Ben Chestnut, the CEO and co-founder of Mailchimp, hates funnels. More specifically “Marketing Funnels” and I absolutely agree! I encourage you to read the full article. Here is a tasty excerpt:

… I hate funnels. And professional marketers just won’t shut up about those God forsaken things. The idea is that you need a ton of website visitors, then some of them become become leads, and then after you do something (the usual recommendation is to bombard the leads with marketing automation) they relent and pay you money, thus becoming a “customer.”

… I hate this, because it’s shortsighted. Deliver awesome customer service. Delight them. Empower them. When I say “empower them” I mean empower them for free, with “no strings attached.” Because when companies make people sign up and register to download their content, we all know they’re about to feed us into the automation meat grinder.