I know, I know—it sounds like marketing sacrilege. Funnels are our bread and butter. They’re the holy grail of growth strategy!

But, you should hear Claire Sullentropout. She’s not just anyone—she started her career as employee #2 at Calendly and has helped countless powerhouse brands like Sprout Social, Calendly, and Wistia drive massive user growth with her agency Forget The Funnel


Here’s what makes her approach so powerful—and why it might just revolutionize your marketing game:

1. You’re oversimplifying the buying journey:

You’re oversimplifying to assume that everyone fits into the typical, 3-phase funnel: Awareness, consideration, and purchase. 

That shoves buying decisions into 3 super generic stages that may not be relevant depending on the product being sold or industry.

(This is especially true for B2B and longer buying cycles.)

What should companies do instead? 

Your customer base is diverse, lots of different job titles, and spread across different regions. Sit down and get super clear about all of your customers. 

Identify who your super ideal customer is, you know, the 10 customers that you wish you could clone. 

They’re who we want to be learning from and acquiring more info from. 

Once you’ve gotten clear on who those folks are, then figure out, before they ever knew about your product, why they woke up one day and were like “I need a new thing.”

From there, if you can uncover what the buying process looked like for your ICP, you can reverse engineer KPIs and funnel stages that match up with that ideal customer’s journey. 

Then go find more folks like them to convert in a meaningful way.

2. How do you know if your funnel is broken?

If there’s been a significant change in the competitive landscape,it’s probably be time to rethink your funnel.

Case in point: Covid hit and totally changed how people made purchases. Every business was wary of their budget. 

Businesses cut all their software expenses they didn’t absolutely need. Forcing hundreds of businesses to rethink who they were targeting, who their best customer was now because they were losing who they thought were their best customers.

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How your brand responds to that type of market shift will give you a good indicator of whether your brand needs to rework its funnel concept.

Two other good indicators are if your product has evolved significantly or if you start attracting customers that you weren’t intentionally targeting. It’s probably time to ask whether your product help customers do more or different things than it used to.

(This is HUGE for startups and high-growth tech companies.)

Think Salesforce or HubSpot: they started solving one issue now they handle a suite of Marketing and sales tasks.

So if your product has evolved, if there’s been a shift in the market, or if you notice that customers you weren’t initially targeting are coming to your product, that’s when you need to look into updating your funnel concept.

3. Where to start:

As a Marketer, you’re incentivized to drive volume, but you’re not working with other departments to track how well those folks are converting and staying engaged. 

You might be driving a bunch of junk traffic, which isn’t helpful to anyone.

That just creates more difficulty down the line for customer success. 

The other thing that’s helpful about rethinking your funnel concept is partnering with other departments. 

If Marketing can pull off a project like a website optimization experiment that’s fueled by customer insight, there’s an opportunity to work with the product team.

Share with them how you learned a lot about those customers and how good of a fit they were for you. 

Partner on reworking your onboarding emails because you might see a couple of ways that you can convert more of them to paid. 

(🍌This is such low-hanging fruit!!! Seriously, go re-read your onboarding emails.)

Rethinking your funnel concept helps break down the silos between Marketing, product, and CS.

4. 7 killer customer research Qs:

Doing customer research can be tricky if it’s something that your team is new to. 

The questions that you ask should be very much about uncovering what happened in your customer’s life. 

Not asking what their opinion is and not asking future looking questions that would gauge interest on potential features. 

The whole goal is to get as much of a sense of what their buying experience looked like in the wild, so that you can then find the commonalities between how all of your best customers buy.

Some specific questions to ask:

1️⃣. “Before you’d ever even heard of us, what were you using?”

2️⃣. “Were you using anything else, or were you doing nothing?”

3️⃣. “Was this a new need that came about?” 

4️⃣. “What happened that made you realize that whatever you were using wasn’t working anymore?”

5️⃣. Then from there ask how they looked for a new product. Did they ask colleagues? Did they Google it? 

6️⃣. “How did you go about trying to find a new solution?” 

7️⃣. “When you found us, what stood out that made you ready to put in your email and sign up?”

Asking those questions is all about uncovering step by step. You want to find as much of the facts of their buying process as possible.

5. A Marketing hill to die on:

Qualitative research is underused, underestimated, and often done wrong. 

It’s not even considered data half the time. 

(This is CRIMINAL.)

When people think of data, it’s only quantitative. They forget about interviews of customers, like what are customers actually saying in the wild? 

There’s absolutely value in data. There’s value in numbers. 

But your data tells you what people do and don’t do, but you still have no idea why they do what they do.”


I hope you’re taking notes, Marketing Besties. And if you want more Marketing truth bombs, listen to the rest of my convo with Claire here!

Daniel Murray
Daniel Murray
Level up your marketing game

Zero BS. Just fun, unfiltered, industry insights with the game-changers behind some of the coolest companies from around the globe.

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