There is no funnel.
Have you watched The Matrix recently? It’s a great film despite the attempts by the Manosphere to co-opt its concepts for their twisted world view. My teenage sons enjoyed it despite the apparently “cringe” special effects. I wanted them to know the original red pill context was about escaping a digital/machine created dream to experience the real world with all its flaws. Ironic really, given the non-sensical garbage spewed by Andrew Tate and his minions only succeeds because of the digital world so many men are trapped in.
Anyway, there is a memorable scene where Neo realises “There is no spoon”. And joining this week’s really enjoyable Marketing Society roundtable on the marketing funnel, the scene came back to me, as in many ways there is no funnel. These were my key takeaways from the session:
🥄 The funnel is a mental model, not reality - Ben Monroe called it "Schrödinger's funnel", useful for internal forecasting, dangerous when you think customers actually flow through it. They don't. They bounce around, disappear, skip stages, enter randomly. Tom Roach goes one step further and calls it "the cockroach of marketing concepts", invented for door-to-door salespeople in 1890s, now mainly a tool for marketers to sell to each other, impossible to eradicate.
🤝 Funnel thinking drives the wrong behaviours - The funnel model makes us obsess about generating leads, moving them "down the funnel”, conversion rates between invented stages and attribution for journeys that don't exist. Meanwhile, Sandeep reminded us: 95% of your audience isn't ready to buy. So we're just doing "marketing by interruption." In B2B, you're not even dealing with individuals, it's buying committees. Good luck mapping that linear journey.
🧠 Influence mindset, not movement - Stop trying to advance leads through stages. Start influencing the mindset of decision makers across the buying group. In 81% of B2B deals, everyone on the buying team already knew the brand. 60-70% of the buyer journey happens in the "dark funnel" without sales contact. So it is better to focus on mental availability - being the brand that comes to mind when anyone in the buying committee needs to solve a problem. Stop trying to move leads down. Start trying to get into heads.