You will be able to use the funnel to plan while recognising that real customers skip, loop and stall.
Somewhere in most marketing courses there is a drawing of a funnel. Wide at the top, where lots of people become aware of you, narrowing through interest and comparison, down to a thin spout of customers at the bottom. It is one of the most widely used pictures in marketing, and one of the oldest. An early version from advertising, AIDA, runs attention, interest, desire, action.
The funnel is worth knowing and worth using. It is also wrong about how most people actually buy, and if you forget that, it will send you looking for problems in the wrong places.
The funnel shows something true and useful: at each stage of the journey, fewer people are left. Many people see a post from a tuition centre. Fewer of them visit its website. Fewer again send a message, fewer still book a trial class, and only some of those enrol.
That narrowing is where the funnel earns its place. If you can count roughly how many people reach each stage, you can see where the biggest drop happens. Priya, who runs a maths centre in Tampines, did this for one term with rough numbers. Plenty of local parents saw her posts and her Google Maps listing, and a fair share of them messaged her. Most who messaged went on to book a trial class, which felt like good news until she counted how few families enrolled afterwards.
Without the funnel, she would have done what most owners do when enrolments are low: spend more on posts and ads to get more people in at the top. With it, she could see that the top wasn't her problem. Parents were coming to the trial and then leaving. So her next fix went into the trial class itself and the follow-up message after it, and her ad spend stayed where it was.
The picture suggests that everyone enters at the top and moves down one stage at a time until they either drop out or reach the bottom, which is rarely how a real customer behaves.
People move back and forth. A parent compares three centres, decides on one, then hears a bad story from a friend and goes back to comparing. They research on several channels at once: Google reviews on the phone at lunch, a parents' group chat in the evening, a question to an AI assistant before bed. They stall, sometimes for months, when the exams are over and the worry fades. And some buy on the first visit, skipping most of the stages, because the centre was close, had a slot and the parent was in a hurry.
The biggest exception is a recommendation from someone the buyer trusts. When a friend says "my daughter went to Priya's centre, her marks went up and she actually likes going", that one message can take a parent from not even thinking about tuition to ready to book. They skip comparison almost entirely, because the friend did the comparing for them.
This is why a funnel drawing can mislead a small business. If most of your customers come through referrals, a funnel built around ads, posts and website visits will describe a journey your best customers never took. You might pour effort into the top of the funnel while the real source of customers, happy families talking to other families, gets no attention at all.
Treat the funnel as a question rather than a map, and the question is where people are leaving. Count what you can at each stage, even roughly, and look for the step where the numbers fall most sharply, because that is where your next hour of work should go.
What you should not do is force every customer through the same steps. If someone messages ready to pay, take the booking there and then, even if your funnel says they should first read the brochure and follow you on Instagram. If someone arrives through a referral, don't treat them like a stranger who has just seen an ad. They already trust you a little, and they will notice if you start from the beginning.
One way to keep the model honest is to look at the paths real customers took. Most owners have never done this. They assume people found them the way the funnel says, through a post, then the website, then a message. When they trace a few actual customers, the paths are messier and more interesting: a Google search, a long silence, a chance meeting at a void deck, a referral that sealed it.
That messier picture is what the activity below asks you to draw. Before you start, pick a customer whose story you know well enough to retell over coffee, because you will need the details the funnel leaves out.
Think of a customer who bought from you or your employer and draw the actual path they took, including any loops or skipped stages.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).