The traditional Sales Funnel is dying in the Age of AI.

I’m going to kind of miss it.
Like the cassette tapes from the 1980’s.

The traditional sales funnel of
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
That I grew up with was simple and straight foreword.
But AI is changing B2B buyer's behavior.
And the traditional sales funnel no longer applies.

In its place is a compressed buyer's journey where buyers are already aware of their problem and can describe it in detail.

Today their purchasing journey begins with looking for partners who can solve their problem.

With AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity,
buyers can find AND analyze you and your competitors
without leaving the AI tool.

More importantly, instead of talking with your sales team,
buyers are having long and multi-threaded conversations with their AI research assistant to determine if your company can solve their problems.

And their conversations are not based on keyword phrases like the good old Google search days.

They are describing in detail their problem and requirements.

Armed with this information, their AI research assistant goes out to find vendors that solve the problem and meet their requirements.

And here’s the thing:
𝑻𝒐 𝒂𝒏𝒔𝒘𝒆𝒓 𝒊𝒕𝒔 𝒖𝒔𝒆𝒓𝒔 𝒒𝒖𝒆𝒔𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔, 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒔𝒆 𝑨𝑰 𝒕𝒐𝒐𝒍𝒔 𝒖𝒔𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒏𝒕 𝒐𝒇 𝒚𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝒘𝒆𝒃𝒔𝒊𝒕𝒆.

In the Age of AI your website isn’t a marketing tool.
It’s a database for AI tools.

And if you want to make the shortlist that these AI researchers create, you need to make sure that your website answers the sales questions of your B2B buyers.

AI is compressing the traditional sales funnel.
Buyers are creating their shortlist without talking with your sales team.
Your website isn't a lead generation machine.
It's a database.