Most B2B funnels end at awareness and pray. What does it look like when every stage actually works? These full-funnel marketing examples have the answer.
B2B marketing teams have a severe funnel problem. One they aren’t aware of.
The teams pour budget into building awareness and lead gen, but lose leads somewhere in the middle. Not to competitors, but to silence.
The fix is not more ads or a better landing page. It is building a journey where every stage feeds the next. That is the whole premise of full funnel marketing, and the brands doing it well are not just getting more leads. They are getting better ones that convert faster and stick around longer. If you need a structural breakdown, this guide to full-funnel marketing strategy explains how the stages connect in practice.
Here are five full-funnel marketing examples doing this right.
What Makes a Full Funnel Marketing Strategy Actually Work
Most companies treat the funnel like three separate departments, often misunderstanding the real difference between demand generation vs lead generation and how each supports different parts of the journey. Awareness is a social media problem. Conversion is a sales problem. Retention is someone else’s problem.
Nobody owns the whole thing. That creates fragmentation that leaks.
Every stage is part of a single narrative in full-funnel marketing. The message at the top creates an expectation. The middle delivers on it. The bottom converts it, which is why structured lead nurturing strategies are critical to maintaining momentum between first touch and sales readiness. When those stages are disconnected, buyers feel it, even if they cannot articulate why they stopped engaging.
Two things make or break execution.
First, message continuity. The tone and promise must remain consistent from the first ad to the final sales call.
Second, behavioral data. A user’s activity in the first stage should shape what they see in the next one, which is where a clearly defined lead scoring model becomes essential. The loop becomes a full circle here.
The funnel doesn’t feel like aggressive marketing, but as the natural next step.
Full Funnel Marketing Examples That Are Driving Outcomes in 2026
1. Salesforce: Let Buyers Sell Themselves Before Sales Steps In
Salesforce does not wait for a sales rep to create a champion inside a prospect account. It builds one first.
Trailhead, Salesforce’s free learning platform, trains thousands of professionals on its products every year. These are end users, admins, and RevOps managers who then become internal advocates when faced with a buying decision. By the time procurement is involved, Salesforce often already has someone in the room making the case.
At the top of the funnel, the State of Sales reports and Salesforce+ content reach decision-makers where they already spend time. No product pitch in sight. Just useful research that gets shared and cited. At the conversion stage, ROI calculators and personalized demos give economic buyers the numbers they need to justify the spend internally.
The funnel works on two audiences at once: the people who use the product and the people who approve the budget.
2. IBM: ABM Done Right Is Its Own Full-Funnel
IBM does not try to reach everyone. It picks its targets and works them methodically from top to bottom, demonstrating how ABM vs lead generation approaches differ when precision matters more than volume.
The Institute for Business Value reports and executive roundtables earn credibility with C-suite buyers before any sales conversation starts. This is not broad awareness content. It is precise. IBM knows exactly which titles and company profiles it is writing for, and the content reflects that.
What makes it a true full funnel play is the handoff. Sales and marketing work from shared data, so a CFO who reads an IBM paper on AI risk does not then receive a generic outreach email. The follow-up references what they read and speaks to their specific context.
At the conversion stage, IBM runs proof-of-concept engagements that allow hesitant buyers validate the solution before committing. The message remains cohesive, from the first research report to the boardroom conversation.
The whole game’s about consistency across a long and complex B2B sales cycle, especially in SaaS environments where SaaS product marketing, content, and sales alignment determine velocity.
3. Intuit: Nobody Buys Accounting Software. They Buy Peace of Mind.
QuickBooks buyers do not want accounting software. They want to feel like their business finances are not a disaster waiting to happen. Intuit builds its entire funnel around that distinction.
At the top, it shows up when financial stress is highest.
Tax season content, cash flow guides, and comparison resources meet SMB owners at the exact moment they are searching for help. There is no hard sell. Just genuinely useful information from a brand that happens to sell the tool they need.
The middle of the funnel is where Intuit earns the conversion before it even happens.
Free trials are designed to get users to their first real win as fast as possible, a strategy closely tied to reducing churn in SaaS by accelerating time-to-value. A reconciled bank account. A clean profit and loss view. Once someone has reorganized their workflows around QuickBooks, switching becomes its own kind of cost.
By the time the trial ends, the decision to pay has already been made emotionally. The billing page is a formality.
4. Mailchimp: A Brand Voice So Consistent It Becomes Its Own Funnel
Most B2B software companies sound like B2B software companies. Mailchimp decided not to.
From a cold social ad to the onboarding flow and a support email, the tone remains consistent, reflecting a disciplined SaaS content marketing playbook rather than isolated campaigns. Warm, a little funny, and straightforwardly useful. That might sound like a branding choice, but it is also a funnel mechanic. When the voice is consistent, every touchpoint reinforces the one before it. Trust compounds instead of resetting.
At the top, Mailchimp’s campaigns signal clearly who the product is for. Not enterprise IT teams.
Growing businesses with a marketing person or two who need something that actually works. The free tier does not just capture leads. It teaches. Users learn email fundamentals inside the product, which means the product itself demonstrates its own value.
When feature limits kick in as a list grows, the upgrade prompt lands at exactly the right moment.
The ROI is obvious because the user experienced it. Retention follows because Mailchimp builds community, not just software subscriptions.
5. Caterpillar: How a 100-Year-Old Brand Rebuilt Its Funnel for the Digital Buyer
Equipment buyers used to walk into a dealership and let a relationship do the work. That is still true at the finish line. But the research now occurs online, long before anyone picks up the phone.
Caterpillar adapted. Content around equipment lifecycle costs, fleet telematics, and sustainability in construction reaches buyers during the research phase through search and LinkedIn. reinforcing why SEO for SaaS and industrial brands alike is foundational to early-stage visibility. It is not flashy. It is just the right information at the right time for someone chasing a six-figure purchasing decision with confidence.
The middle of the funnel is where the digital investment really pays off.
Cat’s online configuration and cost-of-ownership tools let buyers model scenarios before they reach a vendor. This is a substantial shift for an industry built on relationship selling. But the tools don’t cut vendors out of the loop. They make dealer conversations better.
A buyer who already knows what they need and what it will cost is not starting from scratch. They are ready to commit. At the conversion stage, Cat Financial removes the last major obstacle by offering financing that turns a capital expenditure into a manageable monthly decision.
What These Full Funnel Marketing Examples Have in Common
The pattern across all five can’t be missed.
None of them relies on a single channel or a single moment to convert. Every one of them builds something in the middle of the funnel that creates real value before asking for a sale. Salesforce trains future champions. Intuit gets users to their first win. Mailchimp teaches while the product demonstrates itself. IBM proves its thinking before pitching its product. Caterpillar gives buyers the tools to make their own case.
The middle of the funnel is where most B2B strategies fall apart, often because teams optimize for raw lead generation metrics instead of true lead qualification. A few nurture emails are not a middle. It is a placeholder. These brands replace it with something a buyer actually wants to engage with.
The other thread running through all five is that data connects the stages. which is why tracking the right SaaS metrics across acquisition, activation, and retention becomes non-negotiable. What someone does early shapes what they see next. That is what makes the journey feel coherent rather than coincidental.
How to Apply These Full Funnel Marketing Lessons to Your Own Strategy
You do not need Salesforce’s budget to borrow these principles. You need clarity on three things.
1. First, check your message continuity. Pull up your top-performing ad and then open the page it sends people to. Does it feel like the same brand? Same tone, same promise, same visual language?
If there is a gap, fix that before you touch anything else. Every mismatch is a reason for someone to leave.
2. Second, figure out what your middle looks like. If the honest answer is “we send some emails,” you have work to do. It does not have to be a free product tier or a full learning platform.
It could be anything- a tool, an assessment, a live event series, or a content library, built around a pain point the buyer is actively trying to solve. The bar is simple: does it deliver value before asking for commitment?
3. Third, connect your stages with a signal. You don’t need a complex martech stack to start. You just need to know what a lead engaged with before they reach your sales team, and ensure that context is not lost in the handoff.
These full funnel marketing examples are not anomalies. They are what a deliberate, connected strategy looks like at scale, much like the frameworks outlined in this SaaS marketing playbook. They are what a deliberate, connected strategy looks like at scale.
The principles are the same whether you are selling SaaS or heavy equipment. Build the journey as it matters at every step, because to your buyer, it does matter.
