The Death of the Funnel: How to Navigate the Non-linear Buyer’s Journey

The marketing community has been denigrating the idea of a buyer’s journey as a funnel for years – possibly decades – yet the metaphor persists. It’s so comforting in its simplicity that we keep using it, even though it no longer reflects people’s buying behavior.

But for professional services businesses, clinging to the familiar funnel model is not just inaccurate. If we’re using it to design our marketing and sales strategies in 2025, that’s downright dangerous.

Our buyers are not stepping directly from awareness to interest to decision to action. They’re being influenced by a huge swarm of interrelated factors, all of which are either nudging them towards an eventual relationship with us, or inching them further away from ever signing an SOW.

Here’s how we need to be rethinking our buyers’ journeys and adapting our strategies to keep up.

The New “Funnel” (if You Must Have One)

There’s a reason why we use funnels as the metaphor of choice for marketing and sales, and it’s not just because they’re easy to make in a PowerPoint slide. When there were few channels and limited choices, this kind of step-by-step process really could happen.

And funnels, where lots of stuff comes in the top but only some of it makes it out the bottom, helped us visualize and understand the need to talk to a lot of people in order to close a few deals.

So to help us visualize and understand the new reality, let’s consider some new metaphor options:

• Spiderweb: If we’re being honest with ourselves, this one is probably the most accurate in the age of AI, non-stop channel proliferation, and the blurring lines between our business and professional lives. Everything’s interconnected, people can stay on the edges for a really long time before moving toward a decision, and as the spider in the middle you might sense that things are happening, but not be totally confident where that movement is coming from.
• Flow chart: This one is much easier to map activities against than a messy web, but it also assumes some level of linearity among activities that may or may not be true. For example, if someone visits my company’s LinkedIn page, they could click on our featured button and schedule a sales call, which would be a logical thing to visualize in a flow chart. But they might also leave LinkedIn and start a chat with an LLM to ask it questions about my company. If you’re comfortable mapping out some possibilities and knowing that you haven’t documented every possible path, flow charts can work.
• Flywheel: Popularized by Hubspot several years ago, this application of the flywheel concept focuses on the “always-on” nature of customer relationships. It’s far simpler than either of the first two options here, which could be a pro or a con. It’s much easier to map channels and tactics to a flywheel, but that’s likely to mask the complex realities of a modern buyer’s journey. If this one appeals to you, check out Brian Halligan’s piece in the Harvard Business Review on how he accelerates the flywheel by applying force to certain areas and removing friction in others.

What Today’s Buyers Actually Do

Keep whatever model you prefer in your head as we continue; just remember that there aren’t any pre-defined paths any longer. There are, however, some commonalities in buyer behavior that we can optimize for.

1. Lurk before you leap: whether it’s a newsletter, a podcast, or your LinkedIn profile, chances are prospects are lurking in your channels for months before you know about them. Tracking across platforms can help surface these active content consumers so you can proactively reach out to them, but many aren’t ready for a sales conversation. That’s why they’re still lurking.
2. Check the vibe: Basic trust signals, both those you own and those you don’t, are key to showing up as a reputable partner. Things like testimonials and positive PR provide social proof, and of course having a good showing in ChatGPT and other platforms is becoming ever more critical. Assume everyone is checking your website and talking to an LLM before they ever book a sales call. 
3. After-hours sleuthing: Just yesterday I was waiting in the pick-up line at my son’s school and scrolling LinkedIn. I sent two different posts I found interesting to myself via Slack, and I’ll be checking out the people who wrote them next time I’m at my desk with a few minutes to spare. Our prospects are doing the same during non-work hours. They’re browsing social media, checking out Reddit, pinging their group chat, or turning on a podcast while they workout. Time to show up wherever they are, whenever they happen to be there.

What this Means for Your Marketing Strategy

If there’s one word that should be coming to mind at this point, it’s complexity. There’s simply no one perfect way to capture interest and convert it to demand anymore. That means pro serve owners have three top marketing priorities right now: discoverability, diversification, and delayed gratification.

Building an Easy-to-find Brand

Discoverability means making sure your content is easy to find and easy to engage with. SEO isn’t dead (yet), so your web presence still needs to be showing up in search results. But prospects also need to find you during LLM chats and social scrolling.

Investing in PR (yes, the old school kind) and some paid social promotion are tried-and-true tactics that can still give you a big boost in discoverability. And pay careful attention to CRO (conversion rate optimization). Is it clear what step you want people to take once they find you, and is it easy and obvious how to do that? Even a small improvement in CRO can have a major impact.

Creating a Content Ecosystem

Of course, without content there will be nothing for people to discover. A flashy homepage and a blog you haven’t posted on since 2019 are not going to cut it. In 2025 you need a content ecosystem – multi-format options that you can easily distribute to the channels where your prospects are hanging out.

Ecosystems are self-supporting, and that’s how content should be too. Blogs link to podcast episodes, which direct listeners to a downloadable checklist, which mentions your monthly newsletter, which points them to an event you’re speaking at, which invites people to subscribe to the podcast – you get the idea. If we’re using the spiderweb metaphor, we want people to get stuck in our web of content and never leave.

Do You Really Need That Form?

We work so hard to create content and get people to see it that it seems only fair to demand an email address in exchange. But delayed gratification – waiting to capture someone’s contact details far longer than we’re used to – may be the right choice. Decide how important that lead capture really is, and whether you’d rather get more eyeballs or more emails.

It can be helpful to think about the new buyer’s journey as a long, drawn-out series of microconversions, rather than just a few critical big ones. Reading an entire white paper, even if they do it without giving you their email address, might tip them over the edge to a true lead if they’ve already been through a whole bunch of microconversions before that.

Combat Marketing Complexities with Consistency

I’ve been doing marketing for 20 years and running my firm for eight, and I can confidently say marketing has never been harder. The complexity can be overwhelming, and there’s no sign of it getting simpler anytime soon.

But, speaking broadly, the best counter measure I’ve found is consistency. Show up in one or two core channels at a regular cadence and deliver value to your audience. Be a trusted thought partner, show that you understand their struggles, and don’t talk about yourself very often.

The funnel may be gone, but if we’re diligent spiders building out a web full of enticing, sticky content, we can still capture demand in a non-linear world.