Your role as a marketer is simple in concept but complex in execution: understand how your prospects buy, and guide them through that journey from the first touchpoint to conversion.
You’re expected to know their pain points before they’ve fully articulated them, anticipate what they want to learn next, and deliver the right message at the right moment — all while building enough credibility that your brand becomes the obvious choice when buying time finally arrives. That takes strategy, empathy, creativity, and increasingly, the help of smarter tools that make all of this scalable.
To navigate this, for a long time, most of us have leaned on the classic marketing funnel approach: top-of-the-funnel for awareness (TOFU), middle-of-the-funnel for consideration (MOFU), and bottom-of-the-funnel for decision (BOFU). These stages are familiar, linear, helpful… and increasingly out of sync with reality. Buyers no longer move neatly from awareness to consideration to decision. Their paths are unpredictable, independent, and shaped by much more than search engines, your website, and emails.
This doesn’t mean the funnel is dead, but using it as a literal roadmap no longer reflects how people buy today. With AI changing how prospects research, compare, and validate solutions, marketers need to rethink how they interpret intent and show up with relevance.
The Funnel Is Helpful, But It Doesn’t Tell the Full Story
People enter and exit your brand’s orbit from dozens of touchpoints: a LinkedIn post, webinar clip, AI-generated answer, shared resource, peer recommendation, and we could go on. Some spend weeks gathering information before you even know they exist. Others binge your content in a single afternoon and book a demo immediately.
So rather than thinking of the funnel as movement, think of it as mindset:
- TOFU: “Help me understand the problem”
- MOFU: “Show me options and approaches”
- BOFU: “Give me confidence I’m making the right decision”
Buyers shift between these modes constantly, which means your content ecosystem has to meet them wherever they land, not where you expect them to be.
The B2B Buyer Journey: A Marathon, Not a Sprint
B2B purchases take time. Ten to eighteen months is normal, and some cycles stretch far beyond that. This is a process in which multiple stakeholders get involved, teams modify, budgets shift, and priorities change. Most of the journey has nothing to do with you directly. It’s research, alignment, and risk reduction.
This creates a tension for marketers: you need to stay present for 18 months without being intrusive. Most of the time, prospects aren’t ready to talk about your solution. They’re still exploring whether their challenge is worth solving, what approaches exist, and how other companies have handled similar issues. And they certainly don’t want to be sold to.
This is where consistency matters. Not consistency in frequency (bombarding prospects with weekly sales emails won’t work), but consistency in delivering valuable, relevant information that serves the prospects’ actual needs at each stage of their journey (for example, a webinar or downloadable content that provides value). It's the difference between persistent interruption and reliable presence.
Trust Is Still the Decision-Maker
Despite all the technology, the job hasn’t fundamentally changed: your long-term goal is to build trust.
Trust is what separates you from competitors, what makes prospects return to your brand throughout their research, and what ultimately pushes them over the finish line – and hopefully, what turns them from customers to advocates.
Trust is built through clarity, helpfulness, evidence, and consistent value. And this is where TOFU, MOFU, BOFU still matter, just differently:
- TOFU = helping people understand their challenge
- MOFU = helping them evaluate possible solutions
- BOFU = reducing perceived risk
Those stages haven’t disappeared, they’re just no longer linear — looking more like a scribble.
And your content has to be ready for whichever mindset a prospect arrives with, at any moment.
The Path Forward
Your prospects are moving on long, non-linear paths. They expect experiences tailored to them, including needs and timelines – not generic nurture flows or forced progression. So the real question isn’t whether to evolve past the traditional funnel, but how quickly you’ll do it.
A good starting point is auditing your current approach:
- Are you treating all prospects the same, or tailoring based on behavior?
- Are you creating content that helps across all mindsets (TOFU, MOFU, BOFU)?
- Are you using data or relying only on instinct?
- Are you showing up consistently or only when a campaign demands it?
From there, you’ll have a basis for what needs changing, updating, or overall rethinking.
If the buyer journey and everything it entails seem overwhelming, reach out — we're here to help.