Chapter 6

Moments, not funnels

A funnel is a picture of your process. A moment is a picture of the buyer's. Only one of them is where a choice gets made.

What the funnel gets wrong

The funnel assumes buyers enter at the top and move down in order. In large purchases they arrive most of the way through, with a ranked list.

It also averages everyone together. It can't say which need brought them, or which need you keep losing.

What a moment is

A moment is one kind of buyer at one step of their journey, with a need and a question. "Which scheduling tool suits a field team of forty?" "Who can refinance my loan before the fixed rate ends?"

The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute calls the triggers behind these category entry points: the cues buyers use to reach into memory when a buying situation arises (Ehrenberg-Bass). Professor Jenni Romaniuk, who developed the idea, stresses that they're about the buyer and not the brand.

A trigger and a moment are different units. The trigger is the cue in memory: "wages ate the takings again." The moment is a cell on the map: a café owner, comparing options, after that trigger. One trigger can open several moments.

Parts of this aren't new, and the credit matters. Journey mapping has crossed buyer types with journey steps for years. Google named the "Zero Moment of Truth" in 2011: the research a shopper does before buying (Google). In 2015 it added "micro-moments", "intent-rich moments when decisions are made and preferences shaped" (Google). What this book adds is the scoring. Each moment is checked stage by stage, and AI makes each one something you can ask.

AI made the moment visible

For two decades buyers squeezed their need into a few keywords. Given a machine that talks back, they say more.

Semrush studied more than 80 million clickstream records from ChatGPT (Semrush). With its search feature switched off, prompts averaged 23 words. With search on, they averaged 4.2, much like a classic search. That's one snapshot, and the gap is still moving.

Those extra words are the moment itself: the situation, the constraints, the worry. People tell a machine what they once told only a salesperson.

The map

Marketers have long aimed for the right message, to the right person, at the right time. Segmentation listed the people and journey mapping listed the steps. Few lists went down to the question each buyer asks at each step. The map is that list. List the steps of the journey down the side and the kinds of buyer across the top. Each square is one buyer at one step. That square is a moment, and in each moment the seven stages either hold or fail.

Here's a filled one, for the bookkeeper for cafés. She's an invented example. Her offer is "Bookkeeping for cafés. Your wage cost against takings, every Monday by nine."

The map shows her where to start. Her offer answers one worry, wage cost, and that worry peaks while owners compare. So she chooses three cells and leaves the rest for later.

That grid is your market. It turns a vague ambition, "grow awareness", into a specific one: win this moment, for this buyer, at this stage.

Start small: fifteen moments is enough to see where you're losing. Chapter 12 shows how to build your own.

In the age of AI the old maxim gains a clause: the right answer, to the right question, at the right time.

The moment nobody maps

One moment appears in every market and on almost no map: renew or switch. Most maps leave it off, because no team owns it. Marketing stops at the sale, and sales moves to the next deal.

Two ways to grow

A brand grows by winning more of the moments that already exist, or by making new ones. Category creation, problem education and seasonal campaigns all make moments. They give a reason to ask to people who had none.

When nobody is searching for what you sell, that's the first job: create the moments.

Seen versus selected

A brand can appear a million times and still be absent from the twenty questions that decide its sales. That's why Selectability is counted moment by moment, never in general.

A map of moments shows where choices are made. It doesn't yet say how they're made, and that differs more than most marketing advice admits.

Whose evidence this is. Semrush sells SEO and AI-visibility tools. Google sells advertising, and named micro-moments and the Zero Moment of Truth in its own marketing. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute sells research to sponsor brands.