For decades, B2B teams have organized their marketing and sales around the funnel: awareness → consideration → decision. On paper, it looks neat and predictable.
But here’s the problem: buyers don’t move that way anymore.
They jump around. They stall. They ghost you for months and then suddenly reappear. And if your revenue engine only runs on the funnel model, you’re going to miss them.
This post will unpack:
- Why the funnel is broken
- What the buyer journey actually looks like today
- How a Signal Activated Growth approach helps close the mid-funnel gap
Why the Funnel is Broken
The funnel was built for a seller-driven world, back when sales controlled access to information. If you wanted to evaluate a product, you had to talk to a rep.
Today? Buyers have unlimited access to information. Reviews, competitor pricing, peer recommendations, Slack communities, all before they ever fill out a form.
Here’s the disconnect:
- The funnel assumes a straight line: awareness → interest → decision.
- In reality, 79% of marketing leads never convert to sales.
That gap creates a vicious cycle:
- Conversions stall.
- Marketing pumps more leads into the top.
- Sales gets buried in unqualified MQLs.
- Trust between teams erodes.
As one CMO described it:
The Land of the Lost. Leads go in, and then… where did they go?
Funnels aren’t useless, but they no longer reflect how buyers actually behave.
What the Buyer Journey Really Looks Like
Instead of a pipeline diagram, think of the buyer journey as the lived experience of your customer. It’s not linear. It’s full of loops, pauses, and jumps forward or backward.
The SiriusDecisions Buyer’s Journey Map Framework: Sample Data
The SiriusDecisions Buyer’s Journey Map (above) captures this reality in detail. It breaks the process into Education → Solution → Selection, and within those phases, buyers move through stages like:
- Loosen the status quo
- Commit to change
- Explore possible solutions
- Justify the decision
- Make the selection
Critically, these aren’t just “handoffs.” They’re buyer mindsets, and buyers often revisit them multiple times before making a decision.
One stage stands out: Commit to Change.
That’s the breaking point where a buyer decides to stop tolerating the problem. If you miss that moment, you’re chasing ghosts.
And at every stage, buyers leave behind signals:
- Posting about a new initiative on LinkedIn
- Researching competitors on G2
- Hiring a new ops leader
- Opening your emails less… or suddenly more
The challenge? Most companies don’t capture these signals, and even fewer act on them in time.
Signal Activated Growth: A Better Way
So how do we align with buyers instead of pushing them through a funnel?
This is where Signal Activated Growth comes in. It’s a mindset shift: listen for buyer signals and act on them in near-real time.
The playbook:
- Listen for meaningful signals. Funding events, job changes, competitor research, intent surges, not vanity metrics.
- Add context. A random job change is noise. A job change at a priority ICP account? That’s worth acting on.
- Deliver the right content. Meet the buyer where they are. Show the cost of inaction if they’re still committing to change; proof points if they’re exploring solutions.
- Make it personal, at scale. AI can draft context-rich outreach in your brand’s voice. Humans still review so it feels authentic.
This is why we’re building the Lead Nurturing Agent (LNA) at Mabbly: a digital teammate that plugs into your CRM, tracks for meaningful behaviors, and prompts the right outreach at the right time.
Instead of waiting for a quarterly campaign, you engage when the buyer is actually moving.
The Takeaway
Funnels tell you what’s happening inside your company. But they don’t reveal what’s happening inside your buyer’s head.
Frameworks like SiriusDecisions’ Buyer’s Journey Map show the complexity and loops of the modern buying process. And when you add signal-based engagement on top of it, you stop losing leads in the middle and start building real pipeline.
That’s Signal Activated Growth.
