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Terminus, Explained

What is Terminus?

Terminus could very well be the marketing solution you crave. The account-based marketing is something that could change everything you thought you knew about marketing. 

Terminus is a company that devised an account-based marketing program which they say doesn’t just change the sales funnel you’re familiar with. Terminus completely flips the funnel, turning it into something that’s new, exciting, and effective. The results are so exciting that Terminus coined the term and created the #flipmyfunnel event.

Terminus was created in 2014 with the idea of helping B2B businesses boost their profit margin. The company was so successful that within just a few years the company has gone from just three innovative individuals to a large team of hard-working, creative B2B marketing experts who aren’t afraid to think outside of the box. The company has set up locations in on both the East and West coast in order to keep up with the demands of several thousand clients.

How Terminus Works

Terminus takes the traditional marketing funnel that many businesses have been using for years and turns it upside down. There are 4 distinct stages to Terminus’s flipped funnel

Identify the Ideal Customer

Identifying the ideal customer is the tip of the reversed funnel. This involves creating a customer persona and creating marketing material that attracts the members of the target market who are most likely to make a purchase to the business. This stage is all about defining the target market.

Expand the Flipped Funnel

The expand stage of Terminus’s flipped funnel involves using your business’s information and connect it to the ideal customer persona. This phase is about helping you connect with people who you’ll eventually engage with and hope to convert into long time customers. Many businesses use multiple customer personas to help them set up the expand stage of the flipped funnel.

Engage Consumers

The engage phase of Terminus’s flipped funnel is when you basically kick your marketing plan into gear. At this point, you use marketing tools such as live events, social media blasts, webinars, e-books, social media marketing, and more to communicate with and really connect with the members of your target market. The purpose of this stage is to start generating customer velocity and to start nudging the target market towards making a purchase.

Advocate

One of the mistakes many businesses make is ignoring their customers after they’ve made a purchase. The advocate level of the flipped funnel focuses on helping business owner convert first-time customers into long-term customers and to get the advocating your business, which helps direct even more traffic to your website. Turning customers into customer advocates is the final goal of the advocate phase.

This is often the most important and ultimately most profitable part of Terminus’s reverse marketing funnel.  

Who Benefits from Terminus?

B2B businesses who aren’t happy with the results their current marketing program is generating and want to try something different will benefit from Terminus’s flipped funnel approach to marketing. The same is also true for businesses who feel they need a strong connection to their customers. Businesses who do a great job landing a sale but struggle to attract repeat business should also consider the flipped funnel. 

Businesses that already use Terminus include:

  • Domo
  • GE
  • Masergy
  • NetSuite
  • Rosetta Stone
  • Salesforce
  • Snowflake
  • Ttec
  • Vidyard

Account-based marketing like Terminus’s flipped funnel is a good choice for most businesses. SiriusDecisions conducted a marketing study that revealed that when a business incorporated account-based marketing into their sales program, they experience a revenue growth of 24% and their three-year profit margin was 27% better than it was prior to adopting the account-based marketing techniques.

The businesses that see the best results from Terminus’s program are:

  • Businesses with a large target market
  • Businesses that deal more in volume and have a low sales deal size but a high volume of sales
  • Businesses who specialize in a short sales cycle
  • Businesses that don’t directly work with lots of influencers

Who isn’t Terminus for?

While Terminus’s flipped sales funnel has been a good fit for some business, it’s not for everyone.

  • Businesses that should look for different marketing options include:
  • Businesses that have a small target market
  • Businesses that work with a large number of influencers
  • Business with an extended sales cycle
  • Businesses that have large sales deal sizes

If you are in the process of changing the overall scope of your business, the type of product/service you offer, or the way you utilize social media and influencers, there’s a good chance that you’ll benefit from Terminus’s account-based marketing program in the future.

Terminus Alternatives

Terminus alternatives include:

  • Amplifr
  • Clearview
  • Demandbase
  • Mapp
  • Marketing 360
  • PressRush
  • Prezly

 It’s worth noting that the size of your business, the industry you’re in, and the size of your target market are important factors in determining if you should use Terminus or one of the Terminus alternatives.

Pros of Terminus

The main benefits businesses who have already employed Terminus’s flipped funnel approach to marketing include:

  • Improved efficiency in customer acquisition
  • Highly personalized marketing material
  • Improve ROI
  • It’s easy to identify high-value accounts
  • Quicker sales process
  • It’s easier to align marketing and sales 
  • Improve cost efficiency
  • Improved use of marketing resources
  • Account-based marketing usually generates faster results than other marketing options
  • Shorter sales cycle
  • You dedicate less time to marketing plans/leads that fail to reach expectations
  • You get to use actual data that helps you align your marketing efforts with your sales
  • Improved marketing efficiency
  • It’s easier to collect information about how big an impact your marketing efforts have on your sales
  • It works well with your branding

Cons of Terminus Integrations 

While there are numerous benefits connected to using Terminus’s flipped funnel approach to marketing, there are also a few drawbacks.

The cons connected to Terminus include:

  • Compared to other types of marketing programs, Terminus requires a great deal more content
  • Terminus requires that you delve deeper into researching your target market
  • It’s not always a good fit for all marketing accounts so you may have to employ a few different marketing strategies
  • It’s still a relatively young marketing program
  • You’ll probably have to invest in a different platform before you can launch the flipped funnel

Interested in learning more about Terminus? Feel free to contact us and schedule a free strategic session. We’ll use the meeting to discuss your current and future marketing goals and help you decide if Terminus is a good fit for your business.