Anonymous Buyers
and the Dark Funnel
We’ve all long known that buyers conduct most of their research online (nearly 70%, according to Forrester), and they do so anonymously, far from the curious eyes of B2B solution providers and their sales reps. They also conduct research so thoroughly that many already come to some kind of buying decision before they ever explicitly engage with a company.
What Signals Do Buyers Create As They Conduct Research?
How Misaligned Outreach Can Threaten Deals
Since buyers visit dozens—or even hundreds—of online resources far from where you can effectively track them, you’re never quite sure in which stage a buyer might be in the buying process, or how that might align with your sales funnel. They might have just filled out a form on your website for the first time, but do you really know where they’ve been or what they know already?
This is the mysterious Dark Funnel at work. Unless you are able to unlock its hidden treasures, you run the risk of missing deals you could have won, or coming in so late to deals that your sellers can’t effectively compete. You can
even alienate buyers.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that buyers—whether they know it
or not—leave a kind of “breadcrumb trail” across the internet as they conduct their research. It’s a record of what they’re researching, when, and even
on which websites.
This digital breadcrumb trail is typically anonymous, living its best life in your Dark Funnel. But the right revenue technology platforms and data-science solutions—using privacy-compliant methods via partnerships
with governmental organizations, third-party data collectors, regulatory agencies, financial reporting agencies and more—can accurately connect those signals back to the companies conducting that research.
These solutions can tell you:
Armed with that kind of information, those anonymous companies can quickly become engaged opportunities within your CRM.
The duration of an organization’s buyer journey
The size of the buying team
The sources where those team members get their information
The financial situation their company might be in, which informs
their ability or need to purchase new solutions
The technological condition they’re in, which informs if their
tech stack is compatible with your solution
And much more
How Misaligned Outreach Can Threaten Deals
Can a BDR or rep ruin a deal on their very first interaction with a prospect? Yep. And the Dark Funnel is largely
to blame.
Let’s say a buyer fills out a form on your site. Your marketing team assumes this is the first engagement that the buyer’s company has made with your organization, and that the contact is in an early stage of the buyer’s journey.
Your marketers and reps then “follow the process” and pepper the prospect with lots of early-stage interactions and educational content.
But this isn’t the smooth move we’ve been led to think it is. Why? This prospect has probably been anonymously researching their business problem—and even your specific solution—for months. They’ve probably read the same early-stage information your team is now breathlessly providing.
That’s not a good look. Your team is bombarding the contact with noise, not high-value information. Buyers can be so put-off by this rookie move that they’ll kick any future correspondence right into the spam folder.
What Signals Do Buyers Create
As They Conduct Research?
It’s hard for most folks to get their heads around just how much intent data buyers generate as they conduct online research.
Why? For starters, it’s rarely just one person conducting all that research. As the internet has grown, so have buying teams. According to Gartner, most buying teams have about 10 stakeholders to satisfy during a typical buying journey.
However, Forrester says, some teams can have more than 20 members on their buying teams … and they’re all hunting-and-pecking their way through Google to find solutions for their organizational challenges.
Equally significant, these buyers are often generating at least a dozen digital interactions on each digital resource. When this Dark Funnel data is illuminated, its rich record of buyer behavior can provide clear insights on buyer interests and intentions.