How Slowdown in Middle of the Funnel Affects Sales & Marketing

‍Global Fishing Markets and Demand Generation

Every morning during the fishing season, boats and ships across the world set out, braving waves and weather to cast wide nets into vast oceans. These nets catch nearly 2 trillion fish annually, fueling a $230B global fisheries industry. Yet, nearly 10% of all fish caught are discarded due to damage, inedibility, or lack of market value, a significant waste. This inefficiency mirrors a major challenge in B2B go-to-market teams: pipeline waste, especially in the middle of the funnel (MoFU).

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The MoFU Problem: Like Fishing With the Wrong Net

Casting a wide net in B2B means generating volume at the top of the funnel (ToFU): mass email campaigns, webinar signups, badge scans at events. It builds awareness, but also results in a high volume of unqualified or mismatched leads. These leads get passed to sales development teams (SDRs), who struggle to separate the high-intent prospects from the rest. And just like discarded fish, much of this "catch" ends up as pipeline waste.

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ToFU-MoFU-BoFU Breakdown

• ToFU: Drive awareness and interest.
• MoFU: Nurture interest and identify real buying intent.
• BoFU: Convert intent into revenue.

The MoFU’s role is critical: qualifying leads, deepening engagement, and pushing real buyers forward. But when it slows down, the whole GTM machine suffers.

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Top 3 Causes of MoFU Slowdown

1. Targeting the Wrong Persona A common mistake: assuming a successful persona in one region will perform equally in another. A Director of Demand Gen may work in the US, but in EMEA, InfoSec may hold more decision power due to GDPR and privacy laws. Without real-time insight, reps waste time chasing personas that won’t convert.
2. Sales Sandbagging To manage expectations, reps may push out deal timelines. It skews forecasting, clogs the funnel, and delays insights into what’s working.
3. Pseudo-Pipeline Bloat If SDRs qualify unfit leads into the pipeline, MoFU fills with fake momentum. Sales ends up spending discovery time realizing the deals aren’t real, lost hours that could have gone to actual buyers.

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The Fix: Rebooting the MoFU With Systems, Not Just People

Validate ICPs and Personas in Real-Time

Marketing and sales teams must recognize that ICPs and buying personas evolve. Instead of relying on quarterly analysis, RevSure’s Buyer Intelligence and Cohort Intelligence modules provide live segmentation and cohort-level insights to identify which personas work, and which don’t, by region, channel, and stage.

Filter What Reaches SDRs

‍Use systems to ensure only qualified leads make it to CRM. Tools like RevSure's Funnel Health Intelligence can identify leads likely to convert and flag those that will waste your SDRs’ time.

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Introduce a Qualification Playbook

‍Establish a clear checklist and automate validation rules. A wrongly qualified lead wastes more time downstream than it saves upfront.

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Close the Feedback Loop

‍Sales sees real objections. Marketing controls messaging. But unless these insights flow both ways, campaign spending and outreach stay misaligned

With RevSure’s Unified Funnel View, marketing can act on feedback from sales about rejected leads in real time, adjusting campaigns and refining ICPs on the fly.

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The Revenue Cost of MoFU Inefficiency

• Higher deal durations
• Inaccurate forecasts
• Poor pipeline coverage
• Misspent marketing budget
• Reps stuck chasing ghost deals

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Final Words

The MoFU is not just a bridge between lead gen and closed-won. It’s the filter where intent is qualified, value is communicated, and deals are prioritized. When it slows down, your funnel becomes murky. When it’s optimized, the pipeline becomes predictable.

With RevSure, you don’t need to wait until next quarter’s QBR to know what’s working. See what’s moving, and what’s stuck, right now. Turn your MoFU from a bottleneck into a growth engine.

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