For more than a century, the marketing funnel has been a hand-me-down. AIDA: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action was sketched by E. St. Elmo Lewis in the 1890s to describe how an advertisement moves a stranger toward a purchase. Almost everything that followed is a variation on that theme: AIDAS bolted "Satisfaction" onto the end; Colley's DAGMAR reframed the path as Awareness–Comprehension–Conviction–Action so that advertising goals could be measured; Lavidge and Steiner's Hierarchy of Effects stretched it into six cognitive-affective-behavioral steps; and Kotler's modern 5A: Aware, Appeal, Ask, Act, Advocate finally acknowledged that connected customers talk to each other.
These are good models. They are also, largely, advertising models. They were built to explain how a message lands on an individual consumer, not how a buying committee of fifteen people spends two million dollars over nine months.
When we map them against a real enterprise technology sales cycle, they consistently come up short in the same places. When I came across the AISDALS/L model: Awareness, Interest, Search, Desire, Action, Like, Share, and Love, it strongly resembled an modern enterprise SaaS sales process.
AISDALSLove was introduced by Bambang Sukma Wijaya in 2011 and published in 2012, as an extension of AIDA built for the social, connected era: it inserts a Search stage before purchase and adds Like, Share, and Love after it.
My contribution is mapping Wijaya's consumer-marketing lifecycle onto a modern enterprise technology sales and delivery cycle, so that cross-functional sales, engineering, partner, and success teams integrate against the customer lifecycle and sales organizations are focused on selling into existing customer "whitespace" and growing Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) rather than one-and-done Annual Contract Value (ACV).
To that mapping I added a single stage up front: Signals, for enterprise (specifically SaaS) demand sensing where there are online Marketing signals such as freemium downloads, product trials, open-source on which an organization builds its solutions, etc. AISDALS/L is the first lifecycle I've found that fits the way SaaS model technology solutions actually get bought, sold, delivered, and expanded.
This series explains why, walks through each stage and the sales process I've mapped to it, and shows how four sales methodologies and four cross-functional teams turn the model from a diagram into an operating system for revenue.
Why the classic lifecycles fall short, and where the AISDALS/L lifecycle fits
Three structural gaps separate advertising funnels from enterprise reality.
Most of the classics miss the Search stage enabled by web-accessible information. AIDA jumps from Interest straight to Desire, as if wanting the product were a feeling that simply arrives. In enterprise technology, the gap between "this is interesting" and "I want this" is the single most expensive part of the cycle: technical discovery, architecture review, proof of value, competitive bake-offs, security and procurement diligence.
Buyers actively search and evaluate. The instinct to name this explicitly isn't new: the Japanese AISAS model (Attention, Interest, Search, Action, Share) recognized decades ago that connected buyers research and then talk, and AISDALS/L inherits that insight and extends it, making Search a first-class stage. It's exactly where many complex deals are won or quietly lost.
Classic models end at the transaction. AIDA ends at Action. AIDAS grudgingly adds Satisfaction. But in a subscription and consumption economy, the sale is the beginning of the value relationship, not the end of it. AISDALS/L extends the lifecycle into Like, Share, and Love: adoption and realized value, advocacy and referral, and finally loyalty and expansion. That tail is where Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) growth happens.
Most classic models treat the customer as an island. This is where AISDALS/L aligns with something deeper than a funnel: Everett Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations. For a new market entrant, Innovators and Early Adopters are not just early revenue: they are a virtual marketing channel.
It is specifically the Early Adopters – not the venturesome but high-risk Innovators – who become the trusted reference group that pulls the more pragmatic Early Majority across Geoffrey Moore's "chasm." Their willingness to share their experience across professional networks is what makes or breaks a company's ability to scale beyond 1-5, which is precisely the requirement a new entrant has to plan for.
Kotler's 5A is the honorable exception and the strongest rival to AISDALS/L. It was purpose-built for the connected age; its "Ask" stage already behaves like a research-and-search step, and its "Advocate" stage explicitly captures sharing. So this isn't a case of 5A ignoring advocacy; it doesn't. The difference is granularity and intent. 5A compresses the whole post-purchase relationship into a single "Advocate" stage and remains a consumer-marketing journey map.
AISDALS/L separates Like (they're satisfied and live), Share (they refer and open new pipeline), and Love (they renew, expand, and anchor the account). In my mapping, there is a distinct enterprise sales-and-delivery process on each. That separation matters for a B2B SaaS organization, because satisfaction, active referral, and durable loyalty are different motions run by different teams on different timelines, not one emotion to be checked off. For any firm, that distinction is not academic: it is the growth engine.
In short: the advertising funnels were designed to create attention. AISDALS/L, mapped to enterprise selling, is designed to create and compound CLTV enterprise value.