Here’s what I’ve learned after decades of selling: Your customers aren’t progressing in an orderly manner through a carefully crafted sales funnel. They don’t moving predictably from awareness to consideration to purchase, as we were taught in Marketing 101.
The harsh reality? Most early decision-making for your leads doesn’t involve you at all, which is why selling often feels like you are screaming into the void.
There is a term for this coined by the marketing tech firm 6sense: the “Dark Funnel.”
The dark funnel describes the invisible early stages of buying, when prospects research and form opinions. Happening within the dark funnel are all those mysterious and untraceable factors that influence whether a buyer ever agrees to a meeting: emails that are scanned but not acknowledged, voicemails that are listened to, exploratory visits to a website or your social media profile, and word-of-mouth recommendations. Essentially, we are referring to all the actions taken by leads that influence decisions without leaving visible-to-you traces.
When the outcomes are invisible, it’s easy to say, “This isn’t working,” and stop taking the actions. That is a bad plan. Why? Because there’s solid science behind why consistent and repeated steps to achieve and maintain visibility are necessary to win. Here are some things to consider.
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