Insights: The state of B2B marketing: Key trends and transformations
Chapter 2.
Navigating the Dark Funnel: Early engagement in complex buying journeys
Research consistently shows that B2B buyers conduct 70% of their journey before making contact with vendors, creating a "dark funnel" where critical research and evaluation happen out of sight. Combined with more complex buying committees that now typically include 10-13 stakeholders, this creates major challenges for marketing teams attempting to influence purchase decisions before they're largely solidified.
Mohib Ahmad from Brink's Inc captures this reality: "Most B2B buyers decide on their preferred solution before engaging with providers because of how marketing and sales typically treat someone who downloads a case study or reads a white paper – they get hounded by sales, assuming they're ready to buy when clearly that's not the case. I've rethought our approach to meet buyers where they are. I've changed our social media strategy to focus on education and awareness rather than lead generation."
This insight resonates with Greg Tucker from CSG, who notes: "If you're not building affinity early, you might get invited to an RFP process, but you could just be there to validate that the preferred vendor is indeed the right choice." He elaborates on the implications: "What I find particularly interesting is that buyers have often mentally decided who they want to purchase from before engaging with a seller—the sales process mainly confirms what they already believe."
Navigating this challenge effectively requires both advanced technology and detailed approaches to engagement. Ashley Levesque from Fuel50 describes their strategy: "We're using multiple intent data sources like ZoomInfo and G2 to create a complete strategy where we can examine different levels of intent across the buyer's funnel. G2 provides bottom-of-funnel insights—showing us people comparing us with competitors or looking at pricing. ZoomInfo topics help us gain a top-of-funnel view—revealing what people are searching for."
Dylan Max from AmplifAI highlights the importance of targeting multiple stakeholders within buying groups: "Our strategy involves tailoring content for different decision-makers while maintaining a cohesive narrative. For instance, while VPs of customer service might focus on operational metrics, C-suite executives are more interested in how our solution positions them against competitors."
The complexity of buying groups requires careful consideration of different priorities and perspectives. Kate McQuade from P360 explains: "In the life sciences industry, which is the second most regulated sector globally after financial services, buying groups are complex. We've observed a direct correlation between company size and buying team composition. Each stakeholder brings distinct priorities – IT teams focus on implementation challenges and system stability, sales teams prioritize ease of use and efficiency, while compliance officers concentrate on risk mitigation and regulatory adherence."
Steve Greene from Finexio shares a practical example of addressing diverse stakeholder concerns: "Our approach recognizes two distinct groups within each account. The first is the C-suite decision-makers – typically a very tight group supporting the individual that will ultimately sign the contract. The second comprises other stakeholders and influencers, often at the director level or within specific departments like AP. We maintain a workflow-driven nurture program to keep these influencers educated about our value proposition and thought leadership."
Meeting prospects where they are during their self-directed research requires new approaches to content strategy. D'Anna Siegle discusses their success with ungated content: "Several years ago during my last role, we made the important decision to ungate all our core content, which considerably changed our entire marketing approach. This shift led to improved user engagement metrics, including increased time spent on pages and reduced bounce rates. More importantly, it allowed us to move away from traditional funnel categorizations and create a more fluid experience where our ICPs could engage with valuable content at any stage without friction."
For marketing leaders, the dark funnel creates both challenges and opportunities. Understanding where prospects are in their journey, even when they're not explicitly identifying themselves, requires advanced methods for tracking engagement. Matt Taylor from Hawk Ridge Systems explains how they've changed their approach to large deals: "Looking at our larger deals, particularly industrial 3D printers that carry price tags over $600,000, we noticed sales had limited data to work with due to the infrequent nature of these transactions. Marketing stepped in to change our approach, moving away from the traditional 'spray-and-pray' mentality to something much more targeted."
Our survey shows that 54% of sales leaders identify buying group dynamics and influences as the most impactful buyer behavior insight they need from marketing. This underscores the importance of not just engaging early, but engaging effectively across the entire buying committee.
The key to success lies in:
- Creating complete educational content that addresses early-stage research questions
- Developing persona-specific messaging that resonates with different stakeholders
- Using intent data to identify anonymous research activity
- Building engagement models that don't require immediate identification
- Implementing multi-touch attribution to understand complex journeys
Key Insights Recap
With 70% of the buying journey occurring before vendor contact and decisions being made by committees of 10-13 stakeholders, marketing must reach buyers during their anonymous research phase with relevant, educational content for each role in the buying group. The dark funnel represents both a challenge and an opportunity for marketing teams willing to evolve their approach.
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About 6sense
6sense is on a mission to revolutionise the way B2B organisations create revenue by predicting customers most likely to buy and recommending the best course of action to engage anonymous buying teams. 6sense Revenue AI is the only sales and marketing platform to unlock the ability to create, manage and convert high-quality pipeline to revenue. Customers report 2X increases in average contract value, 4X increases in win rate and 20-40% reduction in time to close deals. Know everything, do anything, with 6sense.