In the past couple of decades, we’ve heard so many people declare that SEO was dead, content marketing was dead, even funnels were dead. When they make these statements, you’ve got to remember that they are over-dramatising the situation. Marketing is not dead. Funnel marketing is alive and kicking. The only thing is that the rules have changed. If you don’t keep an eye on the rules, your old gameplan will not work. It’s as simple as that. In this post, we’ll cover the state of marketing automation, funnels, SEO, CRM systems, and lead generation as we see it. 

How Are Marketing Funnels Used in 2026

Funnels are still working. But user behaviour has changed. And it is changing every day. Your prospects will no longer fall for the hype. They are more reluctant to give you their email address than ever before. There’s so much spam or cold outreach. And yes, spamming people is not something we call a marketing funnel. It is just what it is. Desperate attempt to throw crap at the wall to see what sticks. 

If you are in the B2B marketing space, I have bad news for you. CEOs are hiding from the Robo Hounds. They no longer dare to open their email or LinkedIn inmail. I recently had this experience. I sent a question to a CEO on LinkedIn. They came back with: “No thanks”. Here’s how the conversation went. 

Marketing funnels can and will work in 2026 and the future years. But they should feel like a conversation not like a trap. People hate being trapped. They know that 90 percent of the time when they give out their email address they get a low quality irrelevant offer back.

It’s easy to use an AI bot to create a “so called marketing funnel” that will send a sequence of 6 messages to potential prospects. But it will not get you anywhere. Still, software companies are making a killing of this trend. 

What’s the Alternative?

I truly believe what I wrote about earlier this year: Content is a Conversation. It’s a book about building relationships through content, because there’s no such thing as a one – way conversation. I personally would rather spend talking to people in my industry, about themselves. See if I can help. If I cannot, that’s OK. I have had a couple of meetings this year with no agenda. And people said in the beginning that they had a marketing agency and everything was taken care of. But by the end of the call they fessed up that the agency hasn’t been reachable for months, and they don’t know what they are doing. Without having a conversation first, I wouldn’t have found out about that. 

You need to respect your prospect’s intelligence, not insult it. Offer strategic value, be genuinely interested, and cut the mass marketing tools.

Moreover, your funnel should not be linear and should not be modular. I explain this in Paternoster Marketing™ in detail, but will give you the low down in just a second. 

The Funnel Marketing Lie

Marketers – and gurus – love talking about overnight riches and conversions. Us, entrepreneurs love believing in it. Like a kid who loves fairy tales. But let’s get real. If your lead time in a B2B consulting niche is 3-6 months, you will not see those numbers. Maybe if you are selling unique fake nails, but that’s not an industry we’re involved in. 

Funnels work if they are set up properly. But they rarely are. AI made some marketers lazy. It’s easy to prompt and paste, but it does not necessarily lead to profits. Most of the time it does not. 

Here is the hard truth. All those cheap AI funnels built over the last twenty-four months are stopping work entirely.

It is 2026. The tide has turned.

Buyers have developed instant immunity to AI-generated text. They recognize the fake tone immediately. It feels lazy, corporate, and dishonest.

Mass AI funnel tactics might work if you are selling cheap consumer products to millions of retail buyers. It is a fine strategy if you are a multi-billion consumer firm like Unilever selling body wash.

Guess what? You are not Unilever.

You are a B2B business trying to sell high-value solutions, high-ticket services, or complex software to busy founders and executives.

Your buyers do not respond to generic automated blasts. They respond to strategic clarity, direct positioning, and deep market understanding.

The 4/7/11 Rule of Marketing 

The reason guru hype is dangerous is because it does not take into consideration the fact that modern buyers need to consume significant ecosystem exposure before they trust you.

High-ticket B2B buyers do not buy from strangers. They do not drop high-ticket contracts after reading a 2-page PDF lead magnet. Or getting a crappy AI message on LinkedIn.

Daniel Priestley mapped this buyer’s reality out clearly. It is called the 4/7/11 Rule of Marketing. (However, since it is a couple of years old, it might be outdated.)

To build real commercial trust, a prospect needs three distinct benchmarks:

• 7 Hours of Interaction: A prospect must spend roughly seven hours consuming your content. They need to hear your voice, read your strategic breakdowns, or study your methodology.
• 11 Touchpoints: A prospect needs to interact with your brand across eleven distinct moments.
• 4 Locations: These touchpoints must happen across four different channels or environments. This includes your website, your physical or un-gated book, a podcast episode, your LinkedIn articles, or a diagnostic scorecard.

Now you know why linear funnels are dead. They cannot deliver this amount of content. Only evergreen recirculation engines can. And the Paternoster Marketing™ System can. 

Standard linear funnels are not taking into consideration human behaviour. Or math. They try to get your prospects to commit after a couple of minutes of interaction. Most of these funnels use gated content with a simple generic follow up sequence. It ain’t gonna cut it in 2026 and beyond. Funnel marketing is evolving, but most marketers are not. 

Pushing premature sales calls will only ruin your reputation and will not help your bottom line. So how can we solve this problem?

What Is the Alternative to Linear Funnels?

Why Linear Funnels Are Dead In the Water

In my book, Paternoster Marketing™ I argue that linear funnels are dead. I also discussed this issue with Odd Morten Sorensen on the Oddinary podcast. Let me explain. 

The main assumption of a linear funnel is that your prospect lives in a quiet room with no distraction, he is average, and totally predictable. 

I shared this metaphor with Odd that my mother mentioned, growing up in Communist Hungary. She said:

“Kiddo, communism is a good idea on paper. It would even work. Only if people were ants. They would follow the rules. But people are not ants. They have their own agenda.”

And that’s where the problem lies. Your linear funnel assumes that the average user will behave in a certain way and follow a linear path. But they rarely do. We are living in the age of digital distraction, according to Jim Kwik. Your prospect might be interested today, then they see a post, go on a webinar, and consider alternatives.

The problem? They did not follow a linear path. They went from prospect to suspect, from consideration stage back to awareness. They are currently drowning in information. You’ve got to catch them where they are, and that’s why you need an evergreen machine, not a linear funnel. 

As a summary, linear funnels cannot withstand modern human attention spans (currently lower than that of a goldfish). 

Evergreen Recirculating Funnels: The Paternoster System

I have mentioned the Paternoster System a few times, but failed to define it. Here’s the definition of Paternoster Marketing™, the proprietary framework I created in three months last year, after regaining my eyesight and being forced to think in systems and stop hustling. It is an endless loop of conversation that keeps the conversation going with your prospects without forcing them to follow a linear path. 

Think of a Paternoster elevator. It is a continuous loop of open compartments. It never stops moving. There are no doors to open or close. Passengers step on and step off at whatever floor they need. Paternoster Marketing™ works the same way. It doesn’t lock prospects into categories and brackets. It creates a continuous loop of strategic assets. 

As you can see, a prospect might enter through a free ScoreCard. Or they might read your book or listen to a podcast interview. From there, they might follow you on LinkedIn. Subscribe to your Substack. They stay in the recirculation system. 

They are not told to buy at this point. They self-qualify and research you. Don’t underestimate modern buyers’ vigilance. They will come across your AI overviews. They will not leave the ecosystem because you haven’t scared them off with a sales pitch. You gave them enough content and engaged with them enough to stay in your ecosystem and carry on having a conversation. 

I am not claiming that I invented the Paternoster Marketing™ model. I created the framework and conceptualised it in my book. But I have seen many high level marketers use similar methods. Take Daniel Priestley as an example. He is running similar events for different software companies he’s launching. He already has the assets. The list. The core messages. The books. He just recirculates them. 

Proof that this system works: people much smarter than me said this: 

“People hate being sold but love buying”

Want to Fill Your Pipeline Quickly? Good and Bad News

You might have come across various posts that tell you that AI can replace your entire marketing department. And Claude can run your SEO. Guess what… neither of these statements are true. 

I will give you an example. We were running ads for a client who has “goodness” in their name at the time when Google ads started to force feed everyone AI optimisation and it was extremely hard to turn it off. AI did the job. They found related keywords. They started bidding on “for goodness’ sake” and “oh my goodness”. Until we turned off the optimisation. 

Without common sense and expert supervision, AI can do more harm than good. With it, however, it can work magic for your business. I am not saying that your pipeline will be filled overnight. But if you communicate the benefits right, engage in meaningful conversations, and stop spamming people, you will succeed. 

The 80/20 Principle of Marketing and How You Can Use It in 2026

If you were to ask any AI agent (including custom ones you are subscribing to) to give you strategies to grow your business, you will get generic tips. If you ask it to fix your SEO, it will give you the most popular keywords. But will not tell you that a Fortune500 company hogs page one and two. Unless you ask it explicitly. 

Moreover, AI will not prioritise your marketing tasks. It will not have the manager or founder hat on. It will always have the information source hat on. It will not ask the question: “does it make the boat go faster?” You have to do it. 

And that’s the most important question you have to ask when you are trying to put your marketing budget where your mouth is. 80 percent of the things you do in your marketing will get you close to zero results. The other 20 percent, however, will be responsible for 80 percent of your results. 

AI cannot determine what’s working and what is not, unless you are feeding data to it constantly and explain your strategy. But by the time you’ve done that, you can simply do it or work with a strategic marketing agency to develop the plan. Then you can break the strategy down to small chunks of tasks and get your AI agent to work. But not before.

The AI Guru Hype

Gurus want you to believe in the AI hype. They want you to think that one tool can make or break your business. Most funnel marketing strategies we worked on over the past years at LMNts Marketing were built from scratch. We never much cared about which tool we used. It’s not the tool that makes your campaigns profitable, it is the strategy. 

I recently had a chat with Vince Warnock. He literally called Russell Brunson out on the hype: “You’re only one funnel away”  It’s never that simple. Gurus want you to believe it is. 

What Is Too Much for a Funnel?

We recently had a lead from the ScoreApp partner directory. A training company was looking to implement ScoreApp in their tech stack. We gave them a fair price. I mean four figures, not five. It included testing, design, copy, integration. They found it too much. They clearly did not understand the potential they were leaving on the table. 

They were not the only people who thought that software can solve their issue. We have worked with founders who paid big funnel companies for two years with zero return on investment. They set up the funnel from the template and waited for the money to flow. It never did. 

There’s no such thing as crappy software. Most of the tools out there are pretty decent. The reason for zero conversions is user error. That’s why we are ActiveCampaign partners, ScoreApp partners, Text.com and Typeform implementation consultants. To help people make the most out of the software capabilities. 

The difference is investing £500 for someone to press a few buttons and getting nothing back or launching an evergreen profitable revenue generating machine. I know exactly which one I would choose. 

Without a clear strategy, setting up any complex tool is like allowing a 5-year old in the cockpit of a commercial airplane. They are perfectly capable of pressing the buttons. But will they safely fly the aircraft? Not sure about that. Yes, the buttons might light up. The screen might flash. But can the child navigate the flight route from the screen? Not likely. 

You can build a fancy funnel, set up a few different landing pages. Even add a 5-sequence follow up sequence. But if the positioning is off, you’re not going to end up at the destination you are planning to go to. 

Are Your Leads Stuck In Your CRM?

I’ll be honest. I have seen so many CRMs that were forked that I don’t have enough fingers and toes to count them. It’s not your team’s fault. Not even your marketing agency’s fault. It just happens. Strategy is the glue that holds everything together. Without that, you’ll end up with something I call the Frankenstack. A bunch of disconnected tools refusing to talk to each other. 

The Problem with Frankenstacks 

You might be wondering why I am on a mission to kill all the Frankenstacks. It’s simple. They look like they are working, but not everything is working as it is supposed to be. And data does not flow freely. There is no feedback loop. Leads get lost. Money goes down the drain. 

I recently had a conversation with a B2B tech prospect who was frustrated with his marketing results.

He had invested thousands of pounds into software subscriptions. He bought a modern CRM, landing page tools, automated email software, and tracking tags.

Despite all this tech, his sales pipeline was underperforming.

During our call, I dropped a line that hit him immediately:

“People implement new tools and CRMs and it’s just sitting in there disconnected as if it was in a Faraday cage.” 

Because the prospect came from a technical background, he got the concept right away. A Faraday cage is an enclosure used to block electromagnetic fields. The simple purpose is: Signals cannot enter. Signals cannot escape. (Many conspiracy theorists use it to make sure nobody can spy on them). The problem is: Your business is a living organism. When you cut off the circulation in your arm… well, you went to biology class, too. 

The sad thing is that that is precisely what 90 percent of modern B2B marketing setups look like. Companies buy or subscribe to seven different software tools. They get someone from Fiverr to implement it. The freelancer doesn’t care how it fits into the business ecosystem, they don’t get paid for that. 

The existence of Frankenstacks is the exact reason why we have created our B2B Revenue System service and the Unfork Your CRM offer. We realised that looking at one part of your business will not complete the jigsaw puzzle. 

Time To Review Your Funnel Marketing Strategy?

If you are getting complaints from your sales team that they are getting unqualified leads and your marketing blames your salespeople, you have a problem. Namely: the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand’s doing. And that’s a sure-fire sign that you’re dealing with a forked CRM or a Frankenstack. 

The good news:

We’ve created a free Paternoster Marketing™ Assessment that will highlight exactly where the leaks and bottlenecks are. It takes a couple of minutes, but will give you data that you definitely want to share at the next board meeting. 

Conclusion

Sales funnels still work, but they are evolving. The linear model is no longer viable, as people are more savvy, more sceptical, and more distracted than ever. You need to build a recirculating engine. We can potentially help. Find out if you qualify.