There is no shortage of frameworks for organizing a marketing program. Most of them, in the view of Leadia Solutions OÜ, share the same basic flaw: they describe the funnel as a metaphor for the customer’s mind rather than as an operating system for the marketing team. Leadia Solutions has worked with enough mid-market and growth-stage companies to recognize the consequences of this confusion. Teams build campaigns for each phase in isolation, and no one is responsible for whether the phases actually connect.
This piece walks through the three stages Leadia Solutions treats as load-bearing, and the place where companies most often lose the thread between them.
Stage 1: Awareness that is built to be measured later
Most teams know how to do awareness. The piece that often goes missing is the work of making awareness measurable later. That is, the work of designing the awareness layer so that something useful can be said about it six months from now, when the company is trying to understand which channels actually contributed to growth.
Experts point out that the difference between an “awareness campaign” and an “awareness layer” is mostly a matter of discipline. An awareness layer:
- Uses consistent naming conventions across channels so attribution holds up
- Includes a baseline measurement before the campaign starts, not just an after-the-fact estimate
- Defines what “exposure” actually means in this company’s case, rather than borrowing definitions from generic dashboards
The mistake Leadia Solutions tends to flag in audits is teams that move on from the awareness phase too early. This means the quarter-long process is completed successfully, impressions are satisfactory, awareness is considered complete, and soon after, consideration struggles with not having enough quality participation.
Stage 2: Consideration, where the gap usually opens
The second stage is the one where companies are most likely to get the activity right and the structure wrong. There is plenty of content in the form of case studies, comparison pages, and webinars. The disconnect here is answering the simple question, what does the individual really do at the consideration step?
Consideration is a behavioral stage, not a content stage. The team’s work, at this step, is not to produce more material. It is to design the path a person walks while they are weighing the decision. The companies that get the most out of brand-led informational content are the ones that treat the user journey as a connected system rather than a chain of departmental outputs. That sentence sounds obvious, but the practical implication is unusual. It means that the consideration stage should be planned by people who can see both the marketing artifacts and the product onboarding experience, because the prospective customer is already looking at both.
The Leadia Solutions team highlights several patterns that tend to break the consideration stage:
- Case studies that describe outcomes without the prospect of being able to see the system that produced them
- Comparison content that is openly defensive instead of genuinely informative
- Webinar sequences that build energy and then end without an obvious next step
In each case, the underlying issue is the same. The team has built artifacts in parallel rather than thinking through a path.
Stage 3: The conversion-and-retention stage that nobody owns
The third stage is the one that surprises companies the most. Leadia Solutions notes that conversion and retention are often depicted as separate stages in textbook funnel diagrams, but in practice, they function as a single step. The same patterns that drive a person to convert in the first place are the patterns that determine whether the person stays.
Leadia Solutions OÜ believes the most common organizational failure at this phase is a lack of ownership. Marketing thinks the conversion event is the finish line. Product thinks retention is its problem. Customer success often inherits a user who has already formed opinions that nobody on the marketing or product teams has visibility into. Each function is doing its part. The handoff is what nobody owns.
A few things Leadia Solutions tends to recommend at this phase, based on what tends to work:
- Defining a single metric that crosses the conversion line, so the team that is responsible before the conversion is also responsible for what happens 30 days after
- Treating onboarding as a marketing artifact, not just a product artifact, since it carries the brand promise into the early product experience
- Making the first 90 days of the customer relationship visible to the marketing team in the same dashboard that shows campaign performance
According to research from the Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025 by IBM and Ponemon, organizations that extensively use AI and automation in their security operations save USD 1.9 million on average compared to those that do not. The mechanism is similar to what Leadia Solutions sees on the marketing side. The savings come less from any single tool, and more from the fact that the work across stages has been connected into one operational system.
Where the three stages connect
The reason Leadia Solutions OÜ uses a three-stage model rather than the five-stage or seven-stage versions that are popular elsewhere is straightforward. Three stages are roughly the number of separate operational systems a marketing function can actually coordinate well. Steps beyond three become meaningless, used only to fill presentation slides, while fewer than three are not meaningful.
The framework only does its job, when each phase has a named owner, a measurement plan that is in place before the work begins, and an explicit definition of where it hands off to the next step. Without those three things, even the cleanest funnel diagram will produce campaigns that look organized on paper and confused in the data. Leadia Solutions OÜ highlights that this discipline is as much about the team’s day-to-day tools and habits as it is about strategy. Leadia Solutions believes the funnel is less about the customer’s psychology and more about the team’s discipline.
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