When Intent Moves Fast, One Unified Funnel Beats a Stack of Tools

Speed of intent should dictate the shape of a funnel, but almost no one builds that way. Most revenue organizations run one funnel regardless of how fast their buyers actually move, stretching or compressing the same sequence of steps to fit a cycle that might run two days or two years. When the distance from discovery to purchase collapses into hours, every extra step, every handoff between tools, every generic experience becomes a visible leak. The fixes that follow, like a single unified funnel and a compounding loop over of brute-force volume, are what disciplined funnel design looks like when intent leaves no room for waste. Nowhere is that more clear than in the dining industry.

Robin Chiang is Chief Growth Officer at OpenTable, where he leads global growth, diner acquisition, and strategic partnerships across the US and international markets. He came into dining from a travel background accustomed to long lead times, which sharpened his attention to just how short the window is in his current market.

"The vast majority of people book within 48 hours of when they plan to dine, so the funnel between discovery and booking is very short," Chiang says. That ultra-quick cycle has reshaped how he thinks about the entire path from discovery to booking, and there are takeaways for revenue leaders across fields.

When intent is fast, collapse the funnel into one place

Because the booking window is so tight, Chiang surmised that the whole journey should live in one experience rather than scattered across several tools. "Even if you're not ready to book straight away, you're almost always ready to book within 48 hours because you're dining tomorrow night," he says. The design conclusion follows directly. "It makes sense to have the whole experience in one place versus trying to have it in multiple places."

The gap he kept circling was that user discovery had moved toward video and multimedia content while his platform's search-and-booking flow hadn't caught up. The fix was a hybrid experience made possible through a collaboration with the creator-marketing platform Seekeasy. Via the partnership, creators who feature OpenTable restaurants in their content can opt in to have that content showcased on the platform's restaurant pages, helping diners discover where to eat next. "Diners can browse through videos quickly in one spot, then dive deep on OpenTable because we have all the restaurant information there," Chiang explains. Booking happens without leaving the page. When the distance between wanting and doing is measured in hours, folding every step into a single experience keeps a ready customer from slipping away between tools.

Build a flywheel, not just more volume

The obvious marketplace playbook to grow revenue is brute force: acquire more users, win more transactions, onboard more vendors, repeat. Chiang frames the goal differently. "What we try to do is satisfy both the needs of the restaurateur and the diner," he says, describing a loop where each side reinforces the other rather than simply pushing volume up. In addition to showcasing creator content on restaurant pages, Seekeasy links OpenTable’s network of restaurants with its creators, keeping participating establishments in the social conversation. Restaurants bring in creators, creators produce original content, and that content helps diners discover and decide where to eat.

Such a flywheel, Chiang explains, also helps meet different kinds of intent. "The same person could be a mother as well as an executive as well as part of a group of girlfriends, and they will dine out very differently in each situation." Matching the experience to the occasion rather than flattening all of them into one funnel turns a transaction engine into a compounding one.

Personalization starts with the signals you already have

Reading intent sounds like it should require complex data, but Chiang's most useful signal is mundane and already in hand. "The easiest signal for us is the type of restaurant the user is searching for," he says. That existing behavior tells the platform most of what it needs. "If you're searching for a fine dining establishment, you're probably looking for an upscale experience, not one where a bunch of kids are throwing spaghetti everywhere." A search of a casual spot points to something lower-key, often with children in tow.

The company leaned into this signal with its Icons program, which showcases elevated restaurants in a distinct in-app treatment for special-occasion dining. Chiang says the tailored experience measurably lifted conversion. The lesson for revenue teams drowning in signal tooling is that the highest-value signals are often ones already being collected and underused.

When everyone has the signals, taste is the edge

Chiang is most pointed about what happens as the technology to surface customer signals becomes universal. The differentiators, he argues, are "your ability to have taste, and how you take that signal and turn it into something that feels like an experience." Once the same capabilities are democratized across every competitor, the raw signal stops being an advantage and what you do with it becomes the whole game. He describes betting on a more polished platform experience even when it wasn't the obvious growth move. "When we've backed that, when we've said, 'We believe in doing this little bit of extra work and doubling down on design,' we've seen significant increases in conversions."

His test for whether any of it is working stays refreshingly low-tech. "A technology partner recently asked me, 'How do you know if a restaurant is happy?' And my answer was, 'Well, you talk to them'. And so we do. We do it a lot." His teams are in and out of restaurants every day, and the feedback, good or bad, arrives fast. In a market moving at 48-hour speed, the durable edge isn't the data everyone shares, but the judgment and taste that turn it into an experience worth coming back to.