More buyer signals won’t tell you what buyers need next
Clicks, visits, and engagement scores show what buyers did. Better marketing starts with understanding what they’re trying to accomplish.
By Tanya Thorson,
Executive VP Strategic Growth Marketing
Published on October 8, 2026
Marketers can capture more buyer signals than ever. We know who clicked, downloaded, visited, returned, and crossed an engagement threshold. But all that activity doesn’t necessarily tell us what’s happening in a buyer’s decision.
We still love a good funnel. We build stages, assign conversion rates, create dashboards, debate attribution, and spend a lot of time trying to move people neatly from one box to the next.
There’s just one problem: buyers don’t behave nearly as neatly as our systems suggest.
They research independently, move between channels, consult colleagues, compare alternatives, disappear, come back, and sometimes talk to sales. A buyer can sit in consideration in your CRM while already building a business case, checking alternatives, and trying to get three other people comfortable with the decision.
When are we going to accept that a funnel stage tells us where a buyer sits in our process, not necessarily what’s happening in their decision?
That doesn’t mean the funnel is dead. It means we need to stop asking it to do a job it was never designed to do.
The funnel is an operating model, not a map of buyer behavior
Funnels are useful. They give organizations a common language for pipeline, forecasting, conversion, and handoffs between marketing and sales. The problem begins when a stage is used as shorthand for buyer intent.
The latest research makes that distinction harder to ignore. McKinsey’s 2026 Global B2B Pulse surveyed nearly 4,000 B2B decision-makers across 13 countries and found buyers now use an average of 10 channels across the purchasing journey. Buyers move among in-person, remote, and digital interactions, and McKinsey found that inconsistent information across teams is now the leading reason buyers switch suppliers.
Think about what that means for the traditional funnel. The company sees stages. The buyer experiences a company.
They don’t care whether the website belongs to marketing, the conversation belongs to sales, or the problem they had after purchase belongs to customer success. They experience all of it as one relationship. When those interactions contradict one another, the org chart is irrelevant.
Buyers are doing more without us
There’s another problem with treating the funnel as the buyer journey: Increasingly, we can’t see large parts of that journey.
Gartner’s 2026 research found that 67% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience. The study, based on a survey of 646 B2B buyers and conducted in August and September 2025, also found that 45% used generative AI in a recent purchase.
Forrester’s 2026 Buyer Insights research, built from more than 17,500 global buyers, reaches a similar conclusion. Buyers are using new sources to research options and make decisions, often before a seller enters the conversation.
That means the first activity captured in your martech stack may not be the beginning of the buyer’s journey at all. Someone arriving on your website for the first time may already understand the category, know several competitors, have discussed the problem internally, and be narrowing a shortlist.
We call it awareness because that’s when we became aware of them. That’s a very different thing.
Self-service doesn’t mean ‘no humans allowed’
The answer isn’t to swing to the opposite extreme and decide buyers never want to talk to sales. That would be another neat marketing narrative that doesn’t match reality.
In May, Gartner reported that 70% of B2B buyers prefer a completely digital, self-service buying experience. Yet in the same research, 69% said they prefer to validate AI-generated insights with a sales rep. Buyers reported using an average of seven information sources during a recent purchase.
That isn’t contradictory behavior. It’s human behavior.
Buyers want independence when independence is useful. They want expertise when expertise is useful. They may want to research quietly, compare options on their own, and avoid an unnecessary sales call. Then the stakes rise, internal questions surface, or uncertainty creeps in, and suddenly a knowledgeable human becomes incredibly valuable.
The strategic question isn’t whether the journey should be digital or human. It’s whether we understand enough about the buyer’s context to know which experience will help next.
More technology doesn’t automatically create more understanding
This is where the martech conversation needs to change. We’ve spent years getting better at capturing activity. The challenge now is understanding what that activity means.
Salesforce’s 2026 State of Marketing, based on nearly 4,500 marketers worldwide, found that 83% say customers increasingly want two-way conversations. Yet only one in four marketers is completely satisfied with how their organization unifies and uses customer data to create relevant experiences.
That gap matters. We can know that someone visited a pricing page three times. We still may not know why. They could be ready to buy, preparing next year’s budget, comparing us with a competitor, or trying to determine whether we’re remotely affordable.
The behavior is visible. The meaning behind it isn’t always obvious.
That’s why the next advantage in martech won’t come from collecting another signal simply because we can. It’ll come from getting better at interpreting the signals we already have and carrying that context from one interaction to the next.
Stop asking what stage they’re in
A more useful question is: What is this buyer trying to accomplish right now?
Do they need education? Comparison? Proof? Reassurance? Internal consensus? Pricing clarity? A conversation with someone who actually understands the problem?
Those questions force us to think beyond stages and toward the next useful interaction. They also expose where the stack is failing.
- Can marketing and sales see the same customer context?
- Does information survive when a buyer changes channels?
- Are we triggering outreach because it’s genuinely helpful or because an automation rule says it’s time to send email number four?
That’s the standard marketing leaders should bring to their technology decisions. Not how many touches the stack can produce, but whether those touches make the buying experience better.
The funnel is still useful for forecasting, measurement, and running the business. But it’s our model of commercial progress, not the buyer’s map.
The funnel can stay. The fiction can’t.