We’re joined by Mikael Dia, founder and CEO of Funnelytics, a visual journey mapping tool built to help marketers optimize conversions and better communicate strategy.
Mikael shares how the rise of multi-touch, non-linear customer journeys inspired Funnelytics, and how the platform goes far beyond funnel mapping to uncover what drives results. We explore how marketers are using visualization to align teams, boost performance, and turn complex data into clear, actionable insights.
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About Funnelytics
Funnelytics is a visual funnel analytics platform designed to help marketers track, analyze, and optimize the entire customer journey, without needing to be a data expert. By combining intuitive whiteboarding with powerful analytics, Funnelytics transforms complex data into clear, real-time visual maps that show exactly how users move through your marketing funnels.
Whether you’re a hands-on marketer or prefer expert support, Funnelytics empowers you to grow smarter by identifying what’s working, what’s not, and where to focus next.
Time Stamps
00:00:18 – Guest Introduction: Mikael Dia
00:00:39 – Mikael ‘s Background and Journey in Digital Marketing
00:01:53 – The Evolution of Customer Journeys in Marketing
00:05:04 – Identifying the Core Problem Funnelytics Solves
00:08:36 – Understanding Funnelytics Customer Base
00:10:51 – Differences Between B2B and B2C Marketing Analytics
00:12:35 – Shifts in Customer Behavior Over the Years
00:14:29 – Sales Involvement in Selling Funnelytics
00:18:06 – The Importance of Branding in Marketing
00:20:07 – The Impact of AI on Marketing Trends
00:25:48 – How to Connect with Mikael Dia and Learn More About Funnelytics
Quotes
“Learn as much as you can about how the puzzle fits together…Marketing can be a machine, and it should be thought of as a machine. It shouldn’t be thought of as how creative your next campaign is or what your logo look like and, and a lot of the stuff that falls under brand, it’s all of it, it fits together to create a machine to turn strangers into customers. Learn as much about each puzzle piece to understand how can you architect that machine, for any company.” – Mikael Dia, founder and CEO of Funnelytics
Follow Mikael:
Mikael Dia on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikaeldia/
Funnelytics website: https://www.funnelytics.io/
Funnelytics on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/funnelytics-io/about/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
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Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Mikael Dia at Funnelytics
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Mikael Dia
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I’m joined by Mikel Dea. Mikel is the founder of Funnelytics. Welcome to the podcast, Mikael.
Mikael: Thank you for having me, Mike.
Mike: It’s great to have you on the podcast. Do you want to start off and just give us a bit of a background about you? Tell us a little bit about your career and why you decided to found Funnelytics.
Mikael: Yeah, no problem. So I’ll give you the high level so that I don’t bore you with my backstory. But basically, I’ve been a digital marketer and online entrepreneur for well over a decade now. And I’ve built three businesses at this stage, two seven figure businesses, one eight figure business. The two seven figure businesses were in me running my own agency and also a nutrition coaching business that I was a partner in. And then my figure business being my software company and i really started this back in around two thousand nine two thousand ten where i became kind of obsessed with this idea of how do i take a stranger and turn it into a customer and. Really, I studied and learned all of the components of that puzzle. Everything from buying ads to SEO to conversion psychology to follow ups and landing pages. and basically the different phases of a funnel and all of that stuff and I started Funnelytics while I was running my agency to really solve my own problem at the end of the day. And it evolved into something much bigger than what I anticipated. But it was really there to solve my own problem, which is, you know, we live in a world where these customer journeys and marketing is is getting more and more complex. The different touch points and the paths that people take to become a customer is no longer very linear. Back in early 2000s, it was really easy. I could set up a little Google ad, get somebody a landing page, get their name and email, sell them, and it worked. I could do that with Facebook, but now people are jumping to review sites, checking your blog, going to Chat GPT to ask for questions, going on LinkedIn, and they’re kind of jumping all over the place. And, and it’s no longer simple to kind of visualize and understand that journey, you know, from a data standpoint. So what Funnelytics allows us to do is basically visualize that entire journey on a canvas. We built a digital whiteboard, basically, that allows us to map every single touchpoint of a customer journey, connect it together, and then just see the data right there on top. So I could see what’s working, what’s not, what are the paths that people are taking, where are those drop-offs. Really, where do I need to focus in order for us to optimize and make more money from the same marketing. Fundamentally, that is what we do. And that is a little bit of my career.
Mike: And so it’s interesting. I mean, you talk about the kind of messy customer journey we see today. So presumably, Funnelytics as a tool, it’s doing a lot more than mapping a simple awareness, interest, desire, action funnel. You’re actually really mapping a customer journey in detail. Is that right?
Mikael: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. So I don’t, you know, it’s interesting. The word funnel is something that gets thrown around a lot, right? Like, you know, a lot of people talk about the marketing funnel being, quote unquote, dead. I think the problem is people think of the word funnel as either this, these phases of a journey. So like you said, awareness, consideration, you know, conversion, blah, blah, blah. Or they think of it too much on the other end, like the Russell Brunson Click funnels audience, you know, the people who think of it as a, It’s an opt-in page with an email follow-up and a sales video and buy, right? Like a very, very structured sequence. And the reality is it’s somewhere kind of in between. It’s what are the series of touch points that you’ve got to put together in order to take this stranger to get them to then take action and buy something. And those touch points come in the form of traffic sources, different pages on your site, different actions that they can take, whether it’s engaging with a video or a button. Or, you know, conversion actions like filling out a form or scheduling a call or an order purchase or whatever it may be. So basically what Funnelytics allows you to do is take all of those different touch points and throw them on a canvas and then connect them together, sequence them together to basically understand, well, what is somebody actually doing to get to that conversion stage?
Mike: And I mean, obviously, understanding the funnel lets you do a lot of things. You said it solved a problem, but you didn’t talk about the exact problem. Because I think you could solve a problem around what to optimize, you could solve a problem about where to allocate budget, you could solve a problem around reporting. So what was the challenge you found that you actually, you know, needed to solve with Funnelytics? And then how broad are you going today?
Mikael: Yeah, it’s a good question. And the problem was not so much a major like, OK, well, this problem is not solvable today. It’s the way that we approach solving the problem was very, very complicated. So fundamentally, what we do as marketers is we visualize these strategies, these marketing funnels, these engines, whatever you want to call it. on some sort of whiteboard, on a piece of paper, on a PowerPoint, on Lucidchart, some sort of flow diagram, right? And we basically say, okay, well, we’re going to use Facebook ads, we’re going to use Google ads, it’s going to go over to this page over here. And on this page, where there’s going to be an opt in, and now we’re going to get a sequence of emails, and those emails are going to go over to this page. And we visualize all of this so that when we present it to our team, when we present it to a client, it’s really clear. It’s like, OK, this is the thing that is going to help us drive this conversion that we care about. But in order to see whether or not that’s performing now, we’ve got to build spreadsheets and look at dashboards. And Facebook tells me this thing and Google tells me this other thing. And then I got to log into HubSpot and it tells me that I’ve got these many contacts and it doesn’t match up. So I got to start trying to stitch this stuff together. And these two things don’t look anything like each other. Right. I have my right brain thinking and looking at this picture for a strategy. And then I’ve got to switch over to my left brain and be super analytical to understand how that picture translates into these spreadsheets. And that was the fundamental problem that I wanted to address. How do I communicate the results of this strategy to my clients by showing them this is what people are actually doing? These are the conversion rates across each of these steps. This is the flow people are taking. And I always had a hard time explaining that using kind of spreadsheets and dashboards and charts and graphs. So fundamentally, that was the goal is the visibility problem, right? Basically creating awareness and showing my clients that if you can see it on a canvas, you can visually see these are the bottlenecks. And this is where we’re focusing on. And for some reason, when I did it, it created this aha moment. My first prototype for Funnelytics was literally me mapping a strategy on a PowerPoint presentation and then taking the numbers, like manually calculating the numbers from Google Analytics and Facebook and all that, and putting it onto that same picture. Basically, okay, there’s 500 people who clicked on this Facebook ad and they went to this page. And then from there, 30% went and opened and went here. And I just show them that and instantly they would be like, Oh, Okay, I get it. I understand where you’re going to focus. I understand that if you fix this thing, I make this much more money. It makes sense to me, right? So that’s, that’s why I built the tool. It was really for myself.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, you’re very much to say, but if yourself, it’s obviously a very popular tool now. I mean, do you want to talk a little bit about the range of customers that use analytics?
Mikael: Yeah, it took us a long time to understand who was the customer and and also for me to get to a stage where my vision matched the reality, right? And I think that’s one of the hardest things about building a software, especially as a non-technical founder. It’s very, very easy to dream up of what this thing can do. And then you go back to engineers and they’re like, yeah, it’s not that simple. So in the early days, Funnelytics was really kind of attracting a lot of solopreneurs. A lot of the people who were trying to launch that first marketing funnel to try, they were more of the strategists. They would use our mapping tool more so than they would use the analytics, which made sense. Our analytics didn’t really work very well, to be honest. And as we started kind of evolving and improving the analytics, our market started to shift much more towards the performance marketers who actually cared about looking at the data, less so the strategists who cared about selling that strategy, whether it was internally or to a potential client. So at this stage right now, the biggest users of Funnelytics, or at least the people that get the most value out of Funnelytics, I should say, are, you know, three to ten million dollar businesses. They are the ones who run ads. They’re spending money on traffic. And really, they’re trying to optimize those conversions. They don’t want to spend more because as they spend more, you know, their return on ad spend starts to flatline and they’re struggling to figure out how to kind of scale beyond that. Um, and when they can see what happens between the ad and the purchase and they can visualize that and they can optimize those bottlenecks, they start to get a lot of value. So usually e-commerce businesses, info product, you know, info businesses, professional services, you know, the, the types of businesses that drive a lot of inbound traffic, if that makes sense.
Mike: I’m interested because obviously the audience of this podcast is very much B2B. I mean, do you see a difference between business to business and business to consumer marketers in terms of their use of analytics and their use particularly of Funnelytics?
Mikael: Yeah. The biggest difference I think is most B2B businesses truly are, they’re still very divided in terms of marketing and sales. And you kind of have this to B2C typically is much more, okay, well, we are usually selling people directly to some sort of order form. Marketing is sales because everything is led towards trying to get that conversion. What we’re starting to see on the B2B side is kind of this rev-ops coming in where it overlooks both. And that Rev Ops person is the one who’s trying to understand the journey. The journey doesn’t end at somebody filling out a form or booking a demo or going down that path. The journey ends when the deal is won. at least on the acquisition side. Now with a tool like Font Analytics, we built a lot of functionality that allows us to pull in deal pipelines and tie that back to marketing. So we can see that entire journey from that first click that sends somebody to my site to people moving down the pipeline stages. So it kind of gives a little bit of visibility across the full customer journey. But fundamentally, it is still very different. They’re starting to merge a little bit more, but it is definitely different.
Mike: So it’s interesting. I mean, B2B, the behavior of the marketers has changed, obviously, with the introduction of Rev Ops and viewing more of the overall journey. What about the behavior of customers? Do you think that’s changed over the last few years?
Mikael: Yeah, I mean, look, B2B customers or B2C customers, they’re still humans at the end of the day. They still have emotions and they still have desires and they still get triggered off of the same psychological triggers as everybody else. And I think more and more these buyers are less and less looking to speak to sales. They’re more and more moving towards, I want to learn myself and I want to figure out like, is this the right thing before I move on to that sales call? Because they know it’s part of that sales process. You see a lot of product led growth companies now that Even in the B2B space, it’s growing and it’s moving in the right direction. So the marketing is there to really create the sale at the end of the day. Right. The marketing is there not just to create awareness, but it’s there to really get that person all the way to the end. And then really the conversation, the sales conversation is a formality because You know, we either have to put together a custom quote for you or because it’s too expensive and nobody’s going to just put in a credit card onto that order form by themselves. Right. So I think the behavior is shifting more and more towards everyone wants product led. Everyone wants to kind of go through the journey themselves. And really, we need to think of the sales conversation as a touch point in that journey. for a specific type of offer, not think of it as this is sales and this is marketing. The sales conversation is just another touchpoint. And that’s the reality of it in these days.
Mike: And it’s interesting because Funnelytics is not particularly expensive, but it’s certainly not a negligible purchase. So do you find you need to involve salespeople in selling Funnelytics or is it very much a online self-serve business?
Mikael: Yeah, it’s interesting because we tested a lot with price points and we’ve gone through both the low end kind of cheaper entry product led approach. We’ve also experimented with the higher end, you need to book a demo approach with selling pilots and higher level prices. And what’s interesting is we kind of found an interesting sweet spot for ourselves now where It’s not too expensive where the average person who knows the problem and understands the problem isn’t willing to give it a trial because they know that if they look at any other competitor, you know, we’re in that same range of, okay, performance marketing tools. It’s all within kind of, let’s call it the 300 to $500 a month range for really solid tools. So they’re aware enough that they’re not thrown off by that price point. But what’s interesting is it does push away the people who are too low for us. And it creates that barrier for them because now they’re sitting there and they’re like, oh, that’s more expensive than what I’m willing to try, which is something that we want. Ultimately, we want to make sure that we repel the people who are going to eat up our support and make it harder for us and ask for things that aren’t necessarily in our roadmap. So we’ve been kind of trying to figure out how can we keep that product led approach with sales assistance, as opposed to having a sales led approach where everybody must speak to somebody in order to purchase. Because once you do that, now it becomes really, really challenging to scale. Now we have to build a sales team, you really have to kind of go down that path versus we’ve built it is people coming from a product led approach, sales is there to assist the close based on questions. And you can still book a demo, but you don’t have to go down that path. So it’s working out so far for us, but we’re always experimenting.
Mike: It’s interesting. I love the discussion about testing price points. I mean, that’s fascinating that you tried such a wide range of price points to see what worked.
Mikael: Yeah, it’s always interesting because it shows you very, very quickly how your market is segmented. It’s an interesting dynamic to test a whole lot of price points because when you only have one price point, You start to realize that you’re putting everybody in the same bucket and they’re not right. So when you do your, let’s say your churn analysis, even like, okay, well we have, I don’t know, 8% month over month churn, which is, you know, people are sticking around for a whole year, but it’s like, okay, but who is sticking around and who is staying for 24 months versus who’s staying for six months. And what is the difference? And now all of a sudden you look at some of the people who are sticking for 24 months and. There are big companies who would have easily paid and gladly paid $500 a month for your $100 a month tool, right? And by you playing around with pricing, you start to really segment the market and you start to understand where do we fit and where do we really want to play, right? What’s our ideal price point for the tool that we offer for the client we want to attract? And yeah, it’s been an interesting experiment.
Mike: I was just to change track a bit. One of the things we’ve had a lot of people talk about on the podcast is the fact that the branding is kind of back. You know, there was a big boom in performance marketing. And now actually, I think a lot of brands are realizing that you can’t just focus on performance marketing, you’ve got to build the brand, you’ve got to build reputation. Is there a way Funnelytics can understand the impact of brand on the purchase decision?
Mikael: Funnelytics ultimately looks at how people come to your site and how they then navigate and then do specific actions from that. So ultimately, we can look at what drove people to your site, whether it’s a refer, whether it’s a specific link click. So from that standpoint, you kind of get a sense of what brings people into your ecosystem. And based on how you post on social media, or based on where they come from, you can kind of get a sense of, okay, was this more of an awareness kind of brand play? Or was this more of a conversion, you know, bottom of the funnel type of piece of content, but brand is much broader than just you know, how are people getting to your site? This right here is brand. Me being on a podcast is brand at the end of the day, right? Me kind of going out there as a founder and going on a stage and speaking creates brand awareness, which is really difficult to measure. There’s no way for me to know that somebody listened to the Marketing B2B podcast and now all of a sudden goes to funnellytics.io and decides to type it in directly. And I know that that’s where that person came from, right? Unless there’s a specific link or something like that. So not really in that sense, to be completely honest. But I think that’s a really hard thing to measure in general.
Mike: Yeah, and I think if you could solve that problem, then you’d be a very wealthy person as well.
Mikael: If there’s a solution to the problem, for sure. But you know what? It’s an interesting battle between tracking and privacy. Right. It’s funny because obviously marketers want to track everything. We just want to make sure we have a perfect profile of who you are and what you do on our site, because that allows us to, you know, improve the experience to make you convert more. And what’s interesting is consumers don’t want to be tracked. But the distinction with consumers is they also don’t want generic experiences, right? They want very custom experiences. They want their feed to be 100 percent tailored to them. They don’t want to go to YouTube and see random stuff. They want to see what they like. I love the NBA. I love music. So I want to see that stuff when I go to YouTube. So it’s this weird dynamic because. Privacy policies are increasing, but on the flip side, so is personalization and custom experiences. And those two things can’t really be mutually exclusive. Like you have to track people to give them the experience that they want. Um, and you have to understand their behaviors. So it’s an interesting dynamic for sure.
Mike: Yeah, it’s fascinating. I mean, I think it’s one of the big changes. You’ve obviously been running Funnelytics for several years now. I’m interested, I mean, other than the increase in the desire for privacy, what do you see as the big trends that have happened over the last few years in marketing? And maybe what do you see happening over the next five years or so?
Mikael: I think you know the answer to that one. It’s the same thing that everybody talks about, which is one thing and one thing only AI. It’s the trend. It is the thing that is completely obviously revolutionizing everything, right? And we’re just at the precipice of what this thing can really truly do and how it will disrupt marketers and how it will disrupt marketing and sales and really all aspects of business in general. And I think fundamentally, if you are not using and leveraging AI to build a better machine, you’re going to be left behind. And it’s pretty simple. The next billion dollar company will be run by three people and a whole army of AI, right? And that’s just the reality. It’s happening now. And I think if we don’t adopt that, we will we will fall behind. Nobody likes doing, right? Setting up tracking, analyzing data, basically coming up with the insights. I just wanted the answer, right? I just want to know, like, what do I do tomorrow in order to hit my targets? Like, tell me and typically now it’s a process, right? Okay, well, let me log in and let me stitch this data together and let me analyze and let me do, you know, make sure I have this expert here who’s been doing it long enough that they can do this analysis properly. And now AI can do this in a second, right? It’s instant. It can tell you by feeding it the right stuff. here’s what you need to do. Fix this, this, and this, and you will have this increase and you’re good to go. And that’s what we need to kind of move towards. And yeah, so I mean, AI is obviously the biggest trend that has come to play in the last, I don’t even know, maybe since the smartphone, I don’t know. I think it’s bigger than the smartphone, to be honest. It’s crazy.
Mike: That’s pretty cool. I’m looking forward to that button I click on that says hit my targets and everything works. So everything works.
Mikael: It’s happening. Your, your campaigns are going to get created. The copy is going to be rewritten. The split tests are going to be done automatically. Like it’s, and it will happen, you know, and that’s a, that’s the future.
Mike: Mikael, before we let you go, there’s two quick questions we like to ask all the guests on the podcast. And the first one really simple and straightforward. What’s the best bit of marketing advice has ever been given to you?
Mikael: Wow, the best bit of marketing advice that’s ever been given to me. 50% of the sales in the follow-up. That’s the first thing that comes to mind right now. Most marketers think that it’s about just, cool, we’ve got to spend money on ads, or we’ve got to create content. And they neglect a lot of that process. It’s multiple touch points that you need to go through in order to get converts. So I’ll throw that one out there. There’s probably a lot of others, but this one’s the first one that came to mind.
Mike: Yeah, great. I love that. And then the other question we always ask is if you’re talking to someone who is just starting their career in marketing, what advice would you give them?
Mikael: Learn as much as you can about how the puzzle fits together. What I mean by that is marketing can be a machine and it should be thought of as a machine. It shouldn’t be thought of as how creative is your next campaign or what does your logo look like and a lot of the stuff that falls under brand. It’s all of it fits together to create a machine to turn strangers into customers and learn as much about each puzzle piece to understand how can you architect that machine for any company.
Mike: That’s awesome. Mikael, thank you so much for your time. If people are listening to this, they want to find out more about Funnelytics or get in contact with you, what’s the best way to do that?
Mikael: Yeah, if you want to get in contact with me, my social media of choice is LinkedIn. It’s the only one I use. So find me on LinkedIn, connect with me there. Or if you want to learn more about Funnelytics, then head over to finalytics.io.
Mike: Awesome. Mikael, thank you so much for being a great guest. I really appreciate the conversation.
Mikael: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
