July 18, 2026 | Read online
The sales funnel was invented in 1898.
A guy named E. St. Elmo Lewis created it to explain how advertising works: grab Attention, build Interest, create Desire, drive Action. AIDA. We've been running some version of that model ever since. I even use it as a framework for emails and calls.
Which means the framework most sales teams use to manage deals in 2026 is older than the radio.
That sent me down a rabbit hole this week with a question I don't fully have the answer to - is the traditional sales process even relevant anymore?
Every sales methodology I've ever been trained on (MEDDICC, BANT, NEAT, etc.) and all the “qualification” criteria focus on what we're trying to GET from the client. Their budget, their authority, their timeline, their decision process. Almost none of it pays attention to what we're giving them in return or what the client actually needs. (This is exactly why I built my Give/Get Scorecard, which forces you to put value on the table every time you ask for something)
The bigger problem is that we keep trying to force clients through our selling process without paying attention to their buying process.
And the buying process has changed drastically.
Buyers come in and out of the process whenever they want. They're more informed than ever, and AI will answer almost any question they have, at any time, without them ever talking to a rep.
If you think I'm exaggerating, here's what the research says (AI supported/written in italics):
Gartner mapped the modern buying journey and found it isn't a funnel at all. It's six buying jobs (problem identification, solution exploration, requirements building, supplier selection, validation, consensus creation) that buyers loop through over and over, in no particular order.
6sense's Buyer Experience Report found that buyers don't contact sellers until they're 61% of the way through their journey, and 94% of them have already ranked their vendor shortlist before a single conversation happens. The vendor they contact first wins 77 to 81% of deals.
Read that again. By the time a deal hits "Stage 1: Discovery" in your CRM, the buyer is more than halfway done and has probably already picked a favorite.
Then there's the stat I wrote about a few weeks ago in 67% Don't Want You, 69% Do: Gartner found 67% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience, and 45% are already using AI during their purchase.
My point in that newsletter was that buyers aren't trying to eliminate human contact; they're trying to eliminate unprepared reps, because 69% of them still turn to a rep to validate what AI is telling them. This week, I want to pull that thread further. If the buyer is running their own AI-powered process from start to finish, what does that do to OUR process?
If you're a rep and you don't think this applies to you, here's an exercise I recommend to everyone I work with. Open ChatGPT or Claude and pretend you're a potential customer for whatever you sell. Ask every question a real buyer would ask: how the product works, how it compares to competitors, what it should cost, and what the implementation risks are. (I created an AI prompt pack you can use for this if you want)
Once you realize how detailed the answers are, you’ll realize how much trouble we’re in. And by the way, if the answers are wrong, then you’ll know what to challenge the customer with who used it.
So, back to my question. Why do we still have sales stages?
I understand the business side of it. Leadership needs a forecast, and stages give us a common language for where deals sit. I'm not arguing we burn the CRM down.
My issue is what stages do to how reps actually sell.
Think about how most companies label them. There’s the "Discovery" stage, which implies that's the only part of the deal where the rep asks questions. Or the "Negotiation" stage, which implies that's when negotiating starts.
Everyone (hopefully) knows that you should be asking questions all the way through the entire deal, and if you think negotiations don’t start from the minute somebody engages with you, I can guarantee you’re using discounts to close your deals.
The stage names are quietly teaching reps WHEN to do things that should be happening constantly. That's not a process, that's permission to stop thinking.
And here's the forecasting problem that drives me crazy. A stage measures progress, not probability. A deal sitting in "Negotiation" at 75% doesn't mean the buyer is 75% likely to buy. It means your rep has completed 75% of your internal checklist. Those are two completely different things, especially when the buyer ran most of their process before you showed up.
Here's the part that gives me hope, though.
That same Gartner research found buyers are 1.8x more likely to complete a high-quality deal when they work with a rep alongside digital tools. That's the 69% showing up again: buyers using AI to learn, then coming to a human to make sense of it. And 6sense found 58% of buyers actually engaged sellers earlier this year, specifically because AI raised questions about capabilities, pricing, and security that websites couldn't answer.
Buyers don't want to be forced through your process. They want help making sense of everything they're learning on their own.
Which tells me we should stop trying to perfect our selling process and get obsessed with their buying process instead. We need to meet clients with value wherever they are and whenever they need it. If you're not bringing value to a conversation right now, you're not in the conversation.
This is where sales fundamentals matter more than ever, not less. Knowing how to ask a great question, challenge an assumption, or connect a capability to a business problem is the stuff AI can't do for your buyer, and it's what I spend most of my time on with teams in my Filling the Funnel and Driving to Close programs and with sales leaders through my advisory work. If you're an individual rep trying to figure this out on your own, that's what the membership is for.
Now here's where I need your help, because I'm still wrestling with this one.
If stages measure our activity instead of the buyer's intent, what should we track instead? Part of me thinks we keep stages for the forecast and stop using them to run deals. The other part thinks we rebuild them entirely around the buyer's jobs, like have they defined the problem, have they built requirements, is their committee actually aligned, etc.
Hit reply and tell me how you'd rebuild your sales stages if the buyer were in the room watching. I'll share the best answers next week.
The buying process has already changed. The only question is whether your selling catches up.
#MakeItHappen
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