SaaS founders ditch the sales funnel as buyers learn to ignore it

The standard playbook for selling software — cold emails, gated content, A/B-tested landing pages, scripted product demos — is losing its grip. Response rates on cold outreach are falling sharply. Prospects sit through hour-long demonstrations and still walk away, often choosing a rival or no product at all. With AI tools handling more early-stage research, many potential buyers never visit a vendor's website in the first place.

The stakes are existential. Research published in the Journal of Risk and Financial Management estimates that 80 to 95 per cent of a startup's success hinges on its marketing. When the dominant marketing model stops producing results, the companies relying on it face more than a bad quarter.

Three software companies have responded by abandoning the playbook altogether rather than optimising it further.

The product becomes the pitch

Clay, a data enrichment platform, scrapped the conventional demo. Co-founder Varun Anand had been monitoring complaints about data enrichment in online forums and began inviting frustrated users to try the tool themselves. Prospects logged in, shared their screens and worked through their own problems in real time while Clay's team guided them over Zoom.

"My goal is to blow their minds," Anand said. "Can you solve someone's entire problem in 30 minutes and have them do it? I think that is a bar that most software companies cannot achieve."

The effect was to collapse the sales cycle. Because buyers had already used the product during the call, the multiple rounds of follow-up pitches that once closed deals largely disappeared.

A glass box and 100 million views

Ramp, a spend-management and accounting platform, took a different route. The company placed actor Brian Baumgartner — best known as Kevin in the US version of The Office — inside a glass box in New York City, surrounded by piles of receipts, processing them by hand on a live stream. A counter tracked his output against Ramp's automated processing speed.

The stunt was the product of more than 50 hours of brainstorming by Ramp's creative team, which had built a working relationship with the social-media lead for MrBeast through cold outreach. Eight hours of live-streaming generated over 100 million views across social platforms, aided by an unplanned appearance from Andy Buckley, who played the show's CFO David Wallace.

Micro-influencers over megaphones

Gamma, an AI presentation and website builder, went smaller still. With runway tightening and sign-ups lagging, co-founder Grant Lee turned to creators with 10,000 to 100,000 followers rather than pursuing expensive macro-influencer deals.

According to Digital Applied, micro-influencers deliver more than three times the engagement of larger counterparts at roughly 60 per cent of the cost. Gamma treated the partnerships less like advertising and more like onboarding, giving creators genuine familiarity with the product and freedom to present it in their own voice.

The approach has helped Gamma surpass 50 million users, with more than 50,000 sign-ups recorded in a single day. Over half of new subscribers now arrive through word-of-mouth referrals.

What it means for the market

The common thread is not a single tactic but a change in starting question. Instead of asking how to squeeze more conversions from a funnel, these companies asked what they could build that a buyer would genuinely want to spend time on.

For Europe's growing SaaS sector and the venture funds backing it, the shift carries practical weight. The acquisition channels that dominated the last decade are saturating. Investors assessing early-stage software companies may increasingly need to look beyond funnel metrics and examine whether a product can generate its own distribution.

HubSpot for Startups profiled Clay, Ramp and Gamma alongside three other AI-native companies on this theme, framing the question for founders from pre-seed through Series A.