What is the dark funnel?

The dark funnel is the part of the B2B buying journey that happens out of sight of your tracking tools. It includes anonymous website visits, third-party research, peer recommendations, private community discussions and internal buying-committee conversations. Most of it happens before a buyer ever fills out a form or speaks to sales.

Dark social is content sharing and brand discussion that happens through private channels analytics can't track, like Slack, WhatsApp, DMs, email forwards and private communities. Traffic that comes from these shares usually shows up as "direct" in your analytics.

Is dark social the same as the dark funnel?

No. Dark social is one part of the dark funnel. The dark funnel also includes anonymous website visits, research on review sites and third-party content, and offline conversations. All dark social is dark funnel activity, but not all dark funnel activity is dark social.

Can you track dark social?

Not directly. Private conversations will always stay private. But you can measure its effects, through self-reported attribution, sales discovery questions, branded search trends and organization-level analysis of the accounts that come to you "direct."

How do you measure the dark funnel in B2B?

Combine methods. Organization-level touchpoint analysis shows what each company engaged with across your ads, email, social and website. Self-reported attribution and customer interviews reveal where demand was created in the first place.

Posts by
Kirsty Dawe

Kirsty Dawe is Chief Marketing Officer at Lead Forensics, where she leads the company’s global marketing strategy. With extensive experience in B2B marketing, demand generation and business growth, Kirsty is passionate about helping organisations identify new opportunities, connect with the right prospects and turn website traffic into meaningful commercial results.

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Marketing

The Dark Funnel & Dark Social: What B2B Marketers Can Measure

A while ago, someone on my team spotted a thread in a mums' group for marketers. The members were comparing notes on tools, and our software came up by name. None of us had been invited to that conversation, none of us could join it, and none of it would ever show up in a dashboard.

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Sales

What is MEDDPICC? Explained by MEDDIC’s Creator

If you sell into complex B2B deals, you've almost certainly heard someone mention MEDDPICC in a pipeline review. It's one of the most widely used sales qualification frameworks in B2B - and one of the most widely misunderstood, often reduced to a checklist of letters to fill in rather than the discipline it was built to be. To get it right, we went to the source. Dick Dunkel, VP of Revenue Enablement at Altana, coined MEDDIC - the framework MEDDPICC is built on - in 1996, and has spent the years since helping companies adapt it, including the Paper Process and Competition additions that produced MEDDPICC. He joined Lead Forensics' B2B Revenue Masters webinar series to talk through what the framework actually means, why it's endured for three decades, and where he still sees sales teams get it wrong. This guide is built around that conversation.

Blog

How To Get a Lead Forensics Demo – and Exactly What Happens Next

Why does Lead Forensics start with a demo? Here's the whole process, step by step: a sector-matched demo, a two-week guided free trial, an ROI calculation built on your own website data, and going live within hours.