Welcome back to Digital Rage. I'm Jeff the producer here at Byer Company and today we have an article written by Miriam Akhati for Byer Company called AI
Reinventing the customer journey beyond the funnel. And she exposes how the AI search revolution has shortened the distance between discovery and decision and changed the game for everybody who works in marketing funnels.
For decades, the sacred map of every marketer, sales team and well every business strategist was the funnel.
It was, yeah, our predictable path.
Exactly. Awareness at the wide top, you know, filtering down to consideration in the middle and finally conversion at the narrow bottom.
Yeah, it was. It was the assumed choreography of the customer journey.
And it was, you know, a comfortable fantasy. We're deep diving into the source material that calls this traditional marketing funnel an official relic of the past.
Oh, relic. Wow. Yeah. The truth is that clean marching order we all drew on whiteboards was always a little bit off, but the customer sort of played along until AI showed up.
Oh, yeah.
And AI didn't just optimize the funnel. It exposed the fundamental structural flaws in the whole map by collapsing the time it takes to learn and decide.
So the mission today isn't about trying to, you know, patch up that broken model or add a little loop at the bottom.
No, not at all.
It's about understanding the fundamentally new physics of buying in a world mediated by synthetic intelligence.
We need to figure out what replaces the funnel when AI has collapsed the journey and blended all the stages together.
It's a necessary strategic reckoning. I mean, if you're still basing your investment, your content strategy, your sales handoffs,
your measurement on a five step linear time delayed flow, you're designing for a buying environment that simply doesn't exist anymore.
You're mapping a ghost town. Exactly. We have to map reality, not legacy.
Okay, let's unpack this. When we say collapse the journey, it sounds dramatic.
Yeah.
But what is the specific technological change AI introduced that just removed the space between discovery, learning and decision?
It boils down to the difference between information delivery and information synthesis.
Okay.
Think about traditional search. It required all these sequential time consuming steps.
Google gave you a list of links. You, the buyer, had to click, read, open another tab to compare, maybe read a review.
Right, and start forming an opinion over minutes or hours or...
Or sometimes days. Those time intervals were the pauses that define the stages of the funnel.
The moments where you were nurtured down the path by us sending you the next piece of content based on your last click.
Now AI delivers compressed answers instantly. A powerful, large language model doesn't just link you to sources.
It digests hundreds of them. Your white papers, your competitors reviews, independent analyses and outputs a single synthesized verdict.
A verdict. So in that single response, the buyer gets what? Everything at one.
Everything. Context, opinions, comparisons, reviews, and often deep technical detail all merged together.
So the buyer just skips the whole slow-paced courtship phase because the information asymmetries instantly level.
They do. Our sources state that because of this instant compression, there's effectively no top, no middle.
There's only the moment someone asks a question.
Wow.
Awareness, education, and evaluation have simultaneously in the space of a single response from the AI.
The stages haven't shortened. They've simply blended into a single burst of knowledge transfer.
That makes profound sense. The funnel assumes everyone starts at the same entrance door, the awareness stage.
But if a buyer gets an instant comprehensive education, they might bypass our front door entirely.
They do. They just show up informed and potentially already leaning one way or the other.
So what does this all mean if we can't predict where the buyer enters?
It means we have to abandon the idea of a single, uniform, starting gate. The entry point is now. Well, it's completely unpredictable because AI is mediating that first touch.
And it's synthesizing content from sources we don't even control.
Many of which you don't control, right?
Can you give us some examples of these wild entry points that just defy the traditional funnel?
The sources outline a few really disruptive possibilities.
A buyer might discover your brand not by clicking on your blog, but through an AI summary of a white paper,
they never actually downloaded. Right. They just get the cliff notes.
Exactly. Or they might get a product recommendation embedded inside a third party industry chatbot.
Maybe they start with a video clip on LinkedIn that an AI flagged as hyper relevant to their project.
Okay. I can see that.
Or, and this is maybe the most disruptive for B2B. A team might have already decided to buy your product.
They just use AI to validate that purchase or find the best pricing. They enter the journey at what we used to call the bottom.
If they're not walking a predictable linear path, what are they doing?
Our source material offered a really powerful analogy for this, suggesting the journey is now a loop of micro decisions.
Or even better, a gravity well.
I think that's the most important conceptual shift we're dealing with.
A funnel is a diagram where marketers push people down a defined slope.
A gravity well is a force that pulls people in based on mass and density.
Every strong, relevant piece of content, your proprietary research, your unique angle, your deep expertise,
it adds mass and density to your gravity well, pulling the buyer closer.
And conversely, every week or generic piece of content, the stuff that looks like everyone else is marketing, it actively pushes them away.
It lacks gravity. It just wastes their attention and their effort.
Right.
And these decisions, these tightening loops, are happening long before the buyer registers as a lead in your CRM.
They happen in the spaces where content gets synthesized and shared.
Like in a Slack channel.
Exactly when a team is debating vendors in a Slack channel, or someone skims a synthetic summary of five different analyst reports,
these are all critical decision points that just do not obey the neat sequential order of the funnel.
That's a fascinating but frankly scary reality for marketers.
Sounds like the death knell for the classic time-delayed email drip campaign.
The nurture sequence we all learn.
If someone can learn everything in seconds, why would they tolerate a four-week email sequence?
They won't.
That classic sequence assumes the buyer needs to be slowly spoon fed information over weeks to move them from awareness to consideration.
AI has eliminated the scarcity of information that made that effective.
But let me ask the pragmatic marketer question.
If the buyer path is this chaotic and unpredictable and we abandon the familiar stages, how do we ever measure ROI?
Doesn't the gravity well metaphor make marketing planning impossible?
That's a great question.
And it requires redefining success.
We stop measuring linear conversion rates based on sequential steps.
And we start measuring mental availability and influence.
Okay.
Our goal shifts from, did they click the sequence to, is our brand language showing up in the AI summary?
If traditional nurture is dead, what replaces it is brand point of view.
POV.
Here's where it gets really interesting because POV is intangible right.
How does a specific stance replace a measurable sequence of emails?
It replaces sequence with consistency.
Buyers now often arrive at your site if they even arrive at all with instant recall about your brand.
They already know what your brand believes, what it opposes and why it exists.
Because the AI has efficiently synthesized your brand identity from hundreds of sources across the web.
Exactly.
And if your message is contradictory, AI spots that inconsistency instantly and that reduces your gravity, makes you look weak.
So the consistency of the message matters far far more than the timing of the message.
It's brand governance over content cadence.
Absolutely.
The buyer is not nurtured by the sequence of content.
They are nurtured by the relentless consistency of the brand's POV over time.
The sources make it really clear.
In the post funnel era, your clear sharp POV is the journey.
So if you don't have that sharp, consistent and memorable POV.
You have no mass and therefore no gravity, you're just noise.
This brings us to the core problem we set up to solve.
If the funnel is a relic, we need new frameworks.
We need three specific strategic maps to replace that outdated diagram and effectively manage our influence in this compressed journey.
Yes. And these three maps work together.
They account for the chaotic, compressed, and synthetic nature of modern buying.
They force you to look at content as a strategic asset, not just a volume play.
Okay, so let's walk the listener through these required shifts.
What's the first map?
The first map is the influence map.
The goal here is simple but revolutionary.
To chart all the places where AI might pull your specific content into the buyer's synthesized answer,
this is an audit of your content's atomization.
I like that term "atomization".
It suggests the content is being broken down into its smallest useful parts.
That's it exactly. You're moving beyond tracking the whole white paper download.
You're trying to determine if AI is pulling specific sentences, definitions, or proprietary data points from your sources.
The influence map forces you to track where the new touch points actually happen.
Many of which are completely outside your direct control or even off your own website.
Right. So we're talking beyond standard Google search results and social feeds.
The examples provided are critical. Standard search, AI summaries, industry-specific chatbots,
analysts reports, social comments.
What was the other one? Internal queries.
Yes, and that's key for B2B internal queries within a large company's own knowledge systems.
Your content might be locked behind a firewall, but if an AI system digests it,
you need to know how it's being summarized and used.
That is a massive shift, moving from mapping what we send out to mapping where AI is pulling our information in.
And breaking it apart.
And understanding that atomization leads directly to the second framework, the decision loop map.
Since the journey is now a loop of instant micro decisions, this map identifies the specific granular judgements buyers have to make on their way to a final choice.
You have to anticipate those doubts.
And this moves far beyond the simple generic question like, do I need a new CRM?
Oh, absolutely. The decision loop map forces you to ask, what specific questions are they answering?
The question is, are they answering about us right now?
The micro decisions are the points of friction.
For example, is this credible?
Is this solution secure and compliant?
Right. Is this underlying technology modern or is it legacy?
Is this worth the internal switching cost for my team?
I can see how that loop structure forces marketers to be incredibly targeted.
You aren't writing one big awareness article anymore.
You're writing dozens of micro answers for specific, small doubts, credibility, security, and modernity.
That's the essence of the new approach.
Each micro decision is an opportunity for a new piece of content that addresses that specific friction point immediately before the buyer loops away and find a better answer from a competitor.
And this whole process is what defines the gravitational pull of your brand.
Precisely.
Which brings us to the third and arguably most critical map because it defines everything we've just discussed.
The recall map.
And this is about what your brand is known for before the buyer ever even visits your site.
Yes. It's the definition of your brand's mental availability in the age of synthesis.
This map forces strategic clarity.
It requires an internal audit to define the core thesis the brand stands for, ensuring every single touchpoint reinforces that thesis.
So AI repeats it accurately.
Because if you don't define your recall, the AI will just define a generic version of you.
It will. So the goal here is strategic memorability.
Defined in a way that's easily consumable and repeatable by an AI model that summarizes everything down to a few paragraphs.
You have to ask those tough questions.
Exactly. What is the one sentence, the definitive value statement you want AI to repeat about your company?
What stance should people recognize instantly?
What five key patterns or pillars define your specific expertise?
The recall map defines your gravitational center.
And if you can't answer those questions succinctly and consistently.
AI will synthesize its own probably generic answer by blending you with three competitors.
You lose your unique mass. You have no gravity.
So we've gone from mapping sequential events, awareness, consideration, conversion to mapping identity and influence.
The summary of the entire strategic shift is clear.
The traditional funnel made marketers chase specific conversion events.
And the new era rewards brand recognition, mental availability and the ability of your content to withstand synthesis.
The goal is no longer pushing people down a predefined path.
Pulling people in.
It's pulling people in using gravity and a powerful consistent POV that AI can readily articulate on your behalf.
If AI is already using your language, repeating your worldview and recognizing your expertise in a synthesis response,
you've already won half the journey before the customer ever sends you an email or clicks a button.
Recognition is the new victory metric.
It simplifies the objective while drastically complicating the execution.
You have to be omnipresent across all those influence maps, but with a singular voice defined by the recall map.
That requires a rigor and a ruthless consistency that I think we can agree many brands currently lack.
They do.
This entire deep dive started with the premise that AI destroyed the marketing funnel.
But the sources suggest something even more fundamental as it play here.
The most crucial takeaway that I think for you to mow on this week is this.
AI didn't actually destroy the funnel.
It simply exposed that the funnel was never truly real in the first place.
It was an artificial construct based on time delays and information scarcity.
Right.
Now we get the opportunity to replace that comfortable fantasy with a mapping strategy that actually aligns with a messy, compressed and instantaneous way humans make complex decisions today.
Reach out to us at jbuyer.com for comments and questions.
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