The traditional marketing funnel

Other than at trade shows, where people make direct inquiries, leads are typically gathered as a result of a call-to-action on the company's website or on a discrete landing page, in exchange for something. [@ghanadan2016Catalytic Experiences: Persuading Scientists and Clinicianswith Effective Digital Marketing]

What Ghanadan argues is that most companies spend money across the funnel. However, the ROI is not homogeneous. In order for companies to jump into the new aspects that social media for scientific marketing and the role of search engines for scientific marketing open, it is important to evaluate carefully what is done with the money.

In marketing there are many assumptions, for example to be able to upsell to a customer the company must have a very detailed database. If you already know you don't have it and probably never will, does it make sense to keep pushing an outdated, unrealistic, funnel model?