The Funnel Illusion

Remember when the sales funnel used to make sense?

Prospect becomes a lead. Lead becomes an opportunity. Opportunity becomes revenue. Nice and clean.

Except that’s not how any modern B2B buying actually happens anymore — especially in technical industries with long sales cycles, multiple decision-makers, and shifting requirements.

If you’re still optimizing for funnel stages, you’re solving for the wrong problem.

The Problem: B2B Buying Is No Longer Linear

According to Gartner, real buying journeys now look more like this: A bowl of spaghetti!

• Multiple stakeholders join and leave mid-process

• Buyers loop back to previous steps, revise requirements, and restart

• Information overload causes indecision instead of progress

• Decisions stall when consensus breaks down

The six key jobs in B2B buying — problem identification, solution exploration, requirements building, supplier selection, validation, and consensus creation — happen non-sequentially and often simultaneously​.

So if you're tracking leads as “Stage 3” or “Stage 5” …you might just be watching them spin in circles.

Shift from Stage Management to Job Enablement

Smart marketers (and sales teams) are ditching the rigid funnel in favour of a buyer-job-first approach.

Your content and campaigns should be designed to help buyers:

• Clarify the problem

• Compare complex solutions

• Build a business case

• Align internal stakeholders

• Validate their choices

Each of these is a job, not a stage. And buyers may be tackling them all at once — on your site, in a meeting, or through someone else’s blog.

What Cactix Recommends

1. Build a Job-Aligned Content Strategy

• Instead of top/mid/bottom funnel, organize your content library around buyer jobs. For example:

  • “How to convince your CFO to back your tech upgrade” = consensus creation

  • “Troubleshooting inefficiencies in your extrusion line” = problem identification

  • “Comparison checklist: open vs closed automation platforms” = supplier selection

2. Rebuild Lead Scoring Around Engagement Type

• Don’t just score MQLs by pageviews or form fills.

• Track what job each piece of content serves — and what that implies about buying readiness.

3. Enable Sales to Identify Buyer Job Gaps

• Sales enablement should include prompts like:

  • “Has the buyer built internal consensus?”

  • “Do they understand the economic value of this?”

  • “Are they stuck on tech requirements or on change management?”

B2B Buying Isn’t a Pipeline. It’s a Puzzle.

And great marketing solves puzzles. Not by pushing people down a path, but by helping them get unstuck where they already are.

It’s time to stop treating your funnel like gospel — and start mapping to the messy, human, job-driven reality of modern B2B buying.

Want to learn how we design buyer-first strategies for complex industries? Get in touch with us today.