I see this mistake all the time.
A company wants growth and better marketing return on investment (MROI) with more qualified opportunities in the pipeline, so it pours the bulk of its budget into the consideration stage. It goes after prospects already showing buying intent and funds the channels closest to the hand-raise, then tells itself this is the most efficient path because the return feels easier to trace.
And for a while, that logic can look smart.
It’s also one of the fastest ways to cap your growth.
Battle 7 in The B2B Marketing Revolution® is this: you advocate for an investment in each stage of the customer journey. That matters because too many middle-market B2B companies keep trying to build scale from the middle of the funnel. They want a bigger outcome without funding the conditions that create it.
The 12 Battles™ Framework is the proprietary methodology I developed to help middle-market B2B CEOs and marketing leaders build research-backed marketing systems capable of scaling repeatable, predictable growth and guaranteed outcomes. It is a full strategic framework, not a bag of tactics. Each battle strengthens the next. And Battle 7 is where leaders stop treating the customer journey like a convenience and start treating it like a growth engine.
Here’s the hard truth: when you invest heavily in consideration and starve the rest of the journey, you create leaks everywhere else.
You feel it in weak brand recognition, lower conversion efficiency than you should be getting, churn that marketing pretends is somebody else’s problem, and constant pressure to squeeze more out of a finite pool of in-market buyers.
That’s a treadmill, not scale.
Consideration-stage-heavy marketing feels efficient because the waste is hidden
Leaders tend to overfund consideration for one simple reason: it looks close to revenue.
The prospect is already looking with an active pain point. The buying window appears open, so the spend feels safer there.
I get it.
But as I wrote in Battle 7:
“Investing only in prospects with a high intent to purchase misses all the opportunities further up the funnel and limits your ability to scale.”
— The B2B Marketing Revolution®
That’s the problem in one sentence.
When you fund only the stage where intent is already visible, you’re relying on demand that has already formed. You’re not expanding demand or shaping preference early, and you’re not building the kind of familiarity that lowers resistance later.
And you’re definitely not protecting the value of the relationship after the sale.
So, yes, the spreadsheet may smile back at you in the short term. But the growth curve eventually flattens because you’re fishing in the same pond with every other company chasing bottom-funnel buyers.
Battle 7 matters because the whole journey is where scale happens
The customer journey is a nice visual for a strategy deck, but that’s not all it is. It’s the lived path a buyer takes before, during, and after the sale. In the book, I frame it in four stages: awareness, consideration, conversion, and post-purchase. Battle 7 calls on leaders to invest in each stage because neglecting any of them leaves growth and long-term business strength on the table.
That’s where a lot of B2B companies get this wrong. Consideration is treated like the whole game while awareness is treated like fluff. Conversion gets labeled as sales’ problem and post-purchase like operations’ responsibility.
Then they wonder why the whole machine underperforms.
It underperforms because the buyer doesn’t experience your company in silos. The buyer experiences one continuous relationship. Every touchpoint influences the next. Every stage either makes the next step easier or harder. The journey behaves like a system whether your budget does or not.
That’s why I keep pushing leaders toward systems thinking. Predictable growth comes from building a complete path, then optimizing how buyers move through it.
Awareness-stage investment makes consideration work harder
One of the dumbest ideas in B2B marketing is that awareness is soft and consideration is serious.
Awareness is serious.
Awareness is where you earn mental availability. It’s where you create recognition before the buying window opens so you can teach the market what problem you solve and why you matter more than your competitors. Battle 7 makes the case that awareness sets the foundation for long-term success, expands the audience, creates demand, and feeds the rest of the journey.
Without that foundation, your consideration-stage tactics are doing heavier lifting than they should. You have to pay more and explain more to get noticed just to convert fewer of the right buyers. You stay more vulnerable to price pressure because the market doesn’t yet understand your difference.
That’s the hidden tax of underfunding awareness.
And let me be blunt: if your company only shows up when a prospect is already shopping, you’re late.
Why leaders keep underinvesting in awareness
There are a few common reasons:
- The payoff takes longer, so it requires more patience.
- Attribution is harder, so weaker marketers undervalue it.
- Consideration metrics look cleaner in dashboards.
- Pressure from leadership pushes spend toward whatever appears closest to revenue.
That last point matters. Bad attribution trains leaders to overvalue the measurable and underfund the meaningful. That’s why Battle 7 naturally connects to Battle 4 in the 12 Battles™ Framework. If you’re still accepting bad data, you’ll keep starving the stages that create future growth.
Consideration-stage spend without conversion support wastes demand
Let’s say you’re generating strong consideration-stage traffic. Good. That still doesn’t mean the machine is healthy.
I have seen too many companies pay to generate intent, then blow the handoff.
- The website doesn’t convert.
- The value proposition is muddy.
- Sales follow-up is slow.
- Messaging shifts once the buyer reaches a human being.
- Offers are weak.
- The process creates friction.
Now your carefully funded consideration strategy is feeding a conversion stage that cannot close what marketing started.
That’s a journey problem, not a channel problem.
In the book’s cautionary tale for Battle 7, the company’s issue wasn’t simply lead generation. The deeper problem was the lack of investment and alignment across the full journey. Sales took too long to respond, the company’s unique value wasn’t being communicated well, follow-up was inconsistent, and customer onboarding created friction that contributed to churn. Once leadership saw the whole path clearly, investment across all stages became the new standard.
That’s the lesson.
A consideration-stage lead is not value realized, but it’s potential.
Post-purchase is part of growth whether you budget for it or not
Here is another expensive blind spot.
A lot of B2B leaders still think of marketing as the thing that happens before the sale. That thinking is outdated.
Post-purchase is where loyalty is reinforced, retention is protected, referrals are earned, and expansion revenue becomes possible. Battle 7 explicitly includes post-purchase because the customer journey doesn’t end when the contract is signed; it shifts.
If you ignore that stage, you create more leaks:
- Onboarding friction increases churn risk.
- Customers don’t fully understand the value they bought.
- Cross-sell and upsell opportunities stay buried.
- Happy customers are never activated into advocates.
That weakens the return on everything upstream.
You can spend aggressively at consideration all year long, but if customers leave too soon or never deepen the relationship, your economics stay weaker than they should be.
That’s why I say this issue is bigger than media mix. It’s a business model discipline issue.
The best budgets fund movement through the full journey
I’m not arguing for equal dollars in every stage. That would be lazy thinking.
I’m arguing for intentional investment in every stage.
Battle 7 never says the budget must be split evenly. In fact, one of the examples in the book shows a better-distributed mix that still leaned heavily into awareness and consideration while preserving support for conversion and post-purchase. The point is coverage with purpose, not symmetry for its own sake.
A smart middle-market B2B budget asks better questions:
- Where is awareness too weak to support future scale?
- Where is consideration underpowered or over-relied upon?
- Where is conversion friction wasting demand we already paid to create?
- Where is post-purchase neglect hurting retention, referrals, or expansion?
That’s how real leaders think about customer journey investment.
They don’t ask, “What is the cheapest place to spend this quarter?”; rather, they ask, “Where is the system leaking, and what would strengthen the whole machine?”
Research should decide where you lean harder
This is where too many teams start guessing.
Don’t guess.
One of the core ideas in The B2B Marketing Revolution® is that market research is a competitive weapon. Research shows you what customers need at each stage, where friction is showing up, why deals stall, why buyers choose competitors, and what messages actually move the market. Without that, you’re budgeting based on assumptions and personal bias. That’s dangerous.
The right investment pattern should come from evidence.
You might discover your awareness problem is bigger than you thought. Or that your consideration content is weak. You may learn your conversion issue is sales response time and that post-purchase friction is quietly destroying lifetime value.
Good research pulls the whole thing into focus.
And once you can see the leaks, you can stop pretending the middle of the funnel is enough.
What leaders should do next if consideration is carrying too much of the load
If this is hitting a nerve, good. That usually means there’s money being wasted.
Start here:
- Map the full customer journey.
Get brutally honest about what buyers experience from first awareness through onboarding and retention. Look for friction, silence, confusion, delay, and drop-off.
- Audit your budget by stage.
Don’t just review channels. Review where each dollar is working in the journey. You may find that your plan is badly lopsided even if the channel mix looks diversified.
- Compare performance across stages.
Look beyond lead volume. Examine conversion efficiency, sales response time, win rate, onboarding friction, churn, and expansion revenue.
- Use research to reset the mix.
Reallocate based on what will strengthen the entire growth system, not just what gives you the easiest quarterly screenshot.
That’s a Battle 7 move. It’s a CEO move.
Stop starving the stages that make growth possible
Pouring budget into consideration can feel disciplined because it looks closer to the money.
But when you only invest there, you’re living off demand that somebody else helped create, or demand that your earlier investments should have built and didn’t. You’re also increasing the odds that weak conversion mechanics and neglected post-purchase experience will dilute the return.
That’s a costly way to run a business.
As Battle 7 makes plain, this is the standard: ADVOCATE for an investment in each stage of the customer journey.
I stand by that because I have seen what happens when leaders finally fund the whole journey with intention. The plan gets stronger, the handoffs improve, the waste becomes easier to spot, and the business gets more scalable because the path buyers travel is no longer full of preventable leaks.
If your budget is parked mostly in consideration, take that as a warning sign.
It may be delivering activity, and it may even be delivering some wins. But it’s probably leaving growth on the table.
And in this market, that’s too expensive to ignore.
By Lori Turner-Wilson, RedRover CEO/Founder, Internationally Best-Selling Author of The B2B Marketing Revolution®: A Battle Plan for Guaranteed Outcomes
Taking Action
The above insights are part of hundreds of best practices found in The B2B Marketing Revolution®: A Battle Plan for Guaranteed Outcomes — the playbook that middle-market B2B CEOs and marketing leaders lean on to scale. Backed by a groundbreaking research study, this book offers time-tested best practices, indispensable KPIs for benchmarking, insights on where your dollars are best spent, and, above all, the proven 12 Battles™ Framework for generating guaranteed marketing outcomes. The B2B Marketing Revolution® is a battle-hardened approach to becoming an outcomes-first leader who’s ready to shake up the status quo, invest in high-payoff market research and optimization, and — yes — even torch what’s not serving your endgame. Download more than 50 templates, scripts, and tools from the book on the Battle Reader Hub.
If you’d like to talk about how to build a marketing engine that delivers predictable results — whether you want to build it yourself or tag in our team to lead the way — we’d be delighted to help you get started.
