You’ve seen it in countless PowerPoint presentations, whiteboard sessions, and marketing strategy documents: the clean, elegant marketing funnel. It’s a beautiful thing to behold—a perfect inverted triangle with crisp lines, clearly defined stages, and tidy arrows pointing prospects smoothly from awareness to consideration to decision.
There’s something deeply satisfying about this model. It makes complex human behavior look manageable. It turns the chaotic reality of how people make purchasing decisions into something that fits neatly into a spreadsheet. It gives marketing teams a sense of control and predictability in an otherwise unpredictable world.
The traditional marketing funnel is comforting. It gives you neat stages, tidy arrows, and a sense of control.
Too bad it doesn’t match how buyers actually behave anymore.
The Golden Age of Funnel Thinking (And Why It’s Over)
To be fair, there was a time when the marketing funnel wasn’t complete fiction. Back in the early 2010s, when content marketing was still relatively novel and buyers had fewer options for self-education, the funnel was actually a decent approximation of reality—especially for inbound-heavy SaaS companies.
Those were simpler times. Prospects would dutifully download your 20-page ebook about “The Ultimate Guide to [Industry Problem].” They’d attend your 60-minute webinar where you’d spend 45 minutes teaching and 15 minutes soft-pitching your solution. They’d sign up for your email nurture sequence and actually read the emails you sent them. They moved obediently from TOFU (top of funnel) to MOFU (middle of funnel) to BOFU (bottom of funnel), hitting all your carefully designed touchpoints along the way.
Back then, buyers had fewer resources at their disposal. They relied heavily on vendors to educate them about problems and solutions. They had more patience for gated content and multi-step nurture campaigns. They were willing to trade their contact information for access to insights they couldn’t easily find elsewhere.
But today’s buyer? They’re fundamentally different creatures. They’re smarter, more informed, and infinitely more distracted. They have access to peer review sites, online communities, social proof, and competitive intelligence that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. They can research your entire product, read reviews from actual customers, and compare you to competitors without ever visiting your website or talking to your sales team.
Most importantly, they rarely follow your carefully mapped path from awareness to purchase. In fact, they seem to take perverse pleasure in ignoring your funnel entirely.
The Reality of Modern Buyer Behavior
Let’s be brutally honest about how people actually make purchasing decisions today: people don’t want your customer journey. They want their answer. Now.
They don’t care that you’ve designed a beautiful, logical progression from educational content to product-focused material. They don’t appreciate the thought you’ve put into nurturing them through multiple touchpoints over several months. They’re not interested in following your prescribed path from anonymous visitor to marketing qualified lead to sales qualified lead to closed-won customer.
Instead, buyers loop. They ghost. They convert on the third touchpoint, not the thirtieth. They binge research on weekends when your sales team isn’t available. They click ads at odd hours and show intent in ways that don’t fit into your neatly organized CRM fields.
They might start by reading a deep-dive case study (your “bottom funnel” content) because they’re already convinced they have a problem and want to see if you can solve it. Then they disappear for three weeks, only to resurface by downloading your basic industry primer (your “top funnel” content) because they need to educate their boss about the broader market landscape.
They’ll attend your webinar, engage heavily in the chat, and then never respond to your follow-up emails. They’ll spend 20 minutes on your pricing page, fill out a demo request form, and then go radio silent for two months before suddenly reappearing ready to buy—from your competitor.
They research in private browsing windows, use multiple email addresses, and share your content with team members who were never in your CRM in the first place. They make decisions in Slack channels and Microsoft Teams conversations that you’ll never see. They get influenced by podcasts you’ve never heard of and peer recommendations from people you’ve never met.
In other words, they behave like actual human beings making complex business decisions, not like the rational, linear decision-makers your funnel assumes they are.
The Hidden Cost of Funnel-Based Thinking
So what happens when you build your entire content strategy and campaign architecture based on a model that no longer reflects how purchasing decisions are actually made? The consequences are more severe than most marketing teams realize.
First, you burn time and resources creating content that serves your organizational chart rather than your customers’ actual needs. You end up with a perfectly balanced content library—equal parts top, middle, and bottom funnel assets—that looks impressive in audit spreadsheets but fails to address the messy, non-linear way people actually consume information when they’re trying to solve business problems.
Second, you miss critical signals because you’re looking for behavior that fits your model rather than paying attention to the behavior that’s actually happening. You dismiss valuable engagement because it doesn’t occur at the “right” stage of the funnel. You under-invest in content that performs well but doesn’t fit your predefined categories.
Third, you launch campaigns and initiatives that no one asked for, based on gaps in your funnel rather than gaps in your customers’ experience. You create “awareness stage” content because your audit revealed you don’t have enough TOFU assets, not because you’ve identified prospects who need that specific type of education.
The result is marketing that feels disconnected from reality—campaigns that generate activity but not results, content that gets consumed but doesn’t influence decisions, and measurement systems that track funnel progression instead of business impact.
What the Real Buyer Journey Actually Looks Like
If the traditional funnel is a lie, what’s the truth? The real buyer journey doesn’t look like a funnel at all. It’s more like a jungle gym—a complex, three-dimensional structure where people can enter at any point, move in any direction, and take multiple paths to reach the same destination.
Some prospects will start at the top and work their way down, just like your funnel predicts. But many others will start in the middle, jump to the bottom, loop back to the top, disappear entirely, and then re-enter at a completely different point months later.
They’ll consume your content out of order. They’ll share it with colleagues who weren’t part of your original nurture sequence. They’ll use your educational materials to build internal business cases, then go dark for weeks while they navigate internal approval processes you know nothing about.
They’ll engage with your brand across multiple channels simultaneously—reading your blog while listening to your podcast and following your CEO on LinkedIn. They’ll attend your virtual event from their personal email address, then research your pricing from their work computer using a different browser.
The buyer journey is actually a network of interconnected moments, each with the potential to influence the final decision. Some moments matter more than others, but you often can’t predict which ones will be decisive until after the fact.
This doesn’t mean buyer journeys are completely random or unpredictable. There are patterns and preferences that emerge when you look at enough data. But those patterns are much more complex and individualized than the traditional funnel suggests.
The Funnel Test: Is This Content Just a Box-Check?
Given this reality, how should you approach content planning and campaign development? Start with one simple diagnostic question that can save you from creating content that serves your org chart instead of your customers.
Before greenlighting another awareness-stage asset, ask yourself: What specific behavior are we seeing that tells us this content needs to exist?
This question forces you to ground your content decisions in observable reality rather than theoretical framework requirements.
If your answer is something like “because we don’t have anything for TOFU” or “our content audit showed a gap in awareness-stage materials,” stop. That’s not a signal from your market—that’s organizational insecurity dressed up as strategic thinking.
Those aren’t indicators that prospects need more awareness-stage content. They’re indicators that you’re still thinking in funnel terms rather than customer terms.
Instead, look at real journeys and actual behavior patterns. What did your highest-intent leads actually engage with before they converted? Where did promising prospects drop off in their research process? What questions did they ask your sales team that your existing content doesn’t answer? What topics do they research immediately after engaging with your brand?
Those are your content signals. They tell you what people actually need, when they need it, and how they prefer to consume it.
For example, you might discover that your best customers consistently engage with detailed ROI calculators and competitive comparison guides early in their research process—content you might have categorized as “bottom funnel” but which actually serves an educational purpose for prospects who are still in the early stages of understanding their options.
Or you might find that prospects frequently ask your sales team about implementation timelines and change management best practices—topics that don’t fit neatly into any funnel stage but clearly represent high-value content opportunities.
Meeting Customers at Their Moments
Here’s the fundamental shift in thinking that changes everything: great marketing isn’t about dragging people through your predefined stages. It’s about meeting them at their moments of need—and making each one count.
This means designing content and campaigns around customer jobs-to-be-done rather than funnel positions. It means measuring success by business impact rather than stage progression. It means being present and helpful wherever your customers are in their thinking, regardless of whether that aligns with your organizational model.
It also means accepting that you can’t control the buyer journey, but you can influence it by consistently providing value at every possible touchpoint. Instead of trying to force prospects through your funnel, you create a comprehensive ecosystem of helpful resources that serves them regardless of how they choose to engage.
This approach requires different metrics, different content strategies, and different campaign structures. But it also produces better results because it aligns with how people actually make decisions rather than how we wish they would make decisions.
The Path Forward: Building Anti-Funnel Marketing Systems
So how do you build marketing systems that work with buyer behavior rather than against it? It starts with acknowledging that complexity and unpredictability aren’t bugs in the system—they’re features of how modern business decisions get made.
Instead of trying to simplify buyer journeys to fit your spreadsheets, you need to build systems that can handle the messiness of real human behavior. This means creating content that works regardless of consumption order, designing touchpoints that provide value independently of what came before or what comes next, and measuring success by business outcomes rather than funnel metrics.
It means getting comfortable with the fact that you might never fully understand why someone converted when they did, through the channel they chose, after engaging with the specific combination of content they consumed. And that’s okay—as long as they convert.
The goal isn’t to predict and control every aspect of the buyer journey. It’s to be so consistently helpful and present throughout their decision-making process that when they’re ready to move forward, you’re the obvious choice.
This requires a fundamental shift from funnel thinking to ecosystem thinking—from linear campaigns to omnichannel experiences, from stage-based content to moment-based value creation.
It’s more complex than the traditional funnel model, but it’s also more honest about how business decisions actually get made in the modern marketplace. And in a world where buyers have more options, less patience, and higher expectations than ever before, honesty about buyer behavior is the foundation of effective marketing.
The funnel might be dead, but great marketing is very much alive. It just looks different than what we’ve been taught to expect.
This shift from funnel thinking to ecosystem thinking is just the beginning. Chapter 3 of “The Adaptive CMO” digs deeper into buyer unpredictability, decision-making psychology, and how to build marketing systems that adapt in real time to the complex reality of modern purchase behavior.