Your Marketing QBR Deck Is Being Run by a 120-Year-Old Model

Summary

---

Episode Overview

Episode Title: Your Marketing QBR Deck Is Being Run by a 120-Year-Old Model
Podcast: GTM Live by Passetto
Release Date: May 5, 2026
Hosts: Carolyn Dilks & Guest Amber
Audience: CEOs, CFOs, Revenue Leaders at B2B SaaS companies

This episode dives into why the marketing funnel—an antiquated model dating back to 1898—remains central in most B2B marketing reporting and QBRs, despite being widely critiqued as outdated and unfit for the modern buyer’s journey. Carolyn and Amber discuss an Adweek article by Mark Ritson that frames the marketing funnel as a “cockroach”: impossible to kill, deeply embedded, and always surviving attempts at obsolescence. The conversation covers why this model persists, reactions from across the marketing community, and the barriers that keep B2B marketing stuck using a 120-year-old playbook.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why the Marketing Funnel Still Dominates

• Industry Stagnation: Despite almost universal acknowledgement of its flaws, the classic marketing funnel (AIDA or Demand Waterfall) remains dominant in marketing QBRs and reporting structures.
  • “If this is such a widely understood problem, why hasn't the industry evolved? Like what the, what the hell? Sometimes I just like, I just want to like take B2B marketing and just like shake it...” – Carolyn [03:44]
• Results from Recent Polls: On a recent John Miller webinar (co-founder of Marketo):
  • 43% of attendees said their leadership is obsessed with MQLs and don’t know any different.
  • 41% said they lose all visibility after lead handoff to Sales.
  • “We all know, yet here we are.” – Carolyn [02:44]

2. The 'Cockroach' Analogy

• Article Review: The Adweek article by Mark Ritson refers to the marketing funnel as a cockroach: "you just can’t kill it and it won’t go away."
  • The episode references a viral AI-generated image depicting a cockroach teaching the funnel to a classroom, which sparked debate on social channels. [04:30]
  • “The cockroach is kind of disgusting, which is the reaction that I have to the sales funnel. But it’s also like, that shit is so resilient.” – Amber [05:11]
• Community Reaction: Comments were split between defending the funnel as "sometimes useful" and criticizing its linear illusion of buyer control.
  • “All models are wrong. Some are useful. The funnel is sometimes useful in some situations. Kind of sorta.” – [06:51]
  • “The issue of the funnel is that it provides an illusion of a linear direction and control over the buying process.” – [06:51]

3. Where Did the Funnel Originate?

• Historical Roots: Mark Ritson traces the funnel to 1898—much older than most realize, rooted in the AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) framework, later mapped directly onto B2B processes like MQL/SQL. [08:35]
  • “I'm over here thinking this is like a 30 year old measurement model, whereas this guy is saying this is like 150 years old.” – Amber [09:06]
• Persistence Through Reinvention: Even Amazon’s “AI immersion day” used “full funnel campaigns” language, showing the term survives even as models and tools change. [09:41]
  • “I’m over here trying to kill that word ‘full funnel’ and Amazon is just using it because that’s how people talk.” – Amber [09:41]

4. Why Is This Model Impossible to Kill?

• Simplicity and Intellectual Property: The funnel’s enduring power comes from being simple, memorable, and ingrained both in business language and university curricula.
  • “It’s just such a great piece of intellectual property, essentially. That is so memorable, and it makes sense in so many ways… our brain just loves something that is simple, easy to remember, easy to understand.” – Amber [14:54]
• Systemic Barriers to Change:
  • Academic inertia: Textbooks and curricula change slowly.
  • Executive demand: Boards, CEOs, and investors want simple, digestible metrics—so marketers keep reporting easy-to-grasp funnel metrics instead of more nuanced alternatives.
  • Career risk: “Doing anything differently… puts their career at risk. It might rock the boat. It might create contention internally.” – Carolyn [16:03]

5. Core Critiques and Defenses of the Funnel

• Defense (Ritson’s Article): Critics misunderstand the funnel—it’s not about individual journeys, but a snapshot of market proximity to purchase.
  • “He’s saying that this argument [the funnel is too linear] misunderstands what the funnel is. It’s not a description of the path that any individual consumer took. It’s a snapshot of the entire market at any given moment, organized by proximity to purchase.” – Amber [12:00]
• Counterpoint: While true in theory, in practice, funnel data doesn't inform critical business decisions or drive meaningful action.
  • “The metrics, the business metrics, what is this funnel going to tell you about that? It’s a snapshot in time, meaning it’s telling you where your volume is and you know, potentially like conversions through each stage. It does not give you information to inform budget allocation, to determine, you know, what department in your function needs attention. Like none of that.” – Carolyn [12:20]
• Misapplication: Funnels get misapplied as representations of buyer journeys, leading to one-dimensional measurement and misunderstanding.

6. Memorable Moments and Quotes

• On the Cockroach Funnel:
  • “You can't kill a cockroach. You can’t get rid of a cockroach problem.” – Amber [05:44]
  • “Dressed up in a suit, though, it's a disgusting cockroach with some nice fancy suit and a bow tie. Teaching a collector.” – Amber [05:24]
• On Over-Simplicity:
  • “The funnel survives everything you can throw at it. You can critique it, you can build a new platform that replaces it… whatever you say is going to be relevant. You're going to get people like, agreeing with you and disagreeing with you.” – Amber [10:43]

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:07 — Introduction: Marketing’s lack of evolution, the persistence of outdated measurement
• 02:44 — Insights from John Miller Webinar: MQL obsession, poll results about measurement problems
• 04:25 — Introduction to Cockroach Article: "The cockroach is the funnel"
• 06:11 — Social Commentary: LinkedIn debates and the AI-generated cockroach image
• 08:35 — Funnel History: Tracing the funnel to 1898, AIDA model explanations
• 09:41 — Funnel's Survival: Amazon’s “full funnel campaigns” and the immortality of the concept
• 12:00 — Academic vs. Practical Critiques: Is the linear critique even valid?
• 14:54 — Why the Funnel Survives: Simplicity, intellectual property, barriers to change
• 16:03 — Structural Inertia: Curricula, boards, and career risk explain why nothing changes
• 17:43 — Community Prompt: Listeners asked to weigh in on the “cockroach funnel”

---

Concluding Thoughts

• The marketing funnel isn’t just outdated—it’s actively blocking needed evolution in B2B GTM strategy and measurement.
• Despite everyone knowing the flaws, the entrenched, easily understood visual—paired with institutional inertia and executive expectations—makes change extremely difficult.
• Call to listeners: “Do you think the funnel is a cockroach?” [17:43]

---

Tone and Style

Casual, candid, and a little irreverent—true to the hosts' “cut through the noise, ditch outdated playbooks, no fluff” approach. Accompanied by memorable analogies and light banter about cockroaches in suits, the episode delivers honest critique with humor and practicality.

Transcript

[A]

You're listening to GTM Live, a podcast by Passetto.

[B]

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to GTM Live this week. This is a short one, but I'm feeling super energized this week. I actually just got back from celebrating my birthday. I was in Arizona with my husband. It was only just for a few days, a really good reset. We were there for his annual President's club trip. He's in sales. So that was really, really fun being in the heat, being, being in nature. Because honestly, that's where I get so much of my inspiration for this show and for content and just for Passetto in general. And it also gave me a bit of distance from the day to day, which was actually perfect timing given what we're talking about on today's episode, because really, when you zoom out, you really start to see just of how much of what we do in marketing isn't evolving the way it should be. So I spent a lot of time really, really thinking about that and why and what's inhibiting us in, in this industry. Lots of good stuff to come, but in this week's episode, it's a short one. Today, Amber and I sat down, we did a quick review of an article in Ad Week by an author, Mark Ritson, where he basically calls the marketing funnel a cockroach. The fact that you just can't kill it and it won't go away. And the timing of that was perfect because last week we also had John Miller on a webinar. And if you don't know, John is the co founder of Marketo. Right? That's the platform that basically helped institutionalize the concept of the mql. And now John's building what comes next. So he's got a lot of really amazing things to say on this topic. And the chat during that session was insane. We had like a hundred messages back and forth in the chat from senior level marketing leaders, basically all saying the same versions of the same thing. So MQLs can mean whatever you want them to mean. There's no consistency. Leadership doesn't know what else to measure. Once leads get handed to sales, you know, the visibility that marketing have just disappears. And we even ran a poll in that session and the results just basically said it all. 43% of those that attended said the biggest problem in their own organization is that leadership is just obsessed with MQLs and they don't know anything different. And then 41% said they lose visibility after the handoff. So everybody knows. We all know, yet here we are. That was awesome. Can't wait to do more of those types of events and maybe even have John back. But quick thing before we get into today's show. If you're listening to all of this and just thinking, hey, this is exactly where we're stuck in our own organization, well, we've been opening up a very Small number of one on one working sessions with B2B marketing teams. They're one hour. They would include a member of our team at Passetto, plus key members of your GTM team. And we use a structured assessment to help you pinpoint exactly where your visibility breaks with quantitative score and why it's so hard to answer what's actually driving results in your company. So the goal is really to give you a clear roadmap exactly what to do next instead of trying to piece together all of that on your own. We only run a limited number of these and they're for B2B SaaS teams at a certain stage, over 10 million ARR. So if that's you, you can [e-mail] working-session I'll drop the link in the show notes but let's get into today's episode and hope you're all doing amazing.

[A]

All right, see ya.

[B]

So this is actually really timely because I was thinking to myself, as I do when I'm like in the shower and just like you know, driving my kid around, trying not to think about work but thinking about it anyways, I was thinking to myself how deeply embedded like the challenges are that marketers face. Okay, we all know it. We know the challenges that marketers face around last touch attribution, competing for credit, trying to convince their leadership team of influence, one dimensional way of reporting, marketing, measurement, all of this other stuff that obviously you and I have been listening to for years. And I was thinking to myself and I sent you a voice note, if this is such a widely understood problem, why hasn't the industry evolved? Like what the, what the hell? Sometimes I just like, I just want to like take B2B marketing and just like shake it because I'm just like everybody's got the same problem, like why isn't anything changing? And so of course then I see this article and I'm like, ugh, so, so timely.

[A]

Let's share what it is. Let me share my screen. The cockroach is the funnel.

[B]

Yeah, this is interesting though because that, that Im so like if you look at this, it's got a whole bunch of like you know, comments on LinkedIn and shit. But the most thing that people are saying Is like the image, this AI generated image from Nano Banano has this cockroach, like, you know, pointing to a chalkboard that says the marketing sales. And then the thing gets like, that's it. Marketing, sales. And then it looks like it might say funnel, but it gets cut off and then there is the inverted funnel. Awareness, interest, desire, action. And people are debating if that's just the sales funnel or like the demand waterfall. So, like, that part's interesting, but it's. Guys, it's an AI generated image.

[A]

That's what people are debating in the comment.

[B]

Yeah. So I forget what some of the comments are. Maybe pull one up and look at it. What did it say?

[A]

I love this because it's like the cockroach is kind of disgusting, which is the reaction that I have to the sales funnel or the whole funnel in general. But it's also like, that shit is so resilient.

[B]

It's disgusting. Dressed up in a suit, though, it's a disgusting cockroach with some nice fancy suit and a bow tie. Teaching a collector.

[A]

Yes. And it's there and it's surviving and it's survived. So what were some of the comments that you thought were the most. Oh, funny.

[B]

Well, here's the other irony that I'm just picking up on is you know what they say about cockroaches, right? They say that you literally cannot get rid of a cockroach problem. There was this like, we got the Mandarin. I don't know if you guys have that in the US, right? But we have a Mandarin. And where I live and it shut down and like this big thing was like, it shut down and it moved because they had a cockroach problem. And it's like, you cannot get rid of cockroaches and that's why they moved. And so I'm just, I'm thinking about that in, in real time is that the connotation of what's happening here is like, you can't kill a cockroach. You can't get rid of a cockroach problem.

[A]

Interestingly, I think it's just what we all deal with every day when, when it comes to marketing measurement is this. The concept is easy to remember. We all at some point probably bought into it and it was sort of reflective of reality at a certain point in time. I would say maybe to a lesser an extent than maybe we believed. But it's so easy to remember and it's so ingrained. And so I wanna get into the article, but what, what else? Anything else before we go into the article?

[B]

No. Maybe just cover a few comments. What are some, like, interesting comments?

[A]

Just to be clear, I don't own a sword. I prefer an axe. Not really sure what that means, guy. I'll watch with interest to see what emerges from this hornet's nest that you just poked a stick into. Somebody said all models are wrong. Some are useful. The funnel is sometimes useful in some situations. Kind of sorta. Yeah, I would agree with that. The issue of the funnel is that it provides an illusion of a linear direction and control over the buying process.

[B]

I feel like there's like a great divide. I'm actually surprised to see of these comments how many people may still believe in this, like, inverted pyramid thing, the funnel.

[A]

Ooh.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I love what Matt at Refine Lab says. He's like, this is actually a sales process. It's not trying to reflect the buyer's journey. It's just reflecting what we call what we do. It's a sales process.

[B]

Yes. Okay. That's what I was trying to get at when I. When I had said people were commenting on like what is in the image. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's what I was thinking. I did read that comment and you're for sure. Yeah.

[A]

Shout out to Matt. All right, so this article was written by this guy, Mark Ritzand, who I don't really read a lot, so I haven't heard of him. But if we look at this is an article from Adweek just released today. And Mark, let's look at who he is really quick. Cause I thought he had an interesting background. Maybe we can have him on the show. He has a PhD in marketing and he spent 25 years as a marketing professor.

[B]

Interesting.

[A]

Yes. Has a big consultant background as well. But cool to see somebody who's been around the block writing about this.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, I have a thought on that. We can come back to it because I don't want to like divert us.

[A]

So basically he goes into this whole history of the sales funnel, which a lot of stuff I didn't know about. So some of this may be like, if you probably ask like a hundred people, you could probably get 20 different versions of like where the sales funnel came from. So I'm not sure this is like the, you know, end all, be all, this is where it came from. But I thought it was interesting because he basically dates it back to 19 or 1898. I'm over here thinking this is like a 30 year old measurement model, whereas this guy is saying this is like 150 years old.

[B]

Yeah, I think the Concept of like, awareness, interest, desire, action is Right. But we've seen, like, I mean, there's some, there's, there's multiple different versions of like, the funnel or demand waterfall or whatever you want to call it. But I think he's alluding to, like, the, you know, Aida, Aida being like, dating back that, you know, hundreds of years ago or whatever it is.

[A]

Oh. I mean, we've just. So we've mapped the demand waterfall to this, the lead MQL SQL Opportunity Customer. It's mapped to the same, the same things. Like so many different things, just.

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[A]

Right. And he actually says that Amazon had an event, I guess, last week, Immersion Day, and their whole AI centerpiece was around. They called it full funnel campaigns. Like, I'm over here trying to kill that word full funnel, and Amazon is just using it because that's how people talk.

[B]

Yeah, I hate that word.

[A]

So then he talks about this guy, Tom Roach, he works at Jellyfish, and he's saying that he described this whole, like, sales funnel phenomenon as the cockroach of marketing concepts. So I guess that's where this whole analogy came from. Tom Roach. It just seems super ironic that his last name is Roach.

[B]

Yeah, I don't know if there's, if, if that's just ironic. Something about that tells me it is. But I understand the, the analogy of, like, cockroach and cockroaches don't die, and neither does this, like, damn model.

[A]

And maybe like, this guy is also super resilient because his last name is Roach. And then apparently he meant that as a compliment when he called the funnel accomplish.

[B]

Okay, I do remember reading that right.

[A]

The funnel survives everything that you can throw at it. You can critique it, you can build a new platform that like, replaces it. They call it the endless march of Silicon Valley shamans declaring the next big thing, AKA, that's us at Paseto, like, we're the next big thing in marketing measurement. But yeah, so many. You can basically always search like it's. It's a hot topic. Like whether you are saying, like, this is how you measure the funnel and it's so great and you can do XYZ now with AI in the funnel, or whether you're coming at it saying, you know, f that funnel isn't real, this is the other way to measure. Like, whatever you say is going to be relevant. You're going to get people like, agreeing with you and disagreeing with you. So, yeah, they just go into, like, a few different reasons about, you know, the critiques of the Funnel. And then I didn't really get too much into that. Like, are they saying that these critiques are well founded or not?

[B]

I think it's basically an objective article around this. This concept isn't dying. But yet here are all of the critiques that have been thrown at it over the last several decades. Many of them are valid. Like, maybe we can, you know, talk about a few of them.

[A]

I think what he's saying is like, the critiques are not valid. Like the critique around the funnel is too linear.

[B]

Yeah, why does it say it's not valid?

[A]

He's saying that this argument misunderstands what the funnel is. It's not a description of the path that any individual consumer took. It's a snapshot of the entire market at any given moment, organized by proximity to purchase. Okay, super academic answer, I agree, but that's not how it's used.

[B]

Yeah, I would agree with that. I think this is out of all of the critiques in here. I mean, a lot of them hold a lot of merit. But I mean we, we hear the industry talking about all this all the time that like buying is not linear. And I understand the theory of like, yeah, this is meant to, you know, put it in your board deck, have a snapshot of what happened in a quarter, where were people sitting in, you know, that funnel and what stage they're in. But my critique on that is like, yes, it's linear, but it doesn't tell you anything. Like, I think about why we episeto think it's stupid. And if pipeline is down, if your CAC is inflated, if your growth rate is down, if your retention sucks, blah, blah, blah. Right. The metrics, the business metrics, what is this funnel going to tell you about that? It's a snapshot in time, meaning it's telling you where your volume is and you know, potentially like conversions through each stage. It does not give you information to inform budget allocation, to determine, you know, what department in your function needs attention. Like none of that. So I get it. But I'm also going to refute that because like, what good is that? What good does that tell you? A snapshot in time?

[A]

Yeah, I mean, I think it could be used, you know, on like the ABM level to say, hey, here's every account that we are identifying that's in this stage of awareness, we're gonna go move them. Okay, great. But when it comes to how these things convert and like how they translate into the demand waterfall and stuff like this, it's like, it's not how it's used, it's used to say, oh, let's get our SQL to opportunity conversion rate up or let's just make sure we get more MQLs that convert at 0.3% so they can convert to an SQL. Like these things are just being just so misused. So I love the cockroach analogy though. Definitely gonna use that. And yeah, shout out to Adweek for coming out with something that is conversation worthy with the Nano banana generated image. You gotta love that.

[B]

Yeah, I love Nano Banano. Cool. Well, we should try and see if we can get this guy on our show to talk about this. But one final thought and I just wanna ask you, Amber, with all of this logic, all of these critiques that we often see people like, you know, talking about online and even, you know, captured in this article, what is your opinion on why this like cockroach can't, can't go away?

[A]

I think it's just such a great piece of intellectual property, essentially. That is so, it's just so memorable and it makes sense in so many ways. And then so it's just easy to remember and use. And then your brain, it's just, we're so overloaded with so many different things every day and all this information and our, our brain just loves something that is simple, easy to remember, easy to understand. And we don't have a lot of that great, you know, IP coming out that's like making its, making its way into our lexicon and B2B, like we don't have like these things that are widely accepted, which is why people like Jordan Crawford, you know, who's very good at this intellectual property and these frameworks, like he comes up with frameworks for AI that make so much sense and they're so easy to remember and you do just remember it and you use it because you don't have anything else already sitting in that category for you to go use. So you use Jordan's framework. Right. You know what I mean? But like we have all this entrenched other stuff. So that's what I think.

[B]

Yeah. When I saw this guy being a professor, that made me think of one thing, which is I think concepts get created in a classroom, right. And I think so often we see that curriculums struggle to evolve. Right. And so when I see this guy's a, you know, a marketing professor of 20 years or whatever you said, right. I think of what material is in those textbooks that we teach people in, you know, university. Right. When we're talking about marketing concepts, it starts there so that's what we go into. Into the field knowing. And then I think about at the other end of the extreme. So that's where you start your career. And then I think, top down, what. Like, what is happening top down? Well, realistically, everything we report on and everything that happens in our own companies that we work for really comes from the top. The CEO, the board, the investors, all of these other people who are not in the weeds in marketing and want something simple and straightforward. And then, of course, you got all these people in the middle, like, doing the work. And end to end, you got these, like, bookended things. And then these people in the middle. It's like that. I feel like that is why so much doesn't change and, like, why I think marketers struggle to, like, create change in their own organizations. Because it's almost like they're trapped, right. And so doing anything differently, even though it makes sense, well, it puts their career at risk. It might rock the boat. It might create contention internally. Like, there's obviously a whole bunch of reasons, you know, and so I feel like also there's that.

[A]

Well, thanks for sending it. I thought it was super funny.

[B]

Glad you read it. And, yeah, if you want to chime in, drop a comment on this episode. Drop us a comment wherever you hear or see this. Let us know what you think.

[A]

Yeah. Do you think the funnel is a cockroach?

[B]

Well, you know my opinion on that.

[A]

I love it. It is. But somehow I like it more now.

[B]

Why? Because it's in a suit? Yeah. You like it because it's in a suit dress?

[A]

Yeah. It's kind of cute.

[B]

No, it's not cute. Cool. All right, good chat.

[A]

Okay, bye. Bye.