Most B2B buying decisions are made in the dark.
That’s not to say that prospects are oblivious. Far from it. Today’s buyers conduct thorough independent research long before engaging with providers. And that is the problem; none of the thought processes that actually lead to decision to purchase are visible to suppliers.
Measurement models might capture clicks, downloads and form fills – all signs that prospects now armed with self-made intent are ready to move forward. But they fail to capture what shapes that intent, namely private comparisons, conversations with peers and validation sought from internal stakeholders. This effectively leaves businesses in the dark, unaware they were even under consideration.
This invisible area of influence, so key to decision-making, is often referred to as the “dark funnel.”
A Stab in the Dark
Traditional funnel marketing assumes customers will move along a structured pathway – from awareness to consideration and, finally, conversion. But as prospects become better informed, making self-led decisions without speaking to sales beforehand, the assumption that their journey follows a measurable pattern soon falls apart.
Thoughts, beliefs and opinions about a brand are now shaped by behaviors that sit outside the CRMs and attribution models teams have traditionally relied on. The fact that B2B purchases typically involve six to 10 stakeholders, according to Gartner, only compounds this obscurity problem. Multiple individuals form perspectives independently before aligning internally rather than moving through a funnel together.
Until prospects choose to step into the light themselves, intent remains difficult, if not impossible, to capture. Unless, that is, organizations learn how to influence what happens out of sight, beyond the traditional, visible funnel.
Regaining Advantage
A recent 6sense study found that most buyers will have completed 70% of their purchasing process before engaging with sellers, with 80% initiating first contact themselves.
Organizations can win back control with a shift in marketing focus and responsibility. Rather than simply generating awareness and visibility as they did in the past, leaving persuasion and conversion to sales, marketing teams must now anticipate questions, address objections and respond directly to the pain points prospective buyers are exploring independently. It is marketing’s job to facilitate the research process, such that when prospects do make contact, they’re ready to move forward.
Blurred Lines
In this sense, the lines between marketing and sales functions are blurring, much like the lines between the different stages in traditional marketing funnels.
As buyer discovery blends seamlessly into conversion, so, too must the lines between internal functions. Marketing professionals must take on more of a sales capacity in the sense that they are now charged with building credibility, demonstrating value and helping stakeholders justify decisions internally, long before initial contact. Sales teams, meanwhile, must shift their focus away from setting expectations, already dealt with by marketing, toward reinforcing them, as customer success teams serve to safeguard reputation before prospects enter the pipeline.
A Streamlined Solution
Traditional siloed working structures struggle to support this new reality. When teams operate sequentially, working with separate datasets and systems toward different performance targets, momentum emerging from sales-ready prospects is easily lost. Not only can differences in messaging undermine trust, but fragmented journeys rapidly see interested consumers return to the comparison process, towards competitors.
Organizations need to get teams working together.
Maintaining Intent
By the time someone fills out a form or books a demo, they’ve typically moved beyond exploration and have already formed a preference. That’s why the 17% of time that buyers then spend directly engaging with suppliers (as Gartner reports) matters.
When prospects eventually step forward and contact sales, they’re no longer looking for persuasion. Rather, they’re seeking confirmation that the choice they’ve already made independently, based on marketing and external brand image, holds true in practice. And so, the duty of sales teams shifts from generating new value to protecting what’s already there. To do so effectively, they must work hand in hand with other functional teams.
Consistency Is Key
Conversations must align perfectly with what prospects have read, heard, and concluded elsewhere, in order to move into conversions. Indeed, any disconnect between expectation and experience at this stage can undermine trust.
Of course, while organizations can ensure that sales and marketing are aligned to coordinate owned output, they cannot control every influence shaping buyer perception. Independent reviews, peer recommendations and third-party feedback also contribute to buyer decisions.
This makes day-one coordination with customer success and service teams just as vital as coordination between sales and marketing departments. Influence in the dark funnel depends on consistency everywhere the prospect looks, and ensuring alignment between feedback from existing customers, for example, and what’s being promised, is the only real way to achieve this.
Bringing Teams Together
But how can organizations bring previously siloed and perhaps even competing departments together? It begins with redefining success.
Measures like MQL and SQL volume, campaign attribution scores and channel-specific engagement targets were designed for staged funnels and departmental ownership. They rarely reflect how modern buying decisions actually form.
When teams optimize for separate targets, alignment falters and influence weakens. Intent and interest begin slipping through the cracks. By replacing such targets with shared goals, by contrast, teams move away from competing for visibility within an obscured pipeline and begin collectively shaping the out-of-funnel decision-making processes that actually lead to successful conversion.
A Strategic Engine
Revenue operations (RevOps) serves to replace bumpy client journeys still guided by outmoded funnel stages with a truly streamlined customer process. Beyond aligning all departments around a single shared goal – business revenue – it replaces staggered handovers with shared ownership of the customer journey. The accountability created via its single focus is what truly ensures marketing, sales and customer success teams, alongside product and finance, are working together, not just in theory, but in practice, using the same data and messaging to achieve unified growth outcomes.
With RevOps at the helm and a revenue engine in place, businesses can regain control of the darkness, building continuity and confidence that leads to conversion.
Modern success is all about the groundwork. An aligned strategy that ensures when buyers step into the light, they find what they’re expecting with no contradictions or reasons to regress into the darkness.
