What’s Your Funnel Actually For?
Hint: Not for reporting. For revealing what’s broken.
Everyone’s got a funnel.
Most are just… calendars in disguise.
The startup default is to build a funnel that looks clean on a slide, tracks “awareness → revenue,” and gets updated every Tuesday at 10 a.m.
But ask anyone what it’s actually telling them, and the answers get foggy. Fast.
Because most funnels don’t generate signal.
They just create motion. Meetings. Reports. Activity theater.
Let’s fix that.
Funnels Shouldn’t Be Passive
If your funnel isn’t showing you where trust breaks, where your story fails, or where users stop caring — it’s not doing its job.
The goal isn’t just to convert.
The goal is to expose friction so you can act on it.
A signal-rich funnel gives you:
A map of drop-off with context
A way to tie behavior to narrative
A faster path to alignment between teams (and reality)
Let’s look at what this actually looks like in practice.
Example 1: The Free Trial That Was Lying to You
DevTool startup. Free trials are flowing in.
30% activate. “Not bad.”
Until we start treating the funnel as a signal engine:
70% of trials never connect a repo
55% open the onboarding email, but don’t click anything
80% of successful activations come from just one segment: AI-focused teams
Suddenly the funnel isn’t a static stat — it’s a story:
We’re overpromising ease-of-use in ads
Our onboarding email talks about features, not friction
Our ICP isn’t “developers” — it’s a very specific subset
Same numbers. New lens. Now we’re not reporting — we’re redirecting.
Example 2: The Demo Funnel That Blames the Wrong Thing
Vertical SaaS with an outbound-heavy funnel.
100 demos/month → 30% show → 10% close.
Sounds predictable. But once you peel back the layers:
40% of no-shows come from one SDR
Highest-performing bookings use one specific email template
SQLs who played with the ROI calculator convert 5x faster
So no — it’s not a “sales problem.”
It’s a misaligned message → asset → handoff problem.
This isn’t about building a better dashboard.
It’s about building a funnel that reflects how people actually buy — and why they bounce when they don’t.
What to Do With This
If you want your funnel to do more than eat budget and spit out KPIs:
One funnel = one narrative. If it’s not consistent, it’s not useful.
Label the friction. Don’t just measure drop-off — diagnose the break.
Kill the vanity stages. No one cares about “MQL to SAL” if nothing actionable lives there.
Use it to drive conversations. If marketing, product, and sales aren’t seeing the same gaps — the funnel’s a mirror, not a map.
TL;DR
A funnel that doesn’t generate insight isn’t a funnel.
It’s a burn rate with nice formatting.
Coming up next:
Positioning isn’t a tagline.
It’s a decision filter.
See you soon.