points sits a stretch of weeks where they line up three or four options and weigh them. Middle of funnel, usually shortened to MOFU, is the name given to that missing slot. Once it had a name, it could also have an owner, a set of deliverables, and a number attached to it.

People at this stage can name their problem, and they know several products exist that claim to solve it. The one thing they don't know is which of those products fits their team. One slot up, in TOFU, sits someone who feels the friction — "I can never find last week's meeting notes" — without knowing there's a category of tools for it. That gap shows up as behavior.

Three signals usually appear together.

1. They search for product names instead of problems. Not "team documentation tool" but "Pagedeck pricing" or "Pagedeck alternatives."
2. They open the pricing page repeatedly. Not once, but three times over a few days, changing the seat count to see what the monthly bill becomes.
3. They go looking for existing users. Reviews, community threads, and a direct message to someone at a peer company who already runs the thing.

The material that works here is different too. At the top, writing that explains the problem does the work. Here, comparison does it — feature matrices, case studies, and webinars. A case study is an account of what changed for a company that adopted the product, with numbers attached. A webinar is a seminar held online, which lets you walk through the screen and take questions in the moment.

So the sentence this stage needs is not "sounds familiar, right?" but "here's how we differ from that other tool." A value proposition — the one-line reason a customer should pick this product — gets tested for real at this stage, because this is the first point where someone reads it next to a competitor's.

Once the list narrows to two or three and the question shifts from "how are these different" to "can we actually put this in place," the person has dropped into the next slot. BOFU is where that shortlist gets its final check.

Three things mark the handoff.

1. The questions change kind. Instead of asking how you compare, they ask whether existing documents can be migrated and whether you can invoice against a purchase order.
2. More than one person shows up. A manager's email address appears alongside the original user's, and someone from security asks for documentation.
3. A date appears. "We're reorganizing next month and need this settled before then" means the comparing is nearly over.

Rather than leaving that read to instinct, teams run lead scoring. Rules get set in advance — ten points for a pricing page visit, twenty for a work email domain, fifteen for opening a case study — and anything over the threshold moves on. Without rules, a sales rep works through the thirty leads that arrived today from the top of the list and spends the whole day on it.

A lead that clears the bar is called a marketing qualified lead (MQL): one marketing considers worth a conversation. From that point the work stops being list-shaped and starts being person-shaped. Anyone below the bar isn't discarded — they get a piece of reading every few weeks until their own timing comes around. Business buyers run on budget cycles, so someone uninterested today often buys four months from now.

"This lead got to MOFU and has been parked there for two months."

They're still comparing and haven't moved toward a decision.

"Our middle of funnel is empty. There's a blog post, and then there's a quote."

Nothing exists to help someone weigh the options after they've learned the problem has a name.

"This quarter let's fill the middle instead of the top."

Stop chasing new visitors and build the material that lets existing ones compare.

At Pagedeck, Ravi counts this stage separately when he plans a quarter. Visits were up 40 percent last quarter while signed contracts stayed flat, and when he looked at where people stopped, the largest group viewed the pricing page three times and then disappeared without doing anything. Give someone nothing to compare with and they postpone the decision.

So instead of writing more posts, Ravi built a feature comparison against the competing tools and two case studies. Sofia said she had fielded the same questions twenty times on sales calls and handed over the list, and the rows in that comparison came from her list. When marketing picks the rows alone, the one the customer actually cares about tends to be missing.

The most common mistake is treating middle-funnel material as a product brochure. It feels reasonable — these people are evaluating, so surely now is the time to talk about the product. But someone at this stage is holding several candidates at once, and a document that only lists your own features does none of the comparison work for them. Publish enough of those and they go unread, and the buyer ends up on a third-party comparison article that decides which criteria you'll be judged on.

Reading the stages as steps everyone climbs in order is the other one. The diagram runs top to bottom, so it looks like a staircase. In practice plenty of people skip the top entirely on a colleague's recommendation and arrive already comparing, and others get deep into comparison, hit a budget wall, and drift back up for six months. Believe in the staircase and you end up planning "double the top and contracts double too," which keeps missing as long as the middle is empty. A stage names the state someone is in right now, not the route they took.