The first time I really understood what was happening to marketing, I was reading about a man with a coffin.
October 1999. Moscone Center. Tom Siebel was inside, on stage, the king of CRM. Outside on Howard Street, actors hired by an enterprise software founder nobody had heard of were marching with picket signs that said "No Software." Some carried coffins, labeled "Software," and pretended to lower them into the ground.
The founder was Marc Benioff. The press showed up because it was the strangest sight in enterprise tech that week. Everyone thought he was a clown.
He was previewing the next twenty-five years.
Twenty-seven years later, in April 2026, Benioff stood up at a Salesforce event and said: "Our API is the UI. No browser required."
The same man who hired actors to bury enterprise software was now burying his own dashboard.
This is what a prophet does. He sees the next world. He goes there before the world arrives. He keeps going there, even when the new world threatens the old one he built. Especially then.
Most of B2B marketing covered the API announcement as a feature release. It was a reformation, and almost no one saw what it meant.
This essay is about what's being born.
The funnel is dead
You know the funnel. A McKinsey consultant drew it on a whiteboard in 1990. Wide at the top, narrow at the bottom. It became the operating system of marketing for thirty years.
That tube never described any buyer who ever existed.
Buyers don't move through funnels. They move through their own lives. They circle. They bounce. They go dark for two years and come back with a new title. They ask ChatGPT for a recommendation that doesn't include your name. They come back the morning after your CEO's LinkedIn post goes viral.
None of that fits in a tube.
The funnel is dead. What replaces it is older, stranger, more honest.
Physics.
Gravity is market pull
Every body with mass has gravitational pull. The bigger the mass, the stronger the pull. The more matter that falls into orbit, the more matter the system pulls in next.
Markets work the same way.
Gravity is how much your ICP is being pulled into your orbit. Are they learning things from you? Are they hearing about you? Are they subscribed to your newsletter? Engaging with your content? Seeing your founders on LinkedIn? Quoting you back to their team without anyone asking?
If yes, you have gravity.
Your job in 2026 is two things at once.
Push. Get the right buyers into your orbit. Ads, content, podcasts, newsletters, social, AI search visibility. The whole repertoire of demand gen in service of getting more matter inside your field than your competitor gets inside theirs.
Capture and keep them. Not just the ones in a buying cycle. Everyone.
Here is the part most marketing teams miss. At any given moment, 95% of your market is not in market to buy your product. They are not going to fill out your form this quarter. They are not going to take a sales call. They are not even going to remember you exist next Tuesday.
You still have to nurture them. Teach them. Keep them in orbit until they are ready, eighteen months from now, when their title changes, their budget unlocks, or their incumbent vendor screws up.
That follower, the one in market eighteen months from now, who has been reading your stuff in the background the whole time, is the actual prize. Most marketers ignore her because she doesn't show up in the quarterly attribution report. She is where the compounding happens.
Push and capture. If you only push, the matter passes through your orbit and out the other side. If you only capture, you starve. You need both.
The wand is free now
Tools got cheap. Not just cheap. Free at the margin.
Claude Code. MCP. Open APIs. Models that finally remember your business across sessions.
Every marketer on earth now has access to the same arsenal. The same copywriter, the same sequencer, the same playbooks. A competitive analysis that used to take three days happens in twenty seconds in a chat window.
You did not get a superpower. Everyone got a superpower.
If everyone has the same tools, the tools are no longer the moat.
Think of it like a Hunger Games arena where every contestant got dropped in with a magic wand. The wand can build anything. Except every other contestant got the same wand.
You win with the thing the wand cannot conjure.
A religion. Followers who believe you can deliver them to their salvation. A gospel they have read for years that has helped them think when the ground was moving under them.
The wand makes your operations faster. It cannot make a person believe in you. It cannot turn a stranger into a follower.
The religion is the moat. Gravity is the effect. The religion is the cause.
Mass has three sources
Gravity comes from mass. In B2B, mass has exactly three sources. Scripture. Miracles. Dark matter.
Scripture
Scripture is the worldview your company puts in writing in public.
The marketer reading this right now is scared. Their CMO is scared. They have seen the screenshots on LinkedIn of solo operators running entire companies off three agents. They are watching peers get laid off. They are doing the math in private. How long do I have. How do I stay relevant.
That fear is the prayer your scripture has to answer.
Useful scripture is writing that helps the reader keep their job and grow in this environment. It gives them a worldview that makes them more valuable to their company in a week than they were the week before. It turns the chaos of the AI transition into a set of actions they can take on Monday morning.
When you do that, in public, for years, you become the person the reader follows out of the fire.
Scripture has to be opinionated. It has to pick fights. It has to say things competitors would never say, because competitors are still trying to be safe, and safe writing does not save anyone.
If you don't have scripture, you don't have mass.
Miracles
A miracle is something real your customer was able to do because of you.
Marketers think about case studies as the artifact and miss the part that matters. The artifact is a receipt. The miracle is the underlying event. The thing the customer actually did, that they could not have done before, that they will be telling their peers about for the next two years whether or not you ever ask them to.
Sometimes the miracle is the product. Pipeline doubled. Inbound demos went from three a week to fifty.
Sometimes the miracle is the writing. The customer applied your framework and watched their team execute differently the next month.
Sometimes the miracle is the team. You sat with their RevOps lead at 11pm rebuilding routing logic, because someone who knew what they were doing decided to care whether they won.
You cannot manufacture miracles. You can only do work miraculous enough that the customer cannot help retelling it.
The companies with the most gravity are not the ones with the biggest case study libraries. They are the ones with the loudest customers.
Dark matter
Three months ago I typed a query into ChatGPT. "Who should I use for website visitor identification for a B2B SaaS company." The first name it surfaced was ours. A year before, the model had not mentioned us at all.
Something had changed in the cosmos. That something is dark matter.
In physics, dark matter is the stuff we cannot see directly but infer from its gravitational effects. Most of the gravity in the universe is produced by this invisible substance we cannot point at.
The same is now true in markets.
Dark matter in B2B is the invisible mass shaping your market's recommendations. You cannot see it in attribution software. You see its effects when buyers show up saying an AI tool suggested you, when strangers describe your product using language you wrote a year ago, when a stranger in a Slack group says "we use them" and that line indexes somewhere you will never trace.
This matters because the buyer of 2026 makes decisions in the dark. A decade ago they typed a query into Google, read three results, formed an opinion. Today they ask an AI. The AI returns a name. The buyer takes the recommendation and moves on.
If the model says your name, you exist. If it doesn't, you don't.
Dark matter gets built in three places. The model layer (structured content the LLMs can parse). The third-party layer (other people writing your name in the same sentence as the problem you solve, without you asking). The community layer (Reddit, Slack, Discord, group chats no outsider sees). Most teams only work the first.
A small data point from inside Warmly. A year ago, almost none of our inbound demos came from people saying an AI surfaced our name. Today, a meaningful and growing share do. A year from now, AI-mediated discovery will be the largest source of high-intent demand in this category. The dark matter is reorganizing the cosmos right now, while most of the industry is still running Google Ads against the same keywords they were running in 2018.
Three prophets
A prophet's job is to know the audience so well that when the prophet speaks, the audience feels recognized. The corporate version of this happens once per campaign and gets put in a deck. The prophet version happens constantly, across hundreds of small touches over years.
Marc Benioff understood enterprise IT buyers in 1999 the way nobody else in his industry did. They were exhausted by Siebel rollouts, sick of consulting bills, tired of waiting eighteen months for software to work. He hired actors to say what they were already thinking, out loud, in costume. Twenty-seven years later he is doing it to himself, dissolving his own dashboard before someone else does.
Adam Robinson understood bootstrapped founders the day he started writing. He had bootstrapped his way to thirty million ARR with six employees. He wrote on LinkedIn every day with the candor of someone in the trenches. When a competitor sent him a cease and desist last year, most founders would have lawyered up quietly. Adam posted the letter publicly. He posted his response publicly. He let his audience watch the whole thing. The post about the lawsuit went more viral than the post that triggered it. His audience saw themselves in his fight.
Bryan Johnson understood his audience too. Men in their thirties and forties watching themselves age, waking up at 3am thinking about mortality. He compressed their fear and their aspiration into two words that fit on a supplement bottle.
"Don't die."
Painted on the wall of his lab. Printed on the bottles. The title of the documentary. Two words sell because they say out loud what his audience is already thinking.
Every category-defining founder you can name did some version of this. Every one of them.
This is not a coincidence. This is the law.
Orbit, not funnel
A funnel implies an ending. The buyer enters the top, gets converted, exits the bottom. End of game.
The universe implies no such thing.
Planets do not graduate from solar systems. Stars do not retire. The orbit is the work.
Customers are not won. They are kept in orbit. The faster they orbit, the more energy they generate. The more energy they generate, the bigger your gravitational field becomes. The bigger your field, the more new matter you pull in.
A funnel believer thinks the work ends at the close. An orbit believer knows the work begins at the close.
Your customers are not customers. They are followers. They will stay as long as the gospel is true. They will leave the second they stop believing.
Where Warmly fits
You spent the money to bring a stranger into your orbit. They clicked your ad, read your blog, heard your podcast, asked an AI who solves their problem, or typed your name into a browser because they remembered seeing it somewhere.
They drifted within range of your field.
Without something catching them, most drift back out. They sit on the page for eight seconds. They do not fill out a form. They leave. You spent the gravity. You did not collect the matter. They go orbit a competitor.
Every gravitational field needs an event horizon. The boundary past which matter cannot escape.
Warmly is the event horizon.
We are the #1 inbound agent for B2B because the moment a stranger crosses into your field, we identify who they are and who they work for. We map their buying committee. We route them to the right rep in real time. We engage them in the moment of intent. We put them in retargeting so they keep seeing you everywhere. We hand them off to an agent that can answer their question or book the meeting while their hand is still on the mouse.
And once they are in orbit, we keep them there. Newsletter. Re-engagement. Continual nurture. The orbit doesn't end at the close. The orbit is the work.
A million dollars a year of ad spend landing on a site that does not de-anonymize the traffic is gravity bought and an airlock opened. You paid to attract matter and then lost it.
Warmly is the airlock that doesn't open.
We do not generate your gravitational pull. You earn that the slow way, through years of scripture, miracles, and dark matter. What we do is make sure the pull you already built actually catches the matter that enters your field, and that the matter stays in orbit instead of drifting back into the dark.
That is the honest claim. Warmly is the inbound agent. The capture layer. The part of the physics that turns pull into pipeline.
What to do Monday morning
If you accept the physics, the tactics make themselves obvious.
- Pick one audience. Specific enough that they recognize themselves in your writing.
- Write your scripture. Weekly. Opinionated. Useful for your audience's survival.
- Produce one miracle this quarter. Something a customer cannot stop retelling.
- Audit your dark matter. Type your category into ChatGPT. Are you in the answer?
- Instrument your field. If you do not know who entered your orbit today, you have no field.
- Cancel one campaign. Replace it with one piece of scripture.
- Make your founder a prophet. Public. Daily. For years.
- Install the airlock. The matter you pull in stops drifting out. That is what Warmly is for.
Marketing is gravity now
Every founder is a prophet.
Every company is a religion.
Every customer is mass in motion.
There is no funnel.
There is only the field.
If you want to see your field, stop leaking gravity, and start compounding it, try Warmly for free.