Made You Click — Alon Rosenberg By the time someone finds you and lands on your website, they’ve already done their research. They’re interested. They’re ready to move. And most B2B companies respond by putting a wall in front of them — a form, a gated PDF, a 15-minute discovery call where someone asks 20 questions before the buyer has even seen the product. Alon Rosenberg is the co-founder of Knock, and this conversation is one of the clearest takes I’ve heard on why static, robotic sales and marketing funnels are losing — and what the experience-first model actually looks like in practice. The funnel you built is robotic. Buyers feel it. Think about how you buy as a consumer: tap, Apple Pay, done. Now think about how you’re asking someone to buy from you: fill out this form, wait for follow-up, get on a 15-minute discovery call, answer 20 questions, then maybe see the product. That gap — between how buyers live their personal lives and what you’re asking them to go through — is where deals die. Alon’s point: AI made this worse. Buyers now expect instant answers. They’re used to asking Claude or ChatGPT a question and getting one. Cold outbound, nurture sequences, gated content — it all reads as noise now because buyers already know they can get the answer faster somewhere else. People want to know your pricing. Give them a chat, not a form. This came up in a real way in the conversation: buyers today want answers — on pricing, on fit, on whether your product works for their use case — and they want them now. Not in 48 hours after a discovery call. Not buried in a PDF they had to give their email to unlock. Knock’s whole bet is that the companies replacing forms with immediate conversation (an AI chat that qualifies, answers, and hands off to a human when it’s time) are going to shorten sales cycles and win trust faster. Every moment a buyer is waiting is a moment they’re comparing you to a competitor who gave them an answer in thirty seconds. The old way of labeling leads is done. MQL. SQL. The whole taxonomy. Alon’s take: marketing teams measured on MQLs are basically just trying to collect emails — and sales knows it. That’s why sales doesn’t trust the leads marketing sends. That’s why sales reps don’t want marketing booking meetings on their calendar. They want the lead “fully baked,” not someone who clicked a gated PDF and got flagged as “qualified.” As I said in this conversation: someone’s MQLs are up for the quarter, everyone celebrates — but is that actually translating to revenue? Probably not. The shift Alon is seeing in the most advanced orgs: demand gen sits under the CRO, and the whole team points at one number — pipeline. Not sessions. Not form fills. Not which label you put on a contact. The question stops being “did they become an MQL?” and becomes “did they move?” When the measurement changes, everything downstream changes with it — including whether you even need a form in the first place. 80% of Knock’s pipeline is inbound — and it came from one thing. Every LinkedIn post Knock publishes, every outreach message they send, ends the same way: try it. Not “book a demo.” Not “would you be open to a quick call?” Just — here’s the experience, go have it. If it’s relevant to you, great. If not, they don’t chase. The product does the qualifying. That’s the cleanest inbound motion there is, and it only works if you actually have something worth experiencing. Every touchpoint is an experience opportunity. Most companies treat it as a collection event. QR codes on event swag that open an AI conversation about your product. Facebook ads where clicking doesn’t lead to a form — it opens a WhatsApp chat where an AI qualifies the lead and hands it to a human rep. Landing pages where the embedded chat replaces the gated download. These aren’t gimmicks. They’re what happens when you stop treating every touchpoint as a chance to collect an email and start treating it as a chance to give the buyer something they’ll actually remember. “Who has time to go to a 15-minute discovery call? Who wants to do that? I came because I want to see the solution. I want to do it now”. The robotic funnel isn’t just annoying. It’s actively losing ground to competitors who figured out that the experience is the pitch. Alon’s building for that world — and the gap between where most B2B companies are and where buyers already expect them to be is exactly where Knock lives. --- Alon is on LinkedIn and you can find Knock at knock-ai.com. If your funnel is still built around forms and nurture sequences, this one’s worth your time. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit madeyouclickpod.substack.com
