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. 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. 6