Dark Funnel
Quick definition
All buying activities of your prospect that you don't see in your marketing metrics.
Detailed explanation
A CFO reads three whitepapers, looks at your company on LinkedIn, asks colleagues for experiences and googles your product name. Nobody fills in a form. You see nothing in your dashboard. This is the dark funnel – 70% of the buyer journey happens here. Your prospect is already halfway through their decision before they contact you. The problem: your CRM and Google Analytics don't see these signals. You think a lead is "cold", while they've been engaged with you for months. You miss crucial timing. The solution lies in combining signals: who visits your site without logging in? Which companies read your content? Who follows you on social media? Tools like Leadinfo show which companies visit your site. LinkedIn shows who reads your posts. Intent data shows who's searching for similar solutions. This gives you an advantage: call a prospect who visited your pricing page three times, not someone who accidentally landed on your homepage. The dark funnel is becoming increasingly important. Privacy regulations make tracking harder. People use private modes and block cookies. B2B buyers do 83% of their research without sales contact. Those who read these signals know when a prospect is truly ready. That saves time and increases your conversion by 40-60%.
Synonyms
Examples
A manufacturing company sees that 5 people from the same company read their case studies within 2 weeks. They call proactively and discover they're in the middle of a tender process.
A software company uses Leadinfo and sees that a prospect visited their pricing page 7x. Sales calls, hears "your timing is perfect, we're comparing vendors now".
When to use this?
Use this when you want to understand why "cold" leads sometimes convert faster than "warm" leads. Important for marketing and sales alignment – what marketing sees as MQL is often already further in the dark funnel.
Match-day approach
We help you collect and interpret dark funnel signals. We connect Leadinfo to your CRM, create dashboards showing website visits per company, and train sales to use these signals in their timing. One client increased their deal size by 35% by only approaching prospects who had at least 3 touchpoints in the dark funnel.
Learn more
Wil je weten hoe je dark funnel effectief inzet in jouw organisatie? Neem contact op met Match-day.
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