If the marketing funnel is dead, what replaces it? 

When we published The death of the marketing funnel, the response was swift. While many marketing and commercial leaders were already sensing the shift away from the traditional funnel, they weren’t sure how to make the practical changes required to reflect true customer behaviour.  

They asked us: If the funnel doesn’t work anymore, what should we be doing instead? 

Followed closely by:  

What does a “buying ecosystem” actually look like in practice? 

What a buying ecosystem really means 

The idea of a buying ecosystem can feel abstract at first. In simple terms, it refers to all the places where buyer thinking is shaped before and during a decision. 

A traditional marketing funnel assumes buyers move through a series of stages that an organisation can guide and control. Awareness leads to consideration, and consideration leads to conversion. 

An ecosystem recognises something different. That decisions are rarely formed in a straight line, and they are rarely in one place. 

Instead, buyers gather signals over time, across multiple sources, often long before they engage directly with a vendor. 

In B2B environments especially, those signals come from a wide range of influences. 

• Peer conversations with colleagues, industry networks or trusted contacts. 

• Independent information such as analyst reports, trade publications, conferences or podcasts. 

• Online research across search, LinkedIn discussions, YouTube explainers or third-party reviews. 

• Vendor content including case studies, blogs, comparisons and webinars. 

• And internal factors such as procurement requirements, financial scrutiny or risk considerations. 

Each of these plays a role in shaping how confident a buyer feels about a decision, sometimes before there’s even a decision to be made.  

Taken together, they form the environment where decisions actually develop. 

This is the change. Instead of asking how to move buyers through a funnel, the question becomes: How do we influence the ecosystem where decisions are already forming? 

Moving from theory to practice 

Understanding the idea of a buying ecosystem is one thing. Designing marketing around it is another. For organisations used to planning around funnel stages, this requires a shift in both thinking and execution. 

Here are some practical ways to begin: 

Start by mapping how decisions actually happen 

Most organisations already have a model of how buyers should behave. Fewer have a clear view of how they do behave. That insight is the starting point. Some ways to find out are: 

• Speak to recent customers about how their decision unfolded. 

• Look at where they first encountered your organisation. 

• Identify the role of peers, content, research and internal discussions. 

Alongside this, analyse CRM and pipeline data to understand the different entry points into your business, whether that’s search, referrals, events, partners or content. 

The goal is to replace a theoretical funnel with a real picture of how decisions form in your market. 

Organise marketing around buying moments, not stages 

Funnel thinking assumes progression, whereas ecosystem thinking recognises movement. 

Buyers often enter, leave and re-enter the process. They revisit decisions, gather new information and validate their thinking over time. Rather than structuring marketing around stages, it can be more effective to focus on key buying moments. For example: 

• When a problem is first recognised, insight and thought leadership matter. 

• As solutions are explored, frameworks and comparisons become more relevant. 

• During vendor evaluation, proof points and case studies carry more weight. 

• And as decisions near, confidence is built through validation, references and external credibility. 

This approach aligns marketing with how buyers think, rather than how a model suggests they should move. 

Rethink how success is measured 

Traditional funnel metrics focus on progression. How many leads were generated, how many converted, how efficiently they moved through each stage. 

But if journeys are non-linear, those measures only tell part of the story. 

A broader set of indicators is needed, such as: 

• How familiar are target accounts with your brand? 

• How deeply are they engaging with your content? 

• Are you influencing multiple stakeholders within a buying group? 

• Is deal velocity improving as buyer confidence increases? 

These measures better reflect how decisions develop over time, not just how leads move through a system. 

Align marketing and sales around buyer insight 

In a non-linear journey, buyers arrive at sales conversations already informed. They have researched the problem, compared options and formed early preferences. 

This changes the role of both marketing and sales. Marketing is no longer just generating leads. It is shaping the context in which those leads arrive. Meanwhile, sales is no longer introducing the solution. It is responding to a buyer who already has a point of view. 

That means closer alignment becomes critical, and includes: 

• Sharing insight into what content is resonating. 

• Capturing the questions buyers are asking during sales conversations. 

• Building assets that directly address those concerns. 

Over time, marketing and sales become co-interpreters of buyer behaviour, rather than separate functions operating at different funnel stages. 

Build continuous presence, not campaign bursts 

Funnel-based planning often results in bursts of activity. Campaigns are launched, leads are generated, and then attention shifts to the next initiative. But if decisions form over time, influence needs to be continuous. 

That means: 

• Maintaining a steady presence through thought leadership, insight, and expert voices. 

• Publishing regularly, not just during campaigns. 

• Showing up consistently in the places where buyers are learning, discussing and validating ideas. 

In an ecosystem, visibility is not a moment, but rather an ongoing signal. 

A different role for marketing 

None of this suggests that structure disappears but it does suggest that the role of marketing is evolving from moving buyers through predefined stages to shaping the environment in which decisions take place. 

Our original article challenged whether the funnel still reflects reality, the more practical question is what comes next. 

If you were designing your growth strategy today, based on how buyers actually behave, would a linear funnel still sit at the centre of it?