Sam Page
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Most businesses treat marketing, sales and customer experience as a linear funnel.

Customer experience1 min readSam Page

Awareness → Consideration → Purchase → Onboarding → Loyalty → Advocacy.

Marketing owns the top. Sales owns the middle. Customer experience owns the end.

The problem is that's not how modern buyers actually move.

At 7DOTS, we call it the messy middle. Buyers loop: they look at marketing material, engage with a salesperson, trial a product, loop back, compare competitors, and reconsider. Repeatedly.

And as they progress, they shift from opportunity-driven (open to exploring solutions) to risk-averse (needing reassurance).

A brand has to navigate that carefully.

Treating marketing, sales and customer experience as separate functions, when the customer is part of all of them all at once, creates a fragmented experience.

So here is what we do:

We align all three teams around customer-first thinking, not around their individual activity. Focus on the customer, the problems they face, and the psychological factors that move them forward.

When teams share that foundation, the practical things follow naturally:
- Consistent messaging across every touchpoint
- Shared assets built together
- Customer experience feedback informing marketing or sales campaigns
- A coordinated response to where the customer actually is in their journey

We bring representatives from marketing, sales, and customer success into the same room to get aligned, and the whole system becomes more effective because everyone is serving the same person.

First published on LinkedIn.

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GEThttps://sam-page.com/thinking/most-businesses-treat-marketing-sales-and-customer-experience-as-a-linear-funnel.mdtext/markdown; charset=utf-8

---
title: "Most businesses treat marketing, sales and customer experience as a linear funnel."
url: https://sam-page.com/thinking/most-businesses-treat-marketing-sales-and-customer-experience-as-a-linear-funnel
date: 2026-06-30
author: Sam Page
type: Post or article
categories: [Customer experience, Marketing]
reading_time: 1 min
summary: "Awareness Consideration Purchase Onboarding Loyalty Advocacy."
first_published: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn%3Ali%3Ashare%3A7477693888514822144
---

# Most businesses treat marketing, sales and customer experience as a linear funnel.

Awareness → Consideration → Purchase → Onboarding → Loyalty → Advocacy.

![](https://sam-page.com/img/thinking/most-businesses-treat-marketing-sales-and-customer-experience-as-a-lin-li1.webp)

Marketing owns the top. Sales owns the middle. Customer experience owns the end.

The problem is that's not how modern buyers actually move.

At 7DOTS, we call it the messy middle. Buyers loop: they look at marketing material, engage with a salesperson, trial a product, loop back, compare competitors, and reconsider. Repeatedly.

And as they progress, they shift from opportunity-driven (open to exploring solutions) to risk-averse (needing reassurance).

A brand has to navigate that carefully.

Treating marketing, sales and customer experience as separate functions, when the customer is part of all of them all at once, creates a fragmented experience.

So here is what we do:

We align all three teams around customer-first thinking, not around their individual activity. Focus on the customer, the problems they face, and the psychological factors that move them forward.

When teams share that foundation, the practical things follow naturally:  
- Consistent messaging across every touchpoint  
- Shared assets built together  
- Customer experience feedback informing marketing or sales campaigns  
- A coordinated response to where the customer actually is in their journey

We bring representatives from marketing, sales, and customer success into the same room to get aligned, and the whole system becomes more effective because everyone is serving the same person.