Why Modern Buyers No Longer Follow Your Funnel

For years, SaaS sales teams have been built around a familiar idea.Define the funnel. Control the stages. Move buyers through it.

The problem is not that the funnel is badly designed, it is that buyers have quietly stopped using it. Across SaaS and B2B technology, the way people evaluate and buy software has shifted faster than most go to market structures have adapted. What worked when information was scarce and access to vendors was essential no longer reflects how decisions are actually made.

Buyers now arrive informed, not curious

Most buyers do not start with a sales conversation. They start with research.

They read product pages, compare alternatives, watch demos, explore pricing models and often trial software long before they speak to anyone. By the time a sales conversation happens, a large part of the decision making has already taken place.

This changes the role of sales fundamentally. The buyer is no longer asking to be led through a journey. They are asking for clarity, confirmation and help navigating complexity.

The journey is no longer linear

Traditional funnels assume sequence.Awareness leads to qualification. Qualification leads to demo. Demo leads to proposal.

Modern buying rarely works that way. Stakeholders dip in and out. Technical users and commercial decision makers move at different speeds. A buyer might want deep technical validation before discussing price, or a commercial conversation before committing internal time to evaluation.

They move sideways, pause, revisit earlier questions and often run parallel tracks internally.

The funnel has not disappeared. It has become irrelevant as a controlling mechanism.

Where sales teams create friction without realising it

Many SaaS organisations are still structured around internal handoffs. BDR to AE, AE to Sales Engineer. Sales Engineer to Customer Success.

Each handoff introduces loss of context, repetition and delay. From the buyer’s perspective, it often feels disjointed and transactional. From the company’s perspective, it increases cost and reduces momentum.

What buyers respond to instead is continuity, relevance and access to the right expertise at the right moment.

The quiet shift in effective sales roles

In practice, this is leading to a subtle but important change in how high performing teams operate.

Sales Engineers and product specialists are often having earlier, more meaningful conversations. Not to pitch, but to help buyers think through real world use cases and constraints.

Account Executives remain critical, particularly for commercial structure, negotiation and decision making. But the role is less about controlling every step and more about guiding complex outcomes.

Business Development is increasingly technology enabled and tightly aligned with marketing, rather than operating as a volume driven gatekeeping function.

Customer Success delivers the most value when involved early enough to surface risks and shape realistic expectations, not when asked to fix misalignment after the deal closes.

This is not about removing roles. It is about redesigning how value is delivered.

What this means for leaders

For CEOs and CROs, this is not a tooling problem. It is a structural one.

It requires letting go of comfort in familiar frameworks and asking harder questions about how buyers actually behave, not how the organisation prefers them to behave.

The companies that adapt are building sales models that are lower friction, more resilient and better aligned with modern buying behaviour.

Those that do not often respond by adding more process, more headcount or more tools, while wondering why conversion and trust continue to erode.

The funnel has not failed because buyers are broken. It has failed because buying has moved on.