Preventing Uncontested Losses 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. So as a B2B solutions provider, how do you ensure: • 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. Validating Visible Buying Journeys 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. 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. 20