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.…