The Death of the Linear Funnel: Why Modern GTM Requires Multiple Simultaneous Motions

Traditional go-to-market strategies operate on the assumption of a relatively linear funnel. The expectation is that everyone goes through the sales process in this very prescriptive way, and you provide an experience for them that suits to that.

Maybe that's something that doesn't quite match with what the actual customer experience is, given the complexity of the way that people interact with products and services now. Given the complexity of search, of the buying cycle, of a million other different things.

The linear funnel was a convenient fiction that helped us organize our thinking. But it was always a simplification. And in 2026, it's not even a useful simplification anymore—it's actively misleading.

What the Linear Funnel Assumed

The traditional model went something like this: awareness leads to consideration leads to decision leads to purchase. Marketing generates awareness at the top. They nurture prospects through consideration. They hand qualified leads to sales. Sales converts them through a prescribed discovery-demo-proposal-close process. Everyone moves through the stages in order. You can predict conversion rates at each stage. You can optimize each stage independently.

It was clean. It was measurable. It made intuitive sense.

And it bore almost no resemblance to how complex B2B buying actually works.

Here's what the linear funnel model missed: buyers don't move in straight lines. They loop back. They jump stages. They enter at different points. They involve multiple stakeholders who are each at different stages. They research independently before ever talking to sales. They go dark for months and then suddenly re-engage. They make decisions before they ever fill out a form.

The prescribed experience we built around the linear funnel—the nurture sequences, the stage-based content, the handoff from marketing to sales at a specific point—all of that assumes a buying journey that doesn't actually exist.

What Modern Buying Journeys Actually Look Like

Buyers are more educated than they ever have been, and a lot more of the buying journey is taking place before they ever talk to anyone. There are so many resources out there, whether it's AI or whether it's content that's created, that allows people to really make the decision before they speak to people in many instances.

This fundamentally breaks the linear funnel model. Because if buyers are making decisions before they talk to sales, then the entire middle section of your funnel—the part where you thought you were nurturing and educating and qualifying—that's happening outside your visibility. You don't control it. You can't track it. You can't optimize it the way you thought you could.

Instead, what you have is multiple different motions going on at the same time. Someone might read your blog content while simultaneously asking ChatGPT about your category while also reading Reddit threads about competitors while also talking to a peer who used your product five years ago. They're not moving through your funnel—they're gathering inputs from everywhere and synthesizing their own conclusions.

And different stakeholders in the buying decision are doing this independently, at their own pace, through their own preferred channels. The CFO is looking at pricing and ROI calculators. The end user is watching demo videos and reading reviews. The IT leader is evaluating security documentation and integration requirements. None of them are moving through a linear sequence. All of them are influencing the eventual decision.

What Best-in-Class Looks Like Today

Modern go-to-market is much less linear. You have to have a lot of distribution. You have to be present everywhere. You have to give customers multiple opportunities to interact with you. And you have to build more of an ecosystem, a community around your product, your service, your people. Make sure that you're always present in that conversation.

This is a fundamentally different approach. Instead of designing a single path through a funnel, you're creating a presence across an entire ecosystem. Instead of controlling the buyer's journey, you're making sure they encounter you wherever they happen to be looking.

What does this actually mean in practice?

It means you can't just rely on direct sales anymore. You need content that educates. You need community where people can learn from peers. You need presence on the platforms where your buyers actually spend time—whether that's LinkedIn, whether it's industry-specific forums, whether it's conferences and events. You need advocates and ambassadors who can speak credibly about your solution in contexts you'll never reach directly.

It means distribution becomes as important as creation. Just throwing a piece up on a website and leaving it to season for six months and then hopefully start to grow some traffic through SEO—that approach doesn't work anymore. People are looking for quicker results. You need to think about the networks and the mechanisms you use to get your content in front of as many people as possible.

It means you have to serve multiple different buying motions simultaneously. Some buyers want to self-educate. Some want hands-on demos. Some want to talk to sales immediately. Some want to try the product first. Some want to see detailed technical documentation. Some want to hear customer stories. You can't force everyone through the same prescribed path. You have to support all of these motions at once.

Why Companies Struggle With This Shift

The linear funnel was easy to manage because it gave you clear stage gates, clear handoffs, clear metrics at each stage. When you move to multiple simultaneous motions, you lose that clean structure. It's messier. It's harder to track. It's harder to assign credit. It's harder to optimize.

And frankly, it requires much more coordination across functions. Marketing can't just hand off leads at a specific stage anymore—they're involved throughout. Sales can't just work deals that come through the prescribed funnel—they're engaging with prospects who are at wildly different points in their journey. Product and customer success can't wait until after purchase—they're part of the evaluation process now.

This is why alignment matters so much. When you have multiple simultaneous motions, when buyers are interacting with different parts of your organization at different times through different channels, the only way it works is if everyone's pulling in the same direction. If sales and marketing are misaligned, the buyer gets a disjointed experience. If product and marketing are misaligned, the value proposition doesn't match reality. If customer success and sales are misaligned, the handoff after purchase falls apart.

The Practical Implications

First, you need to stop thinking about "the funnel" as a single path and start thinking about the entire ecosystem where buying decisions happen. Map out all the places your buyers might interact with information about your category, your competitors, your solution. That's where you need presence.

Second, you need to instrument for multiple entry points and multiple paths. Not everyone's going to fill out a contact form as their first interaction. Some will read ten blog posts first. Some will engage on social. Some will get a referral from a peer. Your systems need to recognize and accommodate all of these paths, not just the one you prefer.

Third, you need to think about content and enablement for multiple stages happening simultaneously. Because when someone reaches out to sales, you don't actually know what stage they're at. They might have already made the decision and just need pricing. They might be at the very beginning and just exploring options. Your sales team needs to be equipped to handle both, not just follow a prescribed discovery process.

Fourth, you need to accept that measurement is going to be messier. You're not going to have clean conversion rates at each stage anymore. Attribution is going to be complex and imperfect. You need to focus more on the ultimate outcomes—revenue, pipeline, customer acquisition—and less on the intermediate metrics that assume a linear path.

What This Means for Strategy

The shift away from linear funnels isn't just a tactical change. It's a fundamental rethinking of how go-to-market works. You're not designing a path. You're creating an ecosystem. You're not controlling the journey. You're ensuring you're present wherever the journey goes.

This requires investment in multiple channels, multiple formats, multiple types of engagement. It requires coordination across functions that traditionally operated in silos. It requires accepting more ambiguity in measurement and attribution. And it requires letting go of the clean, linear model that made everything feel predictable and controllable.

But here's the thing: the linear funnel was never as predictable and controllable as we thought. We were just comfortable with the illusion. The messy reality of multiple simultaneous motions is actually closer to how buying has always worked—we just have to build systems that acknowledge that reality instead of pretending it doesn't exist.

Build GTM Strategy Around How Buyers Actually Buy

Linear funnels don't reflect how modern buyers make decisions. At Winsome Marketing, we help companies build go-to-market strategies around the messy reality of multiple simultaneous motions—creating presence across the entire ecosystem where buying decisions actually happen.

Ready to move beyond the linear funnel? Let's build a GTM strategy that matches how your buyers actually buy.