The Dark Funnel: How to Reach Buyers Before They Talk to Sales

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. I'm super happy to be here today with Evan. We're going to talk about the dark funnel. We are both very sassy people and very blunt, so this is going to be a lot of fun.

A couple of housekeeping notes: Yes, this will be recorded and will be available on our company's page. I would love you to stay until the end, but if you need to leave for an emergency, you can watch the rest after. Please ask your questions—the more questions you ask, the more tailored this webinar will be for you. If questions are related to what we're discussing, I'm happy to address them in the middle of the webinar. If they're a bit off topic, I'm not ignoring you; I will address them at the end. If we have a flood of questions we can't answer live, we'll respond via LinkedIn.

If you haven't been to N.Rich's webinars before, we do one every week. You get free information on marketing and sales topics. I'm here every week except for August. I'm your host for today. My name is Mafalda. I'm Portuguese living in Germany. I'm the commercial director—a vague title because I do business development and marketing. I'm not head of demand gen; that's my colleague Josh. The commercial director is not the same thing as head of demand gen.

I'm super happy to finally have Evan in my webinar. We've been following each other for a long time. I love his sassy posts and I agree with him on a lot of things, so this will be a great confirmation for me. Evan, tell everyone what you do.

My name is Evan Patterson. I am apparently a very sassy person on LinkedIn, and I self-acknowledge that as well. The way I make my money is by being sassy on LinkedIn, but I'm also a fractional CMO for various types of businesses, usually in the B2B SaaS space, sometimes the B2C marketplace world, venture studios, and professional service providers. Those are typically my clients. I also do personal branding, and if you don't need a CMO, I'm an all-around general freelance marketer.

My specialty in the marketing lane is anything content, community, social media, partnerships, digital events, which obviously goes very well with today's topic: the dark funnel.

I'm so happy to know because I came up with this title and invited you, and you were like, "That's exactly what I love talking about." I was like, "Great, amazing, let's go."

Let us know where you're tuning in from. If you're from the marketing side, sales side, CRO, or leadership, we'd love to know. But with no further ado, let's talk about the dark funnel. To make sure everyone is on the same page, I'd like to spend a couple of minutes explaining the concept. For the most senior people, I promise we won't spend too much time on it. Evan, how would you describe the concept of the dark funnel?

I'm going to explain this in a way that should make sense to everyone. Please tell me in the comments your feedback on how I explain it, because the dark funnel, while not a new concept, has only been talked about recently—I'd say in the last 10 or so years. It's very possible that somebody in this room has no idea what I'm talking about.

The dark funnel is a part of the sales pipeline where it's really hard to track and get attribution data. As new technologies come out, there are more ways to track, but there's still a lot of connecting the dots, making hunches, and learning from experience. The simplest analogy I can give you is if a marketer buys a billboard on the side of the highway, we know that sales go up. If we take the billboard down, sales don't go up as much as they did with the billboard. That's all the attribution data you're going to get.

Tools like N.Rich help fill in the gaps a little bit, but even N.Rich can't do 100% of the dark funnel. The dark funnel is really about working with the psychology of marketing—making people feel something, making people want to care about what you're doing, want to remember what you're doing, want to talk about what you're doing, whether or not they're even your customer. It's all that early start of the funnel and early awareness that your brand even exists. But that's the stuff that leads to meetings, sales, and revenue. The dark funnel is very important.

Absolutely. There are many channels—many tunnels within the dark funnel. I'd love to speak about each one and their importance and how each one behaves. Let's start with peer communities. How do they work? Why are they a dark tunnel within the funnel?

I'm going to use an example that a lot of people have probably heard of: Pavilion. Another one might be Rev Genius. People go into those communities and let's say you're a director of marketing and you want to get more attribution data about what types of people are visiting your website. It's been a while since you've checked what new tools are on the market. Instead of spending hours scrolling through YouTube and learning all of it yourself, you might decide to ask your peers: "Does anybody recommend a tool that can help me solve this problem?" Somebody mentions N.Rich in response to that message.

That is an example of the dark funnel because N.Rich is not going to get that data unless somebody sees it happen with their own eyes, or somebody in Rev Genius catches it and tells somebody at N.Rich that it happened. But there's no way to sustainably, scalably, and legally track that data.

Legally is the right word because I think there are tools that try to track mentions like that. I'm just not sure how legal they are, and it also depends on the countries as well.

I generally go with the rule of thumb that you should go with the most above-board option possible, especially if you're a marketer and not a lawyer. I can't keep up with every single country's laws. I'm not qualified to do a webinar on which ones are legal. But I can tell you which ones I'm not worried about.

That makes a lot of sense. The other dark challenge that everyone is talking about nowadays—and I'm going to say it out there—is LLMs and AI search. That's something new, a tunnel that didn't exist in the funnel before. Tell us, how does it work? What are the difficulties of this channel?

This is the one that keeps me up at night. It gives me night terrors. So, LLMs and AI search—trying to explain this in the simplest way: nowadays when you go on Google and search, you're no longer getting that wall of blue links we're used to. At the very beginning, you're now just getting an AI summary. In that AI summary, let's say it's the same exact question from the previous example—I want to get more attribution data, I want to know what types of people are visiting my website on an individual scale. If you type that into Google, Gemini's going to spit out a shortlist of possible tools and solutions. Those sources are things like Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, other content conversations happening on forums. The list goes on.

In one way, the dark funnel got a little less dark because of that, but in another way, new problems have arisen. If you're not showing up on that list, even paying to boost ads on a Google search won't cut it anymore. You have to be on that list. What's also important now is that people have to know to search for you if you're not going to be on that list. You have two problems now: AI is deciding on our behalf who to show people, and if you're not on that list, how do you get on that list?

The other issue is that this has increased the importance of organic content, social media content, webinars like this, transcripts from webinars, podcasts, blogs from webinars—any sort of content that can be repurposed where you're saying the same message consistently over and over again. That's going to really help you show up more in those LLM results and AI search engine results. That is one of many ways you can manipulate the dark funnel in your favor because you're going to show up more often in those results. In the short term, you're going to train people to search for you on those tools. It's both a psychological training and a technological training.

Still on that topic, would you say that being mentioned in proper press releases from good sources also helps you show up on the LLMs?

Yes. That's another way.

That's also a good way that helps you show up on the LLMs, correct?

Yes. There are tools out there that will help you figure out your AI search engine visibility. There are tools from the traditional SEO days that have even added that in. There are people that have now dedicated their entire career to this topic because it is such a robust topic. Somebody like me who specializes in all things organic content, organic social, and organic partnerships, it makes me happy because I'm downstream of that increased demand. I'm the person that makes the strategy and the content that plugs into what we just said.

The answer to your question about what sources get cited changes based on ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini, and so on and so forth. Each of those AI tools has its own target audience. The type of person that uses Perplexity is not necessarily the same type of person who uses Gemini. Gemini is built for the average everyday consumer. Perplexity has a more specific use case or a specific reason why people would even bother to use it. So when you're creating your AI strategy and trying to manipulate the dark funnel in your favor, it's important that you have somebody who can understand the demographics of each search engine, just like we did way back in the '90s and 2000s.

That's fantastic because that ties back to something we'll mention later: go back to your basics. Know your ICP, know your buyer persona, understand where your target audience is and how they behave, and act accordingly. That's the great takeaway you just mentioned—it's not like, "Oh, we want to show up on LLMs." It's, "Which one of them? And why?"

Exactly. It's why is somebody even on Perplexity? The marketing team needs to understand that. If the people that are on Perplexity aren't your ICP, then maybe you'll stop prioritizing how Perplexity sources things.

Absolutely. Before we go to the next tunnel in the funnel, Colten has a question. I think it's a question for the whole webinar, actually. To be honest, I did a webinar a month ago about this topic with a CMO, which was a whole discussion about aligning sales and marketing. I recommend going to our website or text me on LinkedIn—I can send you the link to that webinar because it's a whole webinar about that. Nevertheless, Evan, can you spare two minutes on how to align sales and marketing?

Colten, you've asked me a question that could be answered in a book. I'm going to try to be succinct here. The long and short of it is that I view marketing in three parts—I view the marketing funnel as a Venn diagram with the sales funnel where the third section overlaps the beginning of the sales funnel as their first step.

The first step is just getting people to know you exist—that ultra top of funnel. That's usually through organic content, usually through events, usually through things like this. N.Rich can definitely view this as a top of funnel piece of content for them. Just because it's top of funnel doesn't mean it can't get people to book a demo or meeting. But when marketers talk about top of funnel, it's not the same way salespeople talk about top of funnel. It just means that we understand we can't write one post or do one event and get somebody who's never heard of us, like us, trust us, want to talk to us, and then buy from us in one swing. That's just not how human beings buy things at this price point or magnitude. The average human being makes a purchase after considering it 12 to 20 times, even subconsciously. That's the top of funnel, which is often where the dark funnel is.

As we move down the funnel and start getting more promotional style content, I want to use my personal brand as an example. I'll make a post about my cats or a Pride joke as a queer man on LinkedIn. That will pull people in—birds of a feather flock together. We're cut from similar cloth. You like me, I like you. That's fun. Then the next post, which will get about 1/10 the views as that previous post, will be more about what I actually sell. That goes from, "Oh, I don't just like this guy and know he exists. He's smart and I want to talk to him, maybe hire him." It's the one-two step of it all.

I always figure out what's going to get people to know we exist and like us, and then what's going to get people to want to book a meeting with us after they've gone from liking you and trusting you to wanting to do something with you. That way, when sales goes outbound and tries to book a meeting with these people, it's warmer because they already know you exist. It's a lot easier to break the ice when you say, "I'm from insert company here," and that person just experienced something with that same brand within the past few days. They're going to be excited and eager to hear what you have to say. It's like meeting a friend of a friend. You two haven't met, but you both know you share a mutual friend. It's the same logic of psychology that we're trying to create for sales reps. Which improves how much energy you're spending. They can make 20 swings a day versus 200 swings a day, but with 20 swings they can book twice as many meetings as they would with 200 attempts. If a marketer's doing their job right—and obviously this takes a long time to get there—that's how a lot of marketers connect marketing to sales.

I focus on outbound more because then inbound will work better if outbound works better.

I agree, I agree. And I'm head of business development, so I've been mostly on the sales side from top of funnel. I've always told my BDR, especially if they start complaining about not getting good leads from marketing, that I never encourage that speech. I say, if you call someone—if you cold call someone and say, "Hey, this is my father from company ABC"—if the person says "Who?" or "Oh, I've heard about it," those are completely different cold calls. That's marketing. It doesn't have to be a lead ready for you because that's almost an inbound. We don't need a sales development rep for that.

I used to be a BDR back in the day, and I never did cold calling. I was the one that only did social media—LinkedIn DMing. But I had an ICP where that all made sense. It's a long story there. I would often tell a BDR, if you're complaining about a lack of leads, become your own marketing engine. Start making your own content, start making your own strategy, start doing what I just said for yourself. Especially if you're a BDR that doesn't want to become an AE or a biz dev manager, if you're a BDR that wants to transition to marketing.

That's mostly me. I never wanted to be in a union. That's why I have this hybrid role between marketing and business development. For the rest of alignment between marketing and sales, check our webinar from last month on June 1st with Andrea Mandial, CMO at Ubenda. All right, let's talk about review sites. I'd love to hear, Evan, do you think that the dark funnel of review sites was way more important before AI, or do you think it still has the same importance?

I'm still trying to come to my own conclusion on that because on one hand, they're less important in the sense that their traffic has plummeted because AI is sourcing reviews or using reviews as a way to pick what to post. But in other ways, one could argue that that's why review sites are more important, because now they're being sourced on the LLMs. Obviously the ones that have the most robust reviews or the most quantity of reviews, the ones on sites that get cited more often than others, which I'm sure there are reasons beyond my technical knowledge as to why one might get cited more than the other.

One could argue that you want more reviews knowing no one's going to read them other than a bot—and that bot's going to pull up with AI LLMs. I think it's still such an early phenomenon that marketers as an industry are mostly going with the mindset that it's important in a different way than it used to be, but it's still important.

I think I agree with you. It fits the LLM. Absolutely. How about LinkedIn Dark Social? Tell us a bit about that one.

It's not too dissimilar to the peer community conversation of people commenting on content or somebody asking in public what tools you recommend for X, Y, and Z. That can be a little dark or a little lighter, depending on social listening technology. If you've got a tool that tracks every time you're mentioned, that depends on the social media platform and their TOS and what's above board there.

But outside of the comments, you're getting people who are DMing each other, sending the post to their friends or colleagues, copying and pasting the link to send to their coworkers, screenshotting things and sending those to people, bookmarking things. You know they bookmarked it, but you don't know why they bookmarked it. You know they sent it, but you don't know who they sent it to or why they sent it. That's where you really want to lean on organic content. That's why a lot of people do influencer marketing these days—because it incentivizes dark social, the dark funnel. We call dark social the part of dark funnel that happens on social media. It incentivizes that behavior to happen.

I'd love to hear your opinion on the next one: Gartner and Forrester reports. Why? Because a couple of weeks ago, we had a prospect who told us he doesn't want to work with companies that are now in the Gartner quadrant or whatever because those are bigger companies and they're too slow for the times we're living in. What's your take on this? Do you think this is a more generic feeling? Do you think it's just one or two people? Do you think this still matters a lot?

As somebody born in the mid-'90s—a cohort statistically proven to be incredibly cynical—I agree to some extent with the prospect you're talking about. If you've seen Devil Wears Prada 2, the whole plot revolves around the company Runway having to adjust for a non-print media world and a digital media world, how they live in the ether, and they have to change their entire business model to be about media, digital media, and events. Yes, Colten, I am 32. I was born in 1994, the cusp of millennial and Gen Z.

When I see somebody say, "Oh, we were featured in Gartner, oh, we were featured in Forrester," this might really offend some people, but my reaction is, "Tell me you're out of date without telling me you're out of date." I mean this with all due respect to the good people at Gartner and Forrester, but they haven't done a good job adapting for the modern media landscape and the way that people born in the '90s and 2000s consume information.

I'm 32, exiting the mid-level portion of my career and entering more director-level and C-suite positions. It would make sense for them to adjust how they do everything to meet my age group's preferred way of learning about things and keeping up to date, because we're going to be the people that decide if the tool gets bought. We're now entering the buying committees. We're entering the room that decides if we're going to use our budget on you. Also, with my generation and Gen Z being so high in the number of business owners and self-employed folks who buy their own tools and tell their friends who are also self-employed—half my friends are self-employed—it would make sense for them to want to invest more in dark funnel and channels that people my age and younger consume media through. Otherwise they're going to be playing catch-up in 5 to 10 years.

I agree with the cynical part. I was born in 1990, so I'm 35 here, and yes, I'm very cynical. I'm always looking at things and thinking, "Sure, you bought to be there," or something like that. I'm always trying to disqualify things based on different criteria. We are cynical and we are always trying to disqualify. Absolutely.

Continuing on the complexity of the dark funnel, not only do we have different tunnels and different dark funnels, but we also have different stakeholders within the dark funnel. I'd love to hear how you see this landscape.

This is the fun part. This is the one that my clients tend to not like talking about because it's never a succinct answer because there's a lot of moving parts. Not every single person that's important to a sale holds the keys to the budget. That's not new information to anybody. We can use buying a car as an example. Somebody at the house is probably the primary driver of whether you can afford this car. But there's somebody else who's going to be using this car probably just as much, if not more, than the person paying for it. Then they've got three kids who need to fit in the car, a dog, and they've got to consider their hobbies. There's a lot of factors that influence the car purchase decision, especially if it's a family. Businesses operate pretty similarly.

There's a lot of people—a lot of purchases affect other people for different reasons depending on their job. For a lawyer, it's reducing liability. Every time you buy a tool, there's a new liability that has to be considered. If it's a marketing tool, it's, "Does it make the marketing person's job easier?" Then depending on what the tool is, is it a tool that individual contributors are using? Or is it a tool that leadership is using? Is it a tool that both use, but they use it differently? A head of sales wants to know, "If this helps marketing, what's the downstream effect on sales?" The CFO wants to know, "Am I going to get an ROI on this? How do we know we're getting an ROI?" The list goes on, and it changes per tool.

You have to make a lot of different types of content that speak to every single type of person. Before anybody asks me for the 10,000th time, no, you can't make one piece of content that will attract every single person. And no, you should not make only content for decision makers. You should make content for the people who just use the tool. All they do is use it. Because those people are going to tell their boss, "Hey, this would make my job easier." They do have some influence still, even if they're an entry-level SDR and you're selling a tool like Outplay, Outreach, or Salesloft. If you can make content for SDRs who have zero budget to their name and they've been doing the job for three minutes, but you say, "Hey, this will make your job easier. Go tell your boss to tell me." That's the same thing people used to do when they would sell toys to kids. Go tell mom and dad. Maybe this one's a little more ethical because they're grown adults. You definitely want to make sure you make a variety of content to really influence all parts of the dark funnel. That's the biggest thing I see people miss, other than having a personality and making sure not all of your content needs to be about what you do for a living and what you sell.

The second thing people miss is that you can't make content for everyone. You have to make individual bits of content for everyone. One content won't work for everyone.

Absolutely. I love that you mentioned that users, even though they're not decision makers, can influence. And the more flat—

And maybe one day they'll become the decision maker when they get a promotion. So you're also setting yourself up for long-term success.

Precisely. There are some sales engagement tools that I'm a huge fan of because I used to be a BDR before and I used them, and I know how good they are. So whenever I need to buy a sales engagement tool, I always go for them first. I don't even consider others because I used them. It depends on the manager, obviously, but in the end of the day, it's not me who uses the tool—it's my team. For me, it goes in the other direction. It's my team who decides if the tool is good, if legal is okay, if the CFO gives me the green light for the budget. So if we fill all the criteria, if it will solve the problem we have that I've shortlisted, in the end of the day, it's my team who will decide which tool we prefer because they're the ones using it.

When I was a senior BDR at Reprise, and even when I was an SDR and BDR at a couple of other companies years ago, whenever we got new technology that was going to be in my hands, it was not uncommon for me to be in the demo room or testing it out with a free trial. My manager was testing it from the perspective of a manager, and I was testing it from the perspective of an individual contributor. I wouldn't do this with a new SDR because they're still learning the job itself, much less the tech. But if you have an SDR or BDR—this applies to all types of tech, not just sales dev tools—you want someone who is good at the job already who can see how this tool makes them more efficient or better. You don't want to take the person still green and learning the job and make them responsible for testing this. You want to find a more qualified guinea pig, for lack of a better description. But as a marketer, if I'm trying to get people to find their guinea pig, I have to make content that attracts that guinea pig.

Absolutely. And there is a reason why a lot of companies that sell developer tools have a developer advocate. They have a person who used to be a developer or still is, who goes on Reddit, makes jokes, goes to meetups. It's the evangelist of your product within your community.

You're saying you should hire marketers that have a sense of humor and a personality? Oh, the radical concept! I'm not hinting, Colten. Hint hint, Colten, pay me.

While we're still in the tools part, Colten has another question. You ask questions that are an entire book and two webinars, but we'll do our best.

I know why he's asking. There's a reason. Go to N.Rich's website. Colten's following me. My answer is probably not what most people expect. I usually work with 0 to 1 startups that can barely afford to hire me. So I go with what they can afford and what will work well enough. My preference is based on very different criteria than the average marketer's preference. When you're balancing necessity with tight budgets and limited bandwidth, I lean on people in my network that we either hire—consummate professionals and experts in what tools to use. In the CRM world, when it comes to 1 to 10, as Colten adds on to his question, it's still a loaded question because it depends on all the other tech. It depends on your sales motion, your sales cycle, the size of your sale, your demographic, a lot.

If I'm using Elefante RevOps, Colten's company, as an example, based on what I can glean from conversations and from the outside looking in: if you want to go with more legacy technology, I used to say I'm a HubSpot fanboy, but I still really like HubSpot. There are a few new tools on the block that I'm trialing and testing that are next-gen versions of CRMs that I'm not ready to give free press to 32,000 followers by mentioning by name. But Colten, we can definitely talk about that when I'm not being recorded live.

I'm a firm believer in systems where it gets brought to Slack. I used to work at Troops, if anybody's heard of them—they were acquired by Salesforce. The whole concept was to bring the CRM to all the tools everybody at the company used, whether you're in CS, sales, or marketing. It would bring it to Slack. An AE in theory could never need to go to Salesforce. All the updating and everything happened from Slack toggles. The manager never needed to go to Salesforce for reporting—it could happen all from Slack. I'm a believer that the CRM should be where all the data goes to live and be sorted by an ops person or by a chief of staff or by tools, but you should minimize the number of times a human being has to go into it to interact with it. It should be robust enough to allow for all sorts of reporting for every single type of user possible.

That's not always the case because Salesforce and HubSpot aren't good at everything. They're a jack of all trades and a master of none. So you want to marry it with a tool like Outplay, Salesloft, or a sales dev tool for your SDRs and outbound folks. If it's for your marketers, marry it with Sprout Social, your CRM social tool, or whatever—not Hootsuite, they've made some really questionable ethical decisions recently. Any CRM that plays nicely with as many other tools as possible, and any CRM that comes to Slack, will be helpful.

Going back to tools and the dark funnel, some tools—and I'm not just talking about N.Rich because today is not a product webinar. We have a product webinar on Tuesday if everyone would like to attend, but not today. Still, I think it's important that we talk about intent signals because that's part of how to deal with the dark funnel. We've talked about a couple of tricks to be mentioned in the LLMs, about influencer marketing, about having an evangelist in the channels, about being present in the dark channels. But intent data is also a way for you to deal with and get the most out of the dark channel. Evan, what's your take? How would you use intent data?

Intent data can be a good way to validate some of the experiments you're doing in the dark funnel because anything that happens in the dark funnel takes a long time to see it turn into revenue. It takes a long time, especially in B2B. That doesn't mean that data's not important because it takes a long time, but you don't necessarily want to wait until then to know what's working. As a marketer, you need some leading indicators that say, "I should keep working on this instead of waiting 3 to 6 months to know if it's working."

If something is going on and people are coming to the website, but the number doesn't go up while the makeup of that number improves qualitatively, that's a win still for the marketer. You might say, "Okay, well, 10 people visited our site and one was our ICP. I shifted our social media content to this other thing, and now we're still getting 10 people, but eight of them are our ICP." But your meetings haven't gone up. People haven't booked. So now I know I need to do something on the site. Intent data can tell you where there are leaks in the funnel, the tunnel, the pipes. It can tell you where to prioritize.

To a salesperson, there's a different way to look at it. A salesperson goes, "Oh, that's somebody I should DM. That's somebody I should call. That's somebody I should reach out to." To a marketer, it says, "This tells me where I need to shift gears and when I should talk to a RevOps person." When I'm not a very technical person, I know how to decide if a website's good and write a wire map, literally draw on a napkin where things should go. But I'm not a web designer. I'm not a web developer. But because intent data can tell me, "Okay, I need to go talk to a web designer, I need to get somebody who can fix this because our button's not in the right place," I've changed the copy, changed the pictures, done a rebrand, done these things, and it's moved the needle, but we're still having this problem. That's one of my favorite parts about intent data as a marketer—it tells me where I should be prioritizing this month's or this quarter's goals to improve the funnel. Obviously sales has a completely different perspective than I do, but an equally valid perspective.

I can chime in for sales because I'm more on the business development side, and I agree with you. It's the same signal, but depending on the department, you have different call to actions, as it should be. I love that you mentioned that. For sales, it's all about prioritization. We have an ICP defined, we have a buyer persona defined. Let's say I have a list of 200 accounts that are within my ICP. Without intent data, I will think I can start with any of them because all of them are correct—everyone is within the guardrails of the ICP. But with intent data, I will know which ones are actually interested in the topic, looking for the challenge. It gives me a prioritization.

Also, I will know which content on the website the account is engaging with. Instead of going after 200 accounts, I know the first 50 I should go after. As everyone knows, time kills deals. Timing is everything in sales. You have to know what your key accounts are looking for in a tool because, remember, they are in the dark funnel. They are in peer reviews, they are searching in LLMs. They are searching for a tool that solves their problem. That might be you, but you don't know. Because you don't know, they might book a call with a different tool. Then you reach out to them two months later, and it's like, "Oh, sorry, we just booked your competitor two months ago and we have a two-year contract. Talk to me in two years." That's what you want to avoid in sales with intent data.

Especially if you're seeing a bunch of people from the same company show up, then you know they're shopping. This is where the art of the psychology part of marketing comes in. I blame Salesforce and HubSpot for turning marketers into lead gen machines. Marketing is a lot more than just lead gen.

That's our mission.

By looking at the patterns in the qualitative data, you can glean what's happening at this company, and that can inform how the salesperson reaches out. But if that pattern keeps happening, then marketing knows how to shift their content to replicate that, especially if sales says, "Hey, these leads are hot ones." Then marketing can reverse engineer how that happened and make it happen more often. Intent data is how it gets used—that's more in the eyes of the beholder and less about the data itself.

Absolutely. I love that you mentioned that because there are a lot of companies who told me they've tried ABM and didn't work. I'm like, "Okay, but you had the data, right?" The platform, whether it's us or our competitors, shows you some data. The question is, what did you do with them? No provider can do anything. It's the same with CRMs. The CRMs allow you to have information about your clients, prospects, and open deals. But if you don't organize it properly and don't update the CRM, it's not the CRM's fault. It's the same thing here. More than the data is what you do with it, and no provider can help you much with that. That's on you.

That's really the mic drop moment.

I would love to hear more of your perspective. We have 15 minutes left, but I think it's super important that we tackle this because, as we mentioned, we've talked about a couple of ways to go into the dark funnel and reach your buyers. But I think the role of marketing is super important as well. We've talked about the role of sales and intent data, but what's the role of marketing in all of this?

Marketing, as the slide suggests, is kind of split into two camps that are equally important. But I've never met anybody who's fantastic at both. You're either better at one more than the other. In my case, I lean on the right side of the slide—the creative psychology and community side. AI has never made it easier for people to do marketing well. I didn't say do it well—just do it. It's never been easier for someone to churn out what technically meets the dictionary definition of marketing. A lot of you were really bad at marketing before AI, and now a lot of you are just really bad at marketing faster.

The tool doesn't make you good at it. It's still dependent on you not being bad at it. In marketing, especially if everything is being made by AI—and it doesn't matter how creative the prompt gets or how technically savvy you are or how good you are at prompt engineering—if you're not good at making people feel something, standing out in the noisiest market possible, which is so noisy because it's never been easier to distribute and generate content to distribute than ever before, you won't stand out. The best way to stand out, especially on a budget, is to not lean on AI sometimes and just go back to the basics of what's going to make a human being feel something.

That's why it's important that marketers invest time and energy into learning about psychology, going to therapy, and the list goes on. If you can't understand why our brains create oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine and when they do in response to what behaviors and actions—why people feel the feelings that they feel on a neurological, chemical level, not just on a logical or pragmatic level—then you're not going to be good at marketing and your company's going to fail. This is where the art really comes into marketing. This is the dark funnel of the dark funnel. I can't track a lot of this stuff. I just go, "Hey, I know it works because this Oxford scientist, this neuroscientist, told me that this type of behavior makes people feel this." So as a marketer, I think, "How can a company do that behavior when his advice was for a person?" But marketing, the brand is basically manufacturing a personality. So how do I take the same logic you use in social interaction and apply it to marketing so I can stand out in a sea of everything being the same or everything being soulless? AI has really sucked the soul out of businesses and corporations.

When you look at the ones doing well right now, it's the people doing things like this webinar where they're just talking like average everyday people. All the prep we did was Mafalda built the script and slide deck, and we had a chat going through it, saying, "Yeah, this makes sense. That's it." There's no script here. There's zero questions sent to me in prep. I saw the slide deck in passing very briefly in under 10 minutes. I barely read any of it. I'm sure you were vetting me not just for expertise but for storytelling abilities and personality. Those are things that AI can't do at all. But those are the things that make AI work for you in its favor. It's this one-two punch: I'm not saying don't use it in your marketing, but if you do only that, it won't work. It'll just feel like it's working, but it won't actually be working.

It gives you that peace of mind, but it's a fake one. It's the same with email prospecting. Now you're sending more emails than before, so it's like, "Oh, my activity levels are higher than ever. I feel something will come out of it." I'm like, will it though? I'd rather send one email and make one cold call and book a meeting. The conversion rate is much, much higher.

You're doing a good job when your activity numbers go down, not up.

Precisely. We're almost finishing, so I'd like to wrap this up. Evan, would you agree with this summary? The dark funnel exists. LLMs are another tunnel in the landscape that already existed. So invest in proper brand content and social community with the help of AI, but not solely—you need the human part to make it stand out. Stop scaling everything. You can scale some things and you should, but not everything. Use intent data to give you a clue who is on the market so you can prioritize, change strategy, work on your content, and refine. Activate the whole buying committee because, especially nowadays, I think there's a statistic that you have like 30 stakeholders in certain companies. Bigger companies have like 30 stakeholders buying.

For these larger companies, yes. I can tell you why they said 30, by the way.

Tell me.

As a little pro tip to people who aren't marketers: they say 30 because that's a more impressive number. You need to look at the companies they've surveyed to figure out why it's 30. If you really did your research the proper way, the answer would be a percentage of the company is the buying committee for every decision, not a firm number. You would also say that it's a percentage within this range of number of employees. If it's a company of one or two people, it's 100%. But if it's a company of 1,000, it can't be 100%. That's why every time somebody says something like that, I roll my eyes when Gartner or Forrester says something, because I'm like, "Yeah, but who did you survey?" I think we live in a world where you should be precise. A good marketer says things precisely. They don't go with the most shocking number that gets the most eyes. They don't go for that clickbait stat that's going to get them the most attention. I'm never trying to get my clients the most attention. I'm trying to get my clients the correct attention.

Context is everything. That's it. Numbers out of context are misleading. So it's really important to understand it's 30 stakeholders in a big enterprise, but you know, there are companies that don't even have 30 people, so that's impossible to have a buying committee like that.

My favorite thing is when people will say on their website that 30 people will be in the buying committee, but they won't say 30 people at enterprise companies are in the buying committee. So then somebody who's in an SMB and an enterprise will go, "Oh, then I guess that makes sense for me." And now you've just misinformed somebody. That should make you feel bad about yourself.

So please, when you're talking, make sure your marketers are being specific. Clarity is kindness.

If you're kind, if you're kind, your dark funnel does better because people trust people who are kind.

I agree. I agree. Even in sales, being a good person pays off in the long term in terms of sales because trust is everything, especially nowadays.

Yeah.

We have 5 minutes. If you still have questions, feel free to ask. Otherwise, I have just one quick question for you, Evan. You've mentioned that you cannot scale everything and you shouldn't scale everything with AI. I agree with you. The thing is, there are a lot of leadership people who don't understand marketing and will put pressure on marketers to scale a lot of things with AI. What's your advice here?

To the marketers or to the leaders?

Both.

To the leaders: Have you heard of a little company called Sears or JCPenney or Kohl's or any store that no longer exists because they tried to scale too much? I'll leave it at that. To the marketer, just remember that if your boss is doing that and you disagree, you're probably smarter than them, so take pity on them.

I told you that would be a sassy webinar. We'll end on that note.

I'm done being nice to people about things that are wrong. You get paid six times more than me and I still know more than you.

I agree. I agree. But you know, it's a question I get a lot when I do talks about how to use AI in prospecting. I said the same thing: scale some things, don't scale the others. That's what you should scale. I always get that question. It's like, "Yeah, but my boss wants me to scale everything." And my advice is, "I'm sorry, but you are a director of a department or a manager. You have to learn how to say no."

You're going to have to learn to say no. And that person will ultimately learn. Right now we're waiting for everybody to mess around and find out. Some companies are finding out. You've seen all the layoffs, now they're rehiring everybody. Don't be the next person who follows that process. Maybe just do something radical like pay attention and learn from other people's mistakes. Have some forethought. Maybe listen to the experts you hired who know more than you about the topic because that's why you hired them.

Exactly. That's a great way to finish the webinar on a very high note. I think that's a perfect wrap-up. I said at the beginning, high for me, low for them.

High for me, low for them. I don't really care.

Thank you so much, Evan, for taking your precious time to speak with me and our audience.

It was a pleasure. You're a pleasure. This has been fun. You're great. I would love to come back and do more. Especially if there's anything I can talk to you about when it comes to social selling and sales dev with intent.

I know, I know, I know. We can do a lot of really cool content because this is a lot of fun. As I mentioned to you on the prep call that you just mentioned 10 minutes ago, our prep call was basically this—what you're all listening to now. So it was a very easy one-to-one.

If you want more of this, folks, either N.Rich or anybody else watching this, hire me.

Exactly. Thank you so much. I will see you around. Make sure everyone follows Evan for marketing and me for business development. I wish you all a great rest of your week. For those in the US, have a nice Fourth of July. And I also—

Happy Canada Day! That was yesterday for our Canadian friends as well. I'm from Detroit, so I love my Canadian friends. I'm on the border.

Have a great summer, and N.Rich will have another webinar on Tuesday—this time a product webinar. See you later, guys. Thank you so much. Bye!