Funnels Were Built for Yesterday
Funnels were dreamed up to make things simple—to capture a neat, linear buyer journey controlled by sales and messages handed out on a schedule. Nice and tidy. But buyers today don’t play by those rules.
The Speed Illusion of 2025
Here we are in 2025, thinking we’re smarter, faster, and leaner than ever. AI is writing our emails, scoring our leads, making data sparkle, and forecasting pipelines like magic. We’ve got dashboards feeding more dashboards, and sequencers orchestrating sequencers. But if you pause for a second, something still feels... off.
Here’s the kicker:
We’re throwing AI at systems that were already fractured before AI came along.
Funnels? They’re slick and familiar, sure, but honestly—they’re like an old laptop running on dial-up internet. Time to face it:
What if the funnel itself is part of the problem?
Funnels: Built for Control—Not for the Beautiful Mess of Today
Funnels were dreamed up to make things simple—to capture a neat, linear buyer journey controlled by sales and messages handed out on a schedule. Nice and tidy. But buyers today don’t play by those rules. They ghost you, then pop back with a crowd. They fall in love with your product thanks to a meme rather than a demo.
A CRO told me recently:
“Our best customer? Started with a blog comment. Signed six months later after seeing a community post from someone we didn’t even know.”
That’s not a funnel. That’s a constellation—a messy, sprawling, fascinating constellation.
The Illusion of Safety Funnels Give Us
Funnels make us feel like we have control. They give us numbers, stages, fancy dashboards, names for every step. But do they really capture how trust grows? How surprises happen? How relationships shift in real-time?
This is an inherited pipeline-obsessed mindset. AI might make us faster, but faster isn’t always smarter or better.
AI won’t fix your GTM motion if the motion is heading in the wrong direction.
The Real Bottleneck Isn’t AI, It’s Our Outdated Assumptions
Let's call out the relics cluttering GTM systems today:
Treating leads like packages to hand off
Keeping Sales and Marketing in siloed bubbles
Believing attribution tells the whole truth
Confusing speed (velocity) with lasting progress (momentum)
Thinking more tools means more control
These are old assumptions fading fast. Clinging to them only slows us down.
AI’s Real Impact: Smashing Walls Between Roles
AI hasn’t just sped things up. It’s blurred lines: Sales is writing content, Marketing is running ops, RevOps is strategizing—and founders? They’re sending outbound at midnight with GPT helpers. This isn’t a simple tech upgrade; it’s an identity collapse for traditional roles.
No funnel crafted for the 2010 sales org stands a chance here.
A New Flag: Flywheel Thinking
Time to plant a new flag for growth—the flywheel.
This isn’t a buzzword or a marketing neat trick. It’s a whole new system built for motion, momentum, and compounding energy.
Funnels push throughput.
Flywheels manage energy: how it’s created, stored, and reused.
Where funnels end, flywheels loop.
Where funnels depend on force, flywheels favor flow.
Where funnels assume neat stages, flywheels account for friction, time, and return.
New Words to Build a New System
To leave funnels behind, we need fresh language:
Friction Mapping: Spotting what grinds the system to a halt at every handoff, not just conversions.
Return Paths: Designing how buyers circle back—through product-led growth, content loops, and advocacy.
Momentum Breaks: Hidden places where the system loses steam, lurking in your CRM.
Signal Surfaces: Layers where buying signals live, often overlooked.
Loop Debt: The cost of one-way campaigns that don’t feed back into the system. Like tech debt, but sneakier.
These aren’t just buzzwords—they’re building blocks for a new kind of GTM.
What We’re Actually Building
I’ll be honest. We don’t have it all figured out yet. Flywheel Engineering is a hypothesis, a working model in motion.
Here’s what we’re up to:
Building systems that reduce drag and boost force.
Designing loops that tighten and get smarter with time.
Rethinking how people, tools, and data connect—or don’t.
Using AI as momentum multipliers, not just automation.
Mapping customer journeys as spirals, not straight lines.
It’s a bit chaotic. A little rebellious. But way more real than clinging to a funnel’s pretended future.
An Invitation to Reimagine
You can keep tweaking your funnel stages... or start rethinking the system entirely.
You can keep believing leads flow from MQL to SQL to Closed/Won... or admit that half your pipeline comes from DMs and subtle usage clues no report ever caught.
You can patch more AI onto a broken system built for SDRs and PDFs... or design something made for how people actually buy now.
I’m choosing the latter. And I’m not alone.
Let’s Build Something That Spins
If this resonates, don’t just nod and scroll on.
Start mapping your friction.
Start drawing your loops.
Start wondering: What if we built this from zero?
Not everything needs a rebuild. But everything deserves a fresh look.
Gia’s in the loop—drop a line anytime at hello@agentic.it.