You’ve done the work. You’ve mapped the funnel. Gated the whitepaper. Set up the MQL thresholds and the beautifully color-coded lifecycle stages. Handoffs are humming. Attribution dashboards are blinking green. Sales swears it’s getting “better.”
So why does it still feel broken?
Here’s the truth most teams don’t want to hear: Your funnel isn’t broken. You just built it for a buyer that doesn’t exist.
Meet the Imaginary Buyer You Built For
Let’s call him Linear Larry.
Linear Larry does exactly what you want him to do cause he’s a fed:
Sees your ad → clicks your blog → downloads your guide → books a demo → becomes a champion
He responds to nurture emails.
Has full budget authority.
Makes decisions solo.
And logs cleanly into Salesforce like a good little duckling.
Cute. But also fake af.
Larry is the buyer every B2B marketing deck is still built around. He’s your funnel’s north star. He’s just not real.
What the Real Buyer Actually Looks Like
Here’s what your buyer actually looks like…
Real buyers are chaotic.
They’re stuck in a tangle of unclear roles, shifting priorities, Slack threads, procurement hurdles, and Q4 budget freezes. And unlike Linear Larry, they don’t travel down a nice little funnel.
They ghost your SDRs. They open your email, but only to forward it to three other people, two of whom will never read it, and the one who did read it skimmed it and will inevitably ask repetitive questions over Teams.
They click “download,” skim the asset, then immediately forget it exists.
They’re tired. They’re overwhelmed. And deep down, they have a general distrust in agencies.
This isn’t a neat journey. It’s a maze. And right now, your funnel is trying to lead them through it using the map from Candy Land.
Why Misalignment Destroys Even ‘Good’ Funnels
Let’s be clear: your funnel might be beautifully constructed, but if it’s pointed at a buyer who only exists in theory, here’s what happens:
- Attribution looks broken because the journey’s nonlinear
- Lead scoring bloats with false positives
- Lifecycle stages misfire and cause timing friction
- Sales loses faith in your leads and goes rogue
- Content underperforms because it speaks to a persona, not a person
And that creeping feeling you’ve had? Like the system’s working, but it’s also not at the same time. That’s not your imagination. That’s your strategy operating on false assumptions.
Okay, So What Now?
The good news: this isn’t unfixable. But it does require a different lens.
The most effective teams we work with have stopped treating the funnel as a conveyor belt, and started treating it like a relationship.
Here’s what that shift looks like:
- Stop chasing neatness: Start accounting for emotional, messy, human buying patterns.
- Map friction, not just flow: Where do people stall out? Ghost? Loop back? Fix that.
- Build content for internal enablement: Your buyer isn’t the only one making the case. Your content should do the talking when they’re not in the room.
- Make your funnel a support system: Not a sales trap.
- Redefine lifecycle stages: Base them on actual behavior, not just form-fills. If you don’t know what those stages are today, ask your buyers. Invest in a little VoC work to get clear, actionable insights from the mind of your audience.
One of our favorite BOFU content prompts:
“Will this get me fired?”
That’s the question your buyer is asking, whether they say it out loud or not. If your funnel doesn’t help them answer that with confidence, then you’re not actually speaking to the person making the call. You’re just sending assets into the void.
This Is What We Fix In Every GTM Roadmap
Most teams don’t need to burn their funnel down. They just need to stop gaslighting themselves with outdated playbooks.
Every GTM Roadmap we run exposes the cracks between how your buyer actually moves and how your funnel assumes they do.
And once that’s clear? Pipeline performance starts making a lot more sense.
TL;DR — Rebuild for Reality, Not Fantasy
Let’s land this plane.
- Your funnel probably isn’t broken
- But your buyer model might be
- When your funnel aligns with actual buyer behavior — chaos and all — your pipeline moves
- When it doesn’t, you’re just optimizing a fantasy
