Sales and marketing professionals imagine a funnel or pipeline. Leads enter the process when they are generated. They are thrown out of the pipeline as they are disqualified or otherwise deferred. They progress in the process as they are qualified, closed, and ultimately become satisfied customers.

Having built my own marketing automation system, and having seen systems built by others, I wonder if there can be an explicit mapping between the funnel/pipeline and a web site’s structure. That is, can we create interactions that result in information exchanges and that automatically move leads through the pipeline?