Why your funnel feels broken — and what to do about it

Let me tell you about the time I discovered our funnel was a total fraud. I was leading a demand generation programme for a B2B SaaS product with a solid reputation and a beautiful marketing dashboard — full of MQLs. So many MQLs. The problem? None of them were buying. Sales was unimpressed. The Country Head called them “ghost leads”. It was time to take an honest view of the situation.

The traditional funnel is like a gym membership in January — full of high hopes at the start, but most of it goes unused by the end. It looks neat in theory: leads enter, sales engages, deals close. Reality? Leads get stuck, sales blames marketing, and marketing hides behind pretty graphs.

Forrester’s B2B Revenue Waterfall gave a name to what I was experiencing — and a better solution: track buying group behaviour, not just individual leads.

In enterprise deals, decisions aren’t made by one person clicking a whitepaper. It’s a squad — IT, finance, procurement, end users, legal.

They don’t line up politely; they come at you sideways, asynchronously, and sometimes invisibly. The Revenue Waterfall model accounts for that mess. It maps opportunity based on where the group is in the buying journey — not where your lead scoring algorithm thinks they are. It is all about the opportunity, not the lead.

Where account-based thinking comes in

And here is where the account-based approach becomes the real hero of this story. ABM focuses not on individual leads but on high-value target accounts. It aligns perfectly with the buying group concept. By treating the account as the unit of attention, we began building customised content and journeys for all the personas involved in the deal.

We also worked closely with the sales team to define ICP accounts, and used firmographic and intent data to prioritise who got what. Suddenly, we weren’t just spraying campaigns and praying. We were tailoring our outreach, speaking the language of each stakeholder — and giving sales the air cover they needed at the right time.

We applied this framework in a campaign targeting mid-market financial firms. We stopped obsessing over lead volume and started mapping accounts based on buying signals across personas. We used tools like 6sense and D&B to get intent data and enhance our database, adjusted our messaging for CFOs and risk officers, and built journeys for the group. Pipeline health improved significantly — and, more importantly, with better predictability over three to four quarters. True story.

The unexpected side effect

What changed? For one, our meetings with sales became strategy sessions, not blame games. Instead of “Why aren’t you following up on these leads?” we asked, “What are your key accounts saying?” The friction between marketing and sales melted into something rather magical: shared ownership.

Companies like Cisco and Adobe are miles ahead in this game. They have embraced buying group marketing not as a tactic, but as core strategy. Their success metrics? Group engagement, stage progression and deal velocity — not “MQLs sourced”.

So, what’s broken isn’t your funnel per se. It’s the lens you’re using. If you’re still celebrating form fills while sales stares at an empty pipeline, it’s time for a rethink.

What I’d recommend

• Map your key personas in a buying group and look at how they move together.
• Use ABM principles to prioritise and personalise account journeys.
• Co-create target account lists with sales and revisit them every quarter.
• Redefine success: it’s not the number of leads, it’s the quality of conversations across the group.

If this sounds familiar — and painful — I’ve been there. And I help companies build smarter, group-based, account-first demand engines that sales teams actually like.