Why “full-funnel marketing” agencies are getting it wrong (and what actually works)

If you’re searching for full-funnel marketing agencies, you’re probably looking for the wrong thing entirely.

That’s because what most call “full-funnel marketing” isn’t marketing — it’s revenue operations. More specifically, it’s a sales development representative (SDR) at the helm of a bottom-up approach to managing the entire buyer journey.

The reality is that full-funnel marketing doesn’t start with marketing strategy or ideas. It doesn’t work top-to-bottom. That approach takes too much time, costs way too much money, and is difficult to outsource to external partners.

Today, effective B2B full-funnel marketing starts with pipeline goals:

• Quarterly revenue targets
• New deal targets
• Sales cycle reduction, etc.

Then, it works backward from there, covering the “full funnel” from bottom to top.

In this article, we’ll go into why the commonly peddled top-down full-funnel marketing doesn’t work, what does, and who your best options for a service provider are.

What is full-funnel marketing (and why most agencies have it wrong)

Here’s how Belkins’ co-founder, Michael Maximoff, defines a full-funnel marketing company:

Michael is saying that full funnel marketing does not start with awareness and then hope for conversions. It starts with specific revenue goals, then relies on an SDR to masterfully guide prospects through each stage of buyer awareness to final conversion.

But you may ask, why is it called full-funnel marketing and not sales?

Revenue function vs. marketing function

Most agencies will tell you that full-funnel marketing is an expanded marketing service, covering awareness, lead generation, and nurturing using traditional channels like content syndication, PPC, and social media. 

The problem with that approach is that it focuses on marketing metrics like clicks, impressions, and marketing qualified leads (MQLs). 

Your marketing department has its place within full-funnel marketing, but it primarily operates in support of sales goals, such as securing 100 new demos, 10 new deals, etc.

This begs the next question: Why not start with traditional marketing metrics? Why not build a funnel from the top down?

Why traditional top-down approaches fail

The old agency model starts with broad audience targeting, driving traffic to content, generating leads, and hoping those leads eventually convert. This creates a disconnect between marketing activities and actual revenue outcomes. 

The result is you’ll end up with plenty of MQLs but struggle to convert them into meaningful sales conversations. You need a revenue-focused strategy connecting the dots between awareness and deals.

For example, we helped an investment platform client who had worked with other vendors that generated leads, but the client wasn’t seeing meaningful conversions.

Our client’s representative stated,

Moreover, our client’s previous lead-to-conversion rate with other agencies barely reached 3%.

Instead of going after more MQLs, we took a revenue-focused approach. One that entailed:

• Developing a deep understanding of the client’s ideal customer profile (ICP) and finding leads that went beyond the basic criteria
• Focusing on high-quality prospects that our client viewed as top priority
• Using a performance and results-driven approach that meant every action contributed as directly as possible to their bottom line.

By starting with revenue in mind, our strategy would leverage not only their sales department but also their marketing channels differently. In this case, we were able to deliver 30+ monthly meetings with qualified prospects. No more unqualified leads.

The bottom-up revenue strategy that actually works

Begin by identifying your top 500–1,000 target accounts. Map buying committees. Build personalized engagement strategies around specific deals you want to close.

Then, work backwards using whatever channels you have available — LinkedIn, email, calling, content, webinars. Orchestrate them through SDRs who treat every touchpoint as a sales conversation, not a marketing impression.

How we selected these full-funnel marketing agencies

The market for full-funnel marketing is evolving. We’ve found that the bottom-up, revenue-focused approach is the way to go.

However, we recognize that businesses are at different stages of growth, with different needs and budgets. So, we balanced our selection criteria based on traditional top-down versus revenue-focused bottom-up philosophies. Here’s what we took into account:

• Revenue-focused agencies that align with our bottom-up methodology.
• Traditional full-funnel providers that maintain their reputation as prominent players in the full-funnel marketing field.
• Specialized agencies that dominate specific aspects of the funnel (awareness, conversion, retention).
• Proven track records with measurable results, regardless of methodology.

The best full-funnel marketing agencies

You already know we’re going to tell you we’re the best, but we also admit that we’re not for everyone. We’ve curated this list of the best companies in different categories:

1. Belkins — Best for revenue-focused full-funnel marketing
2. FullFunnel.co — Best for unifying sales and marketing for revenue operations
3. Tinuiti — Best for performance marketing
4. DAC Group — Best for enterprise-to-local marketing strategies
5. FullFunnel.io — Best for B2B tech companies with complex sales cycles

1. Belkins

We are a B2B lead generation and appointment-setting agency. Founded in 2017, we helped pioneer the modern revenue-driven approach to full-funnel marketing.

We at Belkins still operate as a sales-first organization that uses SDRs to orchestrate integrated customer journeys. Our methodology starts with your pipeline goals, leverages your existing channels, complements them with others, and utilizes your existing marketing assets through strategic outreach.

We have over 120 specialists who are trained in and experienced at bridging the gap between your sales and marketing teams.

Here, you can watch a short video of Michael explaining Belkins’ omnichannel approach to full-funnel marketing. As he goes on, you’ll see how an SDR is central to integrating sales and marketing and providing an integrated customer journey.

While the omnichannel process is complex, it’s built from the ground up so that it directly contributes to your bottom line at every stage of the journey through every marketing channel.

Channels:

We work with whatever channels make sense for your situation, then integrate them into a seamless customer experience. Common activities we use include:

• Cold email outreach with data-backed segmentation designed for pipeline generation.
• LinkedIn lead generation targeting decision-makers within identified buying committees.
• Intent-based calling that follows up on preexisting interactions to drive conversations.
• Strategic content creation that includes using personalized content, case studies, and webinars as conversation starters rather than passive marketing materials.
• Google Ads and PPC retargeting to maintain engagement while SDRs engage with your target accounts.

Industry focus:

We help mid-market and enterprise companies across multiple sectors, focusing on B2B organizations. These industries include:

• Manufacturing
• Healthcare
• Finance
• IT services
• SaaS
• Marketing and creative agencies
• Consulting
• Construction
• Logistics
• Telecommunications

Our service model works best for companies that have longer sales cycles and need account-based engagement rather than broad audience targeting.

Notable clients:  General Electric, TechData, Cisco, Berkeley College, OutSystems, HP, Zendesk, Sharp, Clean Energy, FCS Roofing Software

Pricing:  We offer monthly retainers and custom, scalable pricing tailored to specific pipeline goals and project scopes.

We use this ROI-driven pricing model because it better aligns with our clients’ revenue targets.

Strengths:  

Our superpower is our human-centric approach to digital marketing, using SDRs as the primary orchestrators of customer journeys rather than simple automation.

While we’re big on hiring and keeping the best talent around, we’re also total nerds. We have a data-centric methodology that tracks performance across all channels with measurable systems to provide benchmarks for continuous pipeline growth.

Years of cross-industry experience have enabled us to design customized lead journeys that prioritize actual conversations and deal closure over vanity metrics like clicks and impressions.

Proprietary products:

• Folderly: an email deliverability platform that ensures maximum campaign reach for revenue-focused outreach
• Charge: an email campaign optimization and tracking tool designed specifically for sales-driven engagement strategies

Case studies:

• General Electric: We scheduled 135 in-person meetings over seven months for GE HealthCare, significantly outperforming their goal of 30 meetings at a single conference, with lead-to-appointment conversion rates ranging from 4.2% to 13.8%.
• IGS: Our team arranged 330 appointments over 15 months through 77 targeted email campaigns, consistently achieving 120% of monthly KPIs by focusing on high-level decision-makers.
• An investment platform client: We improved their lead-to-conversion rate from barely 3% to 30+ monthly qualified meetings by developing a deep understanding of their ICP and focusing on prospects that met strict qualification criteria.

What clients say:

2. FullFunnel.co

Company overview:

FullFunnel is a global revenue operations services company based out of San Francisco. They started in August 2014 with the goal of becoming the “KPMG” of sales and marketing.

Today, they operate across ten countries. FullFunnel.co believes that traditional sales and marketing departments are outdated concepts. They advocate for unified revenue operations structured around three core pillars:

1. Demand generation
2. Pipeline management
3. Customer success

Channels:

FullFunnel uses channels for both inbound and outbound demand generation. Specifically, they leverage:

• Owned/earned media
• Paid advertising
• Outbound prospecting through various channels
• Comprehensive tech stack management

Industry focus: Their portfolio includes:

• Publicly traded tech firms
• Middle-market organizations backed by private equity
• Early-stage startups supported by prominent venture capital groups
• Manufacturing and industrial sectors

Notable clients: GLOBO, Finairo, Collette Health, PantherRx, Volt, LiquorSplit, and ISP Painting.

Pricing: FullFunnel offers three distinct staffing models:

1. Flex (for short-term or first-time outbound efforts)
2. Grow (for building internal teams without fixed operational costs)
3. Enterprise (for large organizations requiring global team maintenance.

Specific pricing details are not publicly disclosed.

Strengths:  

Their core function lies in dismantling decades-old sales and marketing silos. They use engineering and AI-driven solutions to accompany comprehensive revenue operations. They aim to transform their clients’ internal revenue operations rather than focus on traditional marketing services.

Proprietary products:  

FullFunnel Flex is their signature offering for scalable outbound prospecting models.

They also provide comprehensive tech stack management services, helping clients navigate over 5,000 available sales and marketing technology platforms.

Case studies:

Case studies include:

• Building a scalable outbound prospecting model for LiquorSplit.
• Generating $250K in qualified pipeline within the first 45 days for ISP Painting.
• Helping Volt achieve higher efficiency with lead transfer to Salesforce.

What clients say:  

Tyler Robinson, Commercial Operations Director at GLOBO, praised their comprehensive approach: 

3. Tinuiti

Company overview:

Tinuiti is the largest independent full-funnel marketing agency in the United States. They were founded in 2004 and are headquartered in New York with over 1,200 employees overseeing $4 billion in annual digital ad spend.

Originally known as Elite SEM, Tinuiti has evolved through multiple acquisitions, including CPC Strategy, Email Aptitude, OrionCKB, Amazon-specialist Ortega Group, and Bliss Point Media.

In 2024, Tinuiti became a product-led company with the launch of their proprietary measurement suite. This led to their current mission, “Love Growth. Hate Waste,” which focuses on eliminating perceived inefficiencies in their clients’ growth plan.

Channels:

Tinuiti specializes in what they call “The Triopoly” — Google, Amazon, and Facebook — which represents over 90% of all digital spend.

Their channel expertise includes:

• Search
• Social
• Amazon & marketplaces
• TV & audio
• Programmatic advertising
• Mobile apps
• Email marketing
• Streaming media
• E-commerce optimization

Rather than treating channels in isolation, Tinuiti uses a cross-channel strategy for performance marketing campaigns meant to activate audiences across disconnected touchpoints.

Industry focus:  

Tinuiti works with both startups and global enterprise clients. They take particular interest in brands investing in scaling through performance marketing. In terms of industries, their portfolio includes:

• Retail
• Consumer packaged goods (CPG)
• Home services
• E-commerce
• Fashion
• Technology sectors

Notable clients: Tinuiti’s impressive client roster includes major brands such as Amazon, Brooks Brothers, Blueair, Poppi, Wrangler, SPARC Group, Bombas, BB&T, Ethan Allen, Etsy, Jet.com, Rite Aid, Seventh Generation, and many more.

Pricing:

Tinuiti’s fees are highly customized based on client needs, geography, ad spend, staffing requirements, setup costs, and specific services required.

All contracts revolve around a flat-based retainer plus a percentage of spend model, though specific pricing details are not publicly disclosed.

Typically, they work best with brands spending at least $15,000 per month on Amazon advertising or those with established marketplace presence ready to scale.

Strengths:

Tinuiti’s expertise lies in “The Triopoly” of Google, Amazon, and Facebook, which represents the most valuable media for connecting with customers.

They’ve earned the highest possible rankings in The Forrester Wave™: Media Management Services for Media Measurement & Attribution. This is a result of their ability to guide marketers’ next best decisions rather than just reporting past performance.

The agency has been recognized as “Best Place to Work” by Fortune, Ad Age, and Digiday, as well as being named “Agency of the Year” by Bing and U.S. Search Awards.

Proprietary products: 

Bliss Point by Tinuiti stands out as their flagship measurement suite. It features six distinct products. Each is powered by leading-edge econometric principles, modern machine learning, and AI.

Their legacy technology platform Mobius unites every data touchpoint with three products (MobiusOS, Mobius Apps, and MobiusX). This helps them unify, optimize, and activate performance marketing data.

Case studies:

Success stories include:

• Helping Blueair achieve a 68% reduction in acquisition costs for new-to-brand customers and a 328% increase in return on ad spend using Amazon Marketing Cloud.
• Delivering a 380% increase in conversions for Wrangler through a partnership with Snap, work that was recognized by CEO Evan Spiegel.

What clients say: 

Client testimonials consistently highlight Tinuiti’s ability to handle data-driven optimization. One Walmart client noted:

4. DAC Group

Company overview:

DAC Group is an award-winning digital media agency that’s been around since 1972. Over 50 years of experience have taught them a lot about delivering outcomes for enterprise-to-local brands.

DAC Group is headquartered in Canada. They have over 600 employees across 12 offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

They started as a Yellow Pages directory advertising leader and have evolved into one of the world’s most recognized full-funnel media agencies. Their philosophy is “always one step ahead — looking to the future for solutions to today’s problems.” Their core mission is to connect brands with local audiences and generate powerful outcomes.

Channels:

DAC Group uses both digital and traditional channels and services, including:

• Paid media
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Social media marketing (SMM)
• Display advertising
• Mobile marketing
• Content strategy
• Local presence management
• Reputation management
• Data analytics
• Creative production
• Web development
• Print/online directory marketing

DAC Group’s approach to marketing is what they call the “TotalSERP” methodology — a cohesive strategy that blends paid, organic, and local search to dominate search results across interconnected consumer touchpoints.

Industry focus:

DAC Group specializes in enterprise-to-local companies. They create national brand strategies and implement them down to the street level.

Their client portfolio spans:

• Advertising & marketing
• Art
• Entertainment & music
• Professional services
• Financial & payments
• Healthcare & medical

Notable clients:  DAC Group’s client roster includes Carfax Canada, MNP (a chartered professional accountancy and business advisory firm), Fit4Less, and The Fresh Market.

Pricing: DAC Group does not provide transparent pricing information publicly. They customize their fee structure based on client needs, scope, and performance requirements.

Strengths:  

DAC Group’s advantage lies in their unique enterprise-to-local specialization. This lets them create national brand strategies and execute them at hyper-local levels with surgical precision.

They also excel at making proactive budget adjustments between different media partners, shifting resources between upper- and lower-funnel strategies based on real-time results.

Proprietary products:

IRIS stands out as a fully integrated marketing suite that orchestrates all their applications. It uses AI-enabled platforms to integrate strategy, media, analytics, creativity, and reporting.

TransparenSEE serves as their local marketing dashboard, which is used to reveal insights and opportunities.

Their TotalSERP methodology serves as a proprietary framework for search optimization. It treats paid, organic, and local search as interconnected elements of the consumer journey.

Case studies:

Case studies include:

• Helping Carfax Canada increase revenue and improve awareness in key markets like Quebec and non-metro Ontario through media-mix modeling optimization.
• For MNP’s Consumer Insolvency business, DAC applied their TotalSERP methodology to business-driving terms, resulting in them winning the 2024 Global Search Awards for Best Canadian PPC and SEO campaigns.
• Their work with Fit4Less delivered the most net-new subscriptions the brand had achieved in any year, particularly in the valuable premium tier.

What clients say:

While specific client testimonials weren’t detailed, DAC’s consistently high Net Promoter Score of 9.3 out of 10 reflects exceptional client satisfaction.

Managing Director Adam Luck explains:

5. FullFunnel.io

Company overview:

FullFunnel.io is a specialized account-based marketing (ABM) and demand generation consulting firm. They were founded in 2017 by Andrei Zinkevich and Vladimir Blagojevic, who bring over 30 years of combined experience in B2B marketing.

The company operates under the philosophy that real growth can only be driven in-house, positioning itself as an external marketing partner. They provide training, playbooks, and support to build evergreen internal growth engines rather than traditional outsourced services.

Channels:

FullFunnel.io operates across ABM channels, relying on initiatives such as:

• Targeted outreach
• Virtual events
• Social engagement
• Content marketing
• Email campaigns
• Personalized engagement strategies

Their approach also emphasizes virtual events with diversified strategies, including top-of-funnel events for awareness creation and 1-to-few webinars addressing specific account challenges.

Industry focus:  

FullFunnel.io specifically targets companies with high annual contract value (ACV) exceeding $50,000 and long sales cycles over 180 days. They typically work with businesses generating $5–10 million in ARR that are looking to expand into new markets, particularly North America.

In terms of industries, since 2007, they have focused exclusively on two verticals:

1. High-value B2B tech companies (enterprise SaaS, blockchain technology, hardware)
2. Service-based companies (software development, consulting, cybersecurity, DevOps as a service)

Notable clients: FullFunnel.io’s client portfolio includes TYK, along with marketers from established companies like Zoho, Siemens, Topdesk, and Sirris.

Pricing: FullFunnel.io does not provide transparent pricing information publicly. Their consulting model is highly customized based on client needs and scope.

Strengths:

FullFunnel.io’s edge comes from its deep niche expertise within high-ACV B2B companies with complex sales cycles. They claim to have gained this from being “in the trenches” for over 15 years.

More specifically, they excel at knowledge transfer and building in-house growth engines, providing assets such as:

• Step-by-step playbooks
• Templates
• Marketing and sales dashboards
• Tech stack recommendations
• Process maps

Proprietary products:  

FullFunnel.io has developed comprehensive ABM frameworks for high-ACV B2B companies.

Their proprietary offerings include detailed positioning guides featuring 11 positioning strategies, specialized templates for ABM campaigns, and structured playbooks for international market expansion.

They’ve also created the Full-Funnel Summit and educational webinars like “0 to ABM” that serve both as lead generation tools and knowledge-sharing platforms.

Case studies:  

Success stories include:

• Helping a smart home hardware company generate 34 sales opportunities and 5 new clients through a targeted virtual event strategy.
• For TYK, they successfully coached and kick-started an ABM-driven demand generation program in early 2022, providing strategic guidance and operational training that accelerated inbound and ABM activities.
• Creating a specialized webinar addressing market expansion challenges, which was attended by 12 companies and resulted in 2 new clients.

What clients say: 

Phil Ruttens from TYK provided detailed feedback on their experience: