Author: Shira Abel Category: Enterprise Marketing URL: https://hunterandbard.com/resources/blog/martini-pipeline-abm-marketing-funnel-became
For years, enterprise B2B teams have talked about the funnel like it was something we could see. Then ABM gave us the bow-tie. Now, in the post-LLM world, the funnel has changed shape again. It is not a bow-tie anymore. It is a martini pipeline: wide at the top, skinny through LLM-assisted validation, and wide again after the win.
The enterprise B2B funnel is no longer the ABM bow-tie. Buyers now start with requirements (not awareness), use LLMs to focus and validate, and arrive at first contact at 61% of the journey already knowing the category. 95% of deals are won by a vendor on the buyer's day-one shortlist, which means messaging, positioning, and consistency across every surface (website, reviews, sales deck, founder content) decide whether you are in the deal before anyone on your team knows there is one.
For years, enterprise B2B teams have talked about the funnel like it was something we could see. A buyer became aware of a problem, engaged with content, considered vendors, evaluated options, made a decision, and then moved into expansion after the win. In reality it was never that clean, but it gave us a useful model. Then Account-Based Marketing came along and we started using the bow-tie funnel, because the sale didn’t end at closed-won. Land-and-expand became the new norm (sell the initial proof of concept for 50k and expand the account to be 500k+). The right side of the funnel mattered too: adoption, retention, upsell, expansion, and all the lovely things that happen when a customer is actually successful.
That model still matters. Expansion is still critical. Customer success is still needed for highly technical products and helps expand accounts. None of that has disappeared.
What has changed is the left side of the funnel.
The top has compressed. The buyer is doing more work earlier, faster, and in places your team often cannot see yet. They are not slowly wandering through awareness, consideration, and evaluation the way your dashboard wants them to. They are getting together, figuring out what they need, asking LLMs and trusted communities for help, checking reviews and analysts, and narrowing the field before most vendors know there is even a deal.
When I first sent my drawing of the new funnel to my design partner, I called it a champagne flute. Admittedly, I do not drink much. She, however, does drink occasionally and very kindly informed me that what I was describing was actually a martini glass. She was right. The new enterprise funnel is not really a bow-tie anymore. It is more like a martini glass: wide at the very top, narrow almost immediately, skinny through validation, and then wide again after the win.
The funnel is changing shape: from the ABM bow-tie to the post-LLM martini pipeline. Data: 6sense 2025, Forrester 2025.
That change matters because it shows where the decision pressure has moved.
The old funnel started with awareness. The new one starts with requirements.
That is a big difference.
Buyers are not beginning by asking, “Who should we talk to?” They are beginning by asking, “What do we actually need?” The committee, whether formal or informal, starts sorting out requirements. What:
This is where LLMs become dangerous for companies with weak messaging.
A buyer can now ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, or whatever tool they prefer to help them structure the category. They can ask what matters in the buying decision, which vendors fit a specific use case, and what questions they should ask before buying. They can ask for comparisons, risks, alternatives, weaknesses, and implementation issues.
That does not mean the LLM is making the decision for them. That is the lazy take, and I do not think it is what is happening. Enterprise buyers are not simply typing, “Who should buy?” and then handing over a purchase order. High-ACV products are still complex decisions made with committees, politics, risk, procurement, legal, IT, finance, internal champions, and people who have very strong opinions because they were burned by purchasing a similar tool three jobs ago.
But LLMs are helping buyers get smarter faster.
That is the real change.
According to 6sense’s 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report, 95% of deals are won by a vendor that was on the buyer’s initial day-one shortlist. The report also says the shortlist is typically small, with buyers coming into the process already familiar with most of the vendors they will consider.
Think about what that means.
If you are not on the day-one shortlist, you are not just behind. You are not in the deal.
Yes, there is technically a chance you can break in later. But if 95% of deals are won by a vendor that was already on the initial shortlist, then being absent from that list gives you terrible odds. It is the business equivalent of showing up to the airport after the plane has boarded, the door has closed, and then wondering why your seat is gone.
This is where a lot of companies are still operating from an outdated assumption. They think the game is getting the buyer to raise their hand. That still matters, but the more important question is whether the buyer, or the LLM helping the buyer, understood you well enough to include you before the hand was ever raised.
That is where messaging and positioning come in.
For a while, people acted like websites had become less important because buyers were not always visiting them early in the process. That was probably already wrong, but with LLMs it is even more wrong.
Your website may be more important now because it feeds the systems buyers use before they talk to you.
The buyer may not visit your homepage until later, but the LLM will likely have already read it, summarized it, compared it, and used it to decide whether you fit the requirements.
This is the part that should make every founder and marketing leader sit up straight.
If your homepage is vague, you will be summarized vaguely. If your product pages sound like everyone else’s product pages, you will be placed in the generic pile. If your differentiators are buried under jargon, the LLM may not pull them forward. If your website says one thing, your G2 reviews say another, your sales deck says a third, and your founder’s LinkedIn says something else entirely, you have a consistency problem.
And consistency matters because buyers are looking for confidence. They are trying to reduce risk. They are trying to figure out if you are who you say you are.
LLMs do not magically fix unclear positioning. They expose it.
This is why your website is no longer just a validation asset. It is part of how you get interpreted before the visible sales process begins.
The post-LLM funnel is not “awareness, engagement, consideration, evaluation, decision” with an AI sticker slapped on top. The steps are different because the behavior is different.
The buyer starts with requirements. They define what they need, what they cannot tolerate, and what would make a vendor a fit.
Then they move into focus. This is where the list gets narrowed quickly. The group figures out which list of 4 - 5 companies they are moving forward with. Typically there’s already a favorite that the champion has already either reviewed or worked with previously. This list is built through LLM research and relationships. One or two wild cards might be in this mix, a newcomer that doesn’t have a built reputation yet.
Then comes engagement, but not in the old sense. This is not “downloaded an eBook and now MQL scoring begins.” This is focused engagement. They are looking deeply at that small group of vendors. They are not learning the category from scratch anymore. They are checking whether the vendors on the list hold up. The website gets reviewed, the materials get downloaded.
Then comes validation. This is the skinny part of the martini glass.
The buyer checks G2. They check Gartner, Forrester, and other analyst or expert sources if those matter in the category. They ask peers. They go into think tanks like Pavilion or private community Slack groups like AI Marketers Guild and say, “Who are you using for this? What do I need to know? What went wrong? Who looks better in the sales process than they are in implementation?”
This part matters because a reference from someone who has already worked with your company is still one of the strongest forms of trust. The buyer does not just want to know whether your product can technically do the thing. They want to know what it will feel like to live with the decision.
That is a different question.
It includes product, but it also includes implementation, customer success, support, pricing surprises, politics, internal adoption, and whether the champion will look smart six months from now.
Only after that do they move into decision.
And by the time they get there, things can close faster because the uncertainty has been reduced.
6sense reports that buyers are now contacting vendors at around 61% of the way through their journey, pulled forward by about six to seven weeks compared with the prior year. Source: 6sense 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report.
At first glance, that sounds like great news. Earlier contact! Sales gets in sooner! Everyone celebrate.
Not so fast.
Earlier contact does not necessarily mean earlier decision-making. It may mean buyers are doing the early work faster. They have already defined requirements, narrowed the field, checked the obvious sources, asked the LLM follow-up questions, and built a point of view. Now they are reaching out to vendors to see if their favorite is actually as good as they think.
That first conversation is validation.
If your sales team treats the buyer like they are at the beginning of the journey, you will create friction immediately. They already know the category. They may know your pricing range. They may know your competitors. They may know the complaints in your reviews. They may know which features matter and which ones are table stakes. They are not asking, “What do you do?” They are asking, “Can you prove you are what we already think you are?”
That requires a different sales motion.
Gartner has been showing for years that B2B buying is not a simple linear process and that buyers spend much of the journey doing independent research before talking to sales.
Forrester’s latest research says that the buying committee has “an average of thirteen people inside the buyer’s organization and nine from outside involved in making a purchase decision.”
This matters because the LLM does not just empower one buyer. It empowers everyone on the committee.
Your champion is doing research. The CFO is doing research. The technical evaluator is doing research. Procurement is doing research. Someone in operations is asking a peer. Someone else is checking reviews. A former colleague is sending a voice memo. The person who will actually be stuck using the system every day is asking different questions than the executive buyer.
Everyone can now come to the table with their own research.
That can help you if your messaging is clear and consistent.
It can hurt you badly if it is not. Inconsistency lowers trust.
The buyer is not receiving one controlled narrative from your sales team. They are assembling a picture from multiple sources. If those sources do not line up, the perception gap widens.
And when there is a perception gap, people do what they always do. They default to risk avoidance.
I keep coming back to this because it is the thing most companies miss.
This is not just a traffic problem. It is not just an AEO problem. It is not just an AI visibility problem. It is not just “we need more content.”
It is a perception problem.
The buyer, the committee, the LLM, the analyst, the review site, the peer recommendation, and the sales conversation all need to add up to a coherent picture. That does not happen by accident. It happens when messaging and positioning are clear enough to travel.
Many companies have an understanding problem.
They cannot explain who they are for, what problem they solve, why they are different, what category they belong in, and why a buyer should trust them now. So the market fills in the gaps.
That is always dangerous.
It is even more dangerous when the first pass is happening through an LLM.
The practical takeaway is not “publish 200 AI-generated blog posts.” Please for the love of all things, do not do that. You will get filtered out.
The first thing to fix is your messaging. Your website needs to clearly explain who you are for, what problem you solve, what situation makes you the right fit, and why you are different from the alternatives. In clear language.
The second thing to fix is your positioning. You cannot be everything to everyone. LLMs, like buyers, need context. If you refuse to make strategic choices, you make yourself harder to understand. If you are harder to understand, you are easier to exclude.
The third thing to fix is your proof. Claims are not enough. You need customer stories, review presence, analyst references if relevant, comparison content, implementation proof, and clear examples of where you win. Social proof has always mattered in B2B, but now it is part of the data layer that helps buyers and LLMs decide whether you belong in the conversation.
The fourth thing to fix is consistency. Your homepage, product pages, sales deck, founder content, review site listings, and case studies should not sound like they were written by five different companies. Mixed messages create doubt. Doubt slows deals. In a compressed funnel, doubt can remove you before you ever get a chance to explain.
The funnel did not disappear.
It moved upstream.
Buyers are still buying. Committees are still deciding. Sales still matters. Expansion still matters. Relationships still matter. Peer trust still matters. Analyst and review sites still matter.
But the first meaningful filter now happens earlier than most teams are built for.
The buyer starts with requirements. LLMs help them focus. Communities and third-party sources help them validate. Sales enters later than your process wants to admit, even when first contact technically happens earlier than before.
That means your messaging and positioning have to work before you are in the room.
Because by the time you get the meeting, the buyer has decided what box you are in.
The question is whether that box helps you win.
Recommended Next Step
If your positioning is not earning you a spot on the day-one shortlist, the rest of the funnel cannot save you. Hunter & Bard’s two-week Sprint rebuilds the messaging architecture your buyers, their committees, and the LLMs they rely on need to put you in the deal before sales ever gets a meeting.
Hunter & Bard is a San Francisco-based B2B strategy consultancy founded in 2011 by Shira Abel. We help deep-tech and enterprise SaaS companies fix their positioning, sharpen their messaging, and close $100K+ deals.
We work with B2B leaders who are tired of being overlooked, underestimated, or mistaken for their competitors. Our specialty is turning complex, technical products into clear, compelling stories that win enterprise deals.
We believe that perception drives revenue. If your buyers can't tell you apart from the next vendor in 30 seconds, you have a positioning problem — not a marketing problem. We fix that.
Perception = (Story × Visibility) ÷ Noise
This framework drives everything we do. Your story has to be sharp. Your visibility has to be strategic. And you have to cut through the noise — not add to it.
Shira Abel — Founder & CEO. Kellogg MBA. 20+ years in B2B marketing. Former CMO. Keynote speaker. Published in Forbes, HuffPost, and Wired. Specialist in enterprise positioning and perception strategy.
Daina Reed — Founding Designer & Partner. 15+ years in product and brand design. Former Senior Product Designer at Dun & Bradstreet. Specialist in enterprise UX, visual identity, and design systems.