Getting Real: Dark Funnel Use Cases & Examples
We’d all love to be the 500-pound gorilla in our respective industries, so that every prospect could immediately find us as they started their buying journeys. Most of us aren’t so fortunate. Sometimes we discover that our competitors won deals with prospects we didn’t even know about.
Preventing Uncontested Losses
In the final section of this document, we’ll explore some real-life use cases in which the Dark Funnel often meaningfully impedes the sales process—and how illuminating its hidden data generates positive outcomes for both buyers and sellers.
That potential buyers always find you among the vast web of information they navigate as they progress through their journeys?
That you don’t miss potential opportunities?
That you’re involved in buying cycles early enough to be competitive?
The best possible way to cover these concerns is to know about buyer interest as soon as possible.
This requires using solutions that effectively give you x-ray vision into the Dark Funnel, highlighting all the relevant buyer signals that insure that your selling teams have a chance to compete for every deal—and engage buyers at the right time.
So as a B2B solutions provider, how do you ensure:
The Conundrum of Content Consumption
While most B2B brands are more concerned with missing deals than being drowned in leads, the most famous brands in a market may find themselves awash in leads with no clear way to differentiate real buyers from the casually curious.
Validating Visible Buying Journeys
Revenue teams have long used metrics such as the volume of content consumed as a proxy for whether a website visitor is a near-term prospect. This can be a misguided strategy. Users bebop across B2B websites for all kinds of reasons—and none of them may in fact be directly related to their company’s immediate business needs.
In fact, there’s no real evidence that any one website visitor’s content consumption is related to their purchase intentions.
Here’s where visibility into the Dark Funnel plays a critical role in account identification. If you’re experiencing a spike of non-buyer content consumption on your website, you should validate a visitor’s intentions by seeking out evidence within the Dark Funnel that their organization is genuinely interested and in-market for your solution.
Your investigation may reveal that there’s an entire buying team, not just a lone individual, demonstrating interest. That’s the one you need to prioritize!
The Conundrum of Content Consumption
As B2B providers produce more and increasingly valuable content, their website traffic often increases. But this traffic doesn’t actually guarantee a meaningful increase in the percentage of legitimately interested visitors.
In fact, it’s likely to contain an ever-increasing percentage of individuals who aren’t immediate prospects at all.
The Impact of Personalized Outreach
Today’s B2B buyers expect their purchasing experiences to match the context-rich, personalized, high-value experiences they have in the consumer space.
Enabling Personalized Marketing and Sales Motions
But contextualizing and personalizing content for B2B buying teams is really hard, especially since buyers are reluctant to share the kind of personal information that would enable such white-glove experiences.
Again, here’s where the hidden info lurking inside the Dark Funnel can provide a wealth of information to effectively engage buyers. These details—especially those hailing from the buyer readiness and psychographic signal categories—can help personalize messaging and content to increase the likelihood that digital ads, emails and phone calls will be positively received.
Here’s a real-world example of how illuminated Dark Funnel data informs the creation of an impactful customer acquisition campaign:
The Impact of Personalized Outreach
Market intelligence and technographic data from the buyer readiness category can alert your revenue team that a competitor is being acquired
With that data, you can produce a list of competitive-install prospects that might be affected
This can trigger a competitive take-out campaign that points out the risks of remaining with the recently-acquired company
We’ve covered a lot of ground in this document. We talked about how there’s a Dark Funnel “out there” but also one within your own revenue team data and process. (External versus internal Dark Funnel data.) We’ve also detailed the different categories of data hidden in the Dark Funnel, from behavioral data and psychographic data to company readiness signals.
Dark Funnel Examples and Use Cases
Account health scores
Net Promoter Scores
Sales conversation content
Product usage data
Pre-MQL leads
Anonymous website traffic
Internal
Dark Funnel Data
People psychographics, such as personal attitudes and interests
Account psychographics, such as sponsorships and organizational priorities
Market intelligence signals such as growth, funding, events, expansions,
and other changes
Technographic insights
Visits to product review websites
Researching competitors
Relevant third-party publisher content consumption
External Dark Funnel Data
Psychographics
Readiness
Behavior
These tables offer a quick reference to see the kinds of data that exist in each part of the Dark Funnel and within each category:
Dark Funnel Examples
Dark Funnel Use Cases
Customer success rep notes provide context for executive outreach
Identify upsell opportunities from customer-success call attendees
Identify future prospecting triggers from Closed/Lost data
Identify pre-MQL buying team members
Prioritize leads with anonymous web traffic data
Use Cases for Internal Dark Funnel Data
Charitable donations supported by prospect account as incentive to take a meeting
Aligning campaigns or sales outreach to key organizational priorities
Identify competitive
take-out opportunities
Identify prospects with a acute need
Identify customer churn risk
Uncover early-stage buyer journeys
Use Cases for External Dark Funnel Data
Psychographics
Readiness
Behavior
And here’s another table that offers sample use cases for each combination of Dark Funnel source and category of data:
Dark Funnel Use Cases
Dark Funnel Examples