The Pinball Sales Funnel: Rethinking the Buyer Journey at Scale
Why Traditional Funnels are Broken
The sales funnel is a comforting visual: prospects enter at the top, and, through a series of predictable steps, a select few emerge as customers. But as your business scales, reality gets messy. More decision-makers, more touchpoints, and longer sales cycles mean the journey is anything but linear. ​
For at least a dozen years now I've thought of the sales funnel as more like being in a pinball machine; prospects have the opportunity to bounce around looking at all of your content, social media, videos - and that of your competitors.
On top of that, the sales process itself has gotten more complex. A recent Gartner study found that your average buying group now involves 6 to 10 decision-makers, each armed with 4 or 5 pieces of information they’ve gathered independently (remember...they're in their own pinball world as well). This complexity increases the chances of stalled deals and creates more opportunities for drop-off, friction, and misalignment (Gartner, 2023).
Where the Pinball Drops
Imagine this: Your sales team is celebrating a record month for new leads, but marketing is frustrated that none are converting.
Meanwhile, ops is overwhelmed with onboarding, and customer success is fielding complaints from new clients who feel lost in the shuffle.
Each department is doing its best, but the “funnel” isn’t capturing the reality that growth at scale is a team sport—and the handoffs are where most opportunities are won or lost.
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Internal: As your team grows, so does the risk of sales, marketing, and ops pulling in different directions. Handoffs get sloppy. Messaging loses consistency. Opportunities slip through the cracks.
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External: Your buyers now have committees, not just one or two decision-makers. Priorities shift mid-process. Timelines stretch out, and deals stall for reasons no funnel report will ever show.
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Post-sale: The real growth opportunity is in expansion and retention, but these require a different playbook—one the funnel doesn’t address.
According to Forrester, companies with strong sales and marketing alignment achieve up to 36% higher customer retention rates and 38% higher sales win rates (Forrester, 2024). This highlights the tangible ROI of addressing internal friction points as you scale.
Tracking the Bouncing Balls - All of Them
Instead of a funnel, picture a multi-level pinball machine with a lot of balls bouncing around at once;: multiple entry points, looping paths, and feedback loops. In today’s world, scaled growth demands mapping the actual journey—internal and external. That means documenting every handoff, customer touchpoint, and moment of truth. It also means recognizing that alignment across teams is as important as moving prospects through stages.
Companies that map and optimize their customer journeys see up to a 54% greater return on marketing investment and more than 10% improvement in customer satisfaction scores (McKinsey, 2023).
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Tools and Tactics for Running Up the Score
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Account-based strategies: Focus on quality, not just quantity. Personalize outreach at scale to key accounts. This takes a bit more time, but the payoff is big.
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Sales enablement: Arm your team with the resources and training to handle complex conversations and objections. A good CRM everyone uses is important; weekly meetings even more so.
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Journey analytics: Track what really matters—progression through meaningful milestones, not just stage changes.
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Internal alignment: Schedule regular cross-team reviews. Share KPIs that matter to everyone, not just one department. Let sales inform marketing, marketing inform sales, sales to operations and all to finance. Once this is set up correctly it becomes a powerful, natural environment for greater growth.
Case Study: The Pinball Wizards
Let’s look at a real-world example. A B2B technology firm—let’s call them “TechSafe”—was hitting a wall. Their funnel was full, but deals were stalling, and post-sale churn was rising.
In a pivotal leadership meeting, we asked, “Where are we actually losing momentum?” The answer wasn’t at the top or bottom of the funnel—it was in the gaps between teams - those holes balls were dropping into.
TechSafe replaced their funnel with a more complete journey map, bringing together sales, marketing, and customer success for every major account. All KPIs were established by Financial. They tracked handoffs, reviewed lost deals for process gaps, and aligned incentives across teams.
The result?
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In the first year they saw a 22% reduction in sales cycle length, which allowed more time for more deals. That increased revenue by 17.5%.
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Operations became better informed of what was scoped out, which eliminated a lot of waste and backtracking.
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Tracking customer satisfaction and setting up a 'side-funnel' mechanism, provided a 15% increase in customer lifetime value.
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All of this led to a 22% increase in margins.
Conclusion
If your funnel feels like it's getting more elongated and slow, like a bottleneck rather than a growth engine, it’s time to audit where it’s failing you. Map the real journey, align your teams, and focus on orchestration—not just volume. The data is clear: companies investing in these pinball funnel strategies see measurable, scalable ROI. Growth at scale is complex, but with the right approach, it’s absolutely achievable.
Sources: User Context summary, Gartner, Forrester, McKinsey
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Ready to See How a Scaled Growth System Would Work for Your Business?
If your sales funnel seems plugged or leaky with too many getting away —and you want a practical, proven approach to break your next revenue ceiling—I invite you to grab 30 minutes on my calendar.
No pitch. No pressure. Just a focused working session about where you are, what’s possible, and how a whole-business growth system could work for you.