Exec Summary

• The Dark Funnel refers to the un-trackable parts of the buyer journey
• This has made the B2B buying process even harder to measure
• New tech is emerging to help connect the dots
• Listen further for an example of one approach on The RevOps Corner Podcast
• BTW – I’m Mallory, USC’s new SVP of Revenue Operations Strategy!

Tracking attribution gets a lot more difficult when a huge chunk of your customers’ exposure to your brand is invisible to you.

According to the 2023 6sense B2B Buyer Experience Report, B2B customers are already 70% of the way through their buying journey by the time they make contact with sales. That’s a lot of time spent considering you as a solution – without you knowing it.

In today’s newsletter we’re going to explore what can be done to gain insight into this shadowy path along your buyer’s journey.

What is the “dark funnel”?

There’s a large volume of activities along the buyer journey that cannot be tracked with traditional marketing technologies. These activities are known as the “dark funnel”. The term emerged back in 2016, but really gained popularity about 3 years ago when it was evangelized by Chris Walker.

Essentially, if you can’t place a UTM tag on it or otherwise gain lead source information from it, it’s a part of the dark funnel.

This includes:

• Podcasts
• Word of mouth
• Offline interactions
• Closed communities
• Research done on AI platforms

According to the 6sense 2023 B2B Buyer Experience Report, the average B2B buying committee will have ~4,000 digital and real life investigative interactions across an average of 3 vendor options. A mere 1% of those will be visible to your team. Wow!

How can we navigate through the dark?

Many marketers have resorted to asking on their forms explicitly: “how did you hear about us”?

I remember using this strategy back in 2009 when I started in marketing at ExactTarget. Well, time is a flat circle, and we’re back to simply asking people for this information. The great news is that, because many people are aware of the dark funnel, they are much more willing to share exactly how they learned about you. This can help inform which marketing programs are working.

The best sales reps out there also ask this question in their discovery calls. This helps them learn about the prospect and provide feedback to marketing. Some of my favorite reps in the past even asked people about their search terms.

Many of the review sites and/or analyst sites have begun to offer demand generation tools that allow someone to request a demo right there from the third party page. This is a win-win because we know where they came from – and it helps the vendor justify the ROI of spending money to have a listing on G2, etc.

Lastly, smart marketers have created narrow paths to their website which might be clues to where someone heard about you. If you offer a certain coupon code at the end of your podcast, and then your audience uses it to get an offer, you can reasonably assume they listened.

Keep in mind – none of these approaches are fool-proof.

Will new technology be our light at the end of the dark funnel?

In recent years, company-level intent data has gained popularity as one way to solve this problem. By using IP addresses or cookie pools, many vendors such as Bombora, ZoomInfo, and Apollo will show you which companies are in the market for your product.

The issue? We still don’t know who those people are to connect the dots to demand capture. We have an identity resolution problem.

Thanks to capitalism, new technology vendors are popping up to solve this problem. Will we finally shed some light on the dark funnel? Here are the players in the space that stand out to us at Union Square:

1. Common Room auto-collects and aggregate buying signals across 50-plus channels, revealing the person, account, and context behind each one.
2. rb2b.com identifies your anonymous website viewers and pushes their LinkedIn profiles to Slack in realtime (double-check your website’s privacy compliance needs for this one).
3. 6sense uses buyer intent signals and AI pattern recognition to de-anonymize web traffic and track interactions on an account-based level.
4. Commsor helps you tap into your existing network to source intros to new people with their product Bronto.

Listen further on the RevOps Corner Podcast

Eddie explored different facets of this topic with Kerry Cunningham on the RevOps Corner podcast episode, “Finding and Using Attribution Data From the Dark Funnel”.  I think you’ll enjoy it!

By the way, did you notice something new?

If you’re a long-time subscriber (and very observant) you might be wondering who this new author is. Hey there! My name is Mallory Lee, I’m the new SVP of Revenue Operations Strategy for Union Square. I’ll be helping people like you execute on strategic revenue plans, fix up processes, and reach your targets.

A little about me:

• I grew up in marketing operations
• I pioneered marketing automation strategy with the Salesforce team
• As VP of RevOps at Terminus I drove scale through their Series C and several acquisitions
• Most recently served as VP of RevOps at Nylas where we adopted PLG and transformed our go-to-market strategy
• My specialties are executive-level GTM strategy and alignment, insights, and revenue funnel optimization

I can’t wait to share more RevOps knowledge with you in many newsletters to come!