The Company That Sold the Funnel Says the Funnel is Over
HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar says the marketing that works now learns inside the campaign rather than after the results arrive.
Today's customers aren't searching for keywords or browsing your website. They're asking AI for what they need.
If this caught your attention, that’s not accidental.
The best editorial systems don’t happen by accident. Outlever builds them.
HubSpot helped standardize the B2B funnel. Its Chief Marketing Officer now says that model is finished.
"AI collapsed the buyer's journey and made the old playbook obsolete," Kipp Bodnar, the company's CMO, wrote on LinkedIn. The lifecycle stages, the lead score, the nurture track, and the handoff from marketing to sales became industry defaults through the tooling HubSpot sold into them. That history is what gives Bodnar's assessment its weight, since the company grading the model is the one that shipped it.
Discovery moves off the website
The change Bodnar describes sits below the surface. Buyers now make their first move somewhere the company can't see, and everything downstream was built on the assumption that the first move happened on a vendor's property.
Bodnar made the mechanism explicit in a later post. "Today's customers aren't searching for keywords or browsing your website. They're asking AI for what they need," he wrote. Set that against the old model and the problem draws itself. The top of the funnel used to be your site, your search ranking, your gated report. If the buyer now opens an answer engine instead, then discovery, the shortlist, the first read on whether you're even a fit, all of it happens somewhere your funnel can't see and, more importantly, can't measure.
The always-on motion
The old sequence ran in one direction. Teams planned a campaign, shipped it, and read the results after the spend was gone, with no way to correct a weak plan until the cycle closed.
Loop marketing moves the learning inside the campaign. Experiments run constantly, and signals surface while the spend is still live. Each cycle feeds the next, and the system itself becomes the asset. "Learnings happen so fast that setbacks never become full-blown failures," Bodnar said.
Better for buyers
Buyers gain first. The old sequence asked for a form and a scheduled call before anyone gave a straight answer, and the wait was the price of admission. A system that meets buyers inside the tool they already opened answers at the moment they ask, and the conversation that follows starts from a better place.
The buyer has already moved. The funnel still sits where they used to stand, which leaves a well-run motion aimed at a customer who has stopped arriving that way.
Read what the room is reading.
New pieces for growth leaders, delivered as they publish. Unsubscribe whenever.
