Buyers Take 28+ Steps. Funnels Assume 5.

Happy New Year.

Most newsletters today will tell you this is the year of growth, AI, efficiency, or doing more with less.

I’m going to say something less comforting — and more useful:

Marketing is still broken.
And the funnel didn’t magically fix itself on January 1st. Feel me?

I know that’s not the tone most people expect at the start of a new year.
But it is the truth most operators are living with.

Why this episode is different

I just published a 40-minute Practitioner’s POV conversation with Steve Garrison, SVP of Marketing at a VC-backed cybersecurity scale-up.

This is not a trends discussion.
And it’s definitely not motivational content.

It’s an operator explaining — very calmly — why the models most B2B teams still rely on no longer reflect how buyers actually buy.

From the episode:

• Buyers don’t move through clean, linear funnels

• Decisions are influenced by 20–30+ non-linear steps

• Most of those steps happen outside your dashboards

That last one made a lot of people uncomfortable. It should.

The uncomfortable New Year truth

Most marketing teams didn’t fail last year because they didn’t work hard enough.

They failed because:

• They optimized for attention instead of buyers

• They trusted attribution more than actual buying behavior

• They kept fixing execution instead of questioning the model

Funnels didn’t break overnight.
They broke slowly — as buying became more fragmented, more social, and more self-directed.

Point isn’t “burn everything down.”

It’s simpler — and harder:

That’s the shift most teams are scared to make.

This isn’t a new argument

Over the last year, the ideas most marketers were uncomfortable with…
were the ones people actually leaned into.

Here are three episodes that resonated most — not because they were optimistic, but because they said what most GTM teams were already experiencing:

• Anti-Funnel Ep. 1
  Funnels Never Worked — And Here’s the Proof
  → 18K marketers watched because the funnel wasn’t delivering anymore

• Anti-Funnel Ep. 2
  Lead Gen Is a False Signal — Here’s Why Sales Ignores Your Leads
  → 6K views from teams questioning MQL-driven growth

• Anti-Funnel Ep. 7
  Only 5% of CMOs Tell the Truth. Are You One of Them?
  → 12.5K views because internal narratives and dashboards don’t match reality

These weren’t popular because they were comfortable.
They were popular because they were recognizable.

If you want help applying this (no pitch deck, no sales theatre)

To kick off the year, I’m offering a free 15-minute GTM Audit.

This is not a demo.
This is not a funnel review checklist.

In 15 minutes, we’ll look at:

• Where your GTM motion is misaligned with real buying behavior

• Where funnels are creating false confidence

• And what one change would create the biggest downstream impact

If nothing useful comes out of it, we part ways. No follow-ups.

👉 Reply to this email with “GTM” and I’ll share the booking link.

Happy New Year.
Let’s fix what’s actually broken.

— Sajin

Anti-Marketing with Sajin