Think about the last significant purchase you made, personal or professional. Did you call a salesperson first? Almost certainly not. You searched, read, compared, asked peers, scrolled social media, ran questions through an AI tool, and maybe revisited competitive websites three times without ever registering your interest. By the time you finally reached out, your mind was largely made up.

That entire process including the research, the comparison and quiet deliberation, all took place in what we call ‘dark funnel’. And for most organisations, it’s invisible.

For years, we’ve built our go-to-market strategies around a comforting known: the linear funnel. Unaware. Aware. Engaged. Considered. Converted. We designed our marketing programmes to move people through this sequence step by step. We built technology stacks to track them, we commissioned salespeople to nurture them, and it worked, right up until it didn’t.

Understanding where buyers really are

It’s been widely recognised that buyers were approximately 60% of the way through their decision-making process before they wanted to engage with a salesperson directly. That figure has now risen above 80%.

In fact, 81% of buyers research extensively before any sales contact occurs, and 84% define their needs in advance, increasingly shaped by LLMs (Large Language Models), peer forums, and self-serve content that leaves no footprint in your CRM (Customer Relationship Mangagment). Meanwhile, the average buying journey now spans more than ten channels, with 70% of those interactions occurring before you even know the buyer is active.

If you have a sales organisation that receives leads from marketing, they may assume they’re receiving pre-opportunities. In reality, they may be receiving buyers who are already 80% of the way through their decision cycle and are actually ready to negotiate, which changes the entire nature of the first conversation. The traditional ‘nurture, qualify, nurture’ approach doesn’t apply when someone’s ready to buy. The first thing any salesperson needs to do is establish where in the decision cycle that individual actually sits, and then move fast.

I often use a sporting analogy here. In elite team sports, we now celebrate the assist as much as the goal. The person who set up the score is as vital as the one who converted it. However, in most sales organisations, commission structures still only reward the conversion, the goal scorer. When you have no control over which entry point a buyer chooses, or at what stage they arrive, you have to start recognising those that assist too. This is a structural and cultural challenge, not just a process tweak.

This has implications for how you route inbound interest. If a buyer comes in through one product division but is ready to purchase across another, a rigid commission structure can cause you to miss the sale entirely. The buyer is ready, so your organisation needs to be designed to respond.

Creating the conditions for buyers to come forward

Nobody wants to fill in a form to download a white paper anymore. And now they don’t have to, they can ask their AI assistant instead. The moment you gate your content, you risk being invisible to the very tools your buyers now rely on for self-serve research.

The shift we’re working through with clients is towards what we call the ‘hand-raiser’ model. Rather than relying on covert interest scoring, you create frictionless mechanisms at every touchpoint that allow a buyer to simply signal, “I’m ready.”

A leap of faith is required here. You put your best thinking into the world, and trust that when a buyer is ready, they’ll find their way to you. That’s uncomfortable for organisations used to gating their content as a lead-capture mechanism. However, it’s the new reality. AI can’t access and include your content if it is through a gate.

The average attention span of an adult in 2025 is less than eight seconds, down from twelve seconds in 2000. On a mobile device, users spend roughly 1.7 seconds deciding whether to engage with a piece of content at all, an extraordinarily narrow window to earn engagement.

The emergence of silent research, and the dark funnel, is challenging enough, AI makes it more complex and more urgent. There’s no cookie, no form submission. Buyers are consuming your brand using a range of mechanisms. We used to talk about ‘watering holes’, which is ensuring your content is available at those places your buyers go looking. Now you have to make it accessible to be taken directly to them. Answering the questions they pose to AI tools requires an understanding of the questions they are asking and content that is open, readable, ‘un-gated’ and genuinely useful.

Building the capability to listen at scale

The biggest operational challenge is how to get better at mapping the anonymous to the known. We have always had anonymous audiences. But the proportion of activity that remains anonymous is growing. Researching using AI tools or peer communities means they can remain completely anonymous until they choose to raise their hand.

Your technology infrastructure, therefore, needs to have what I describe as “ears everywhere”. It is the ability to capture signals wherever, whenever and from whoever holds that data (structured or unstructured) for however long, and eventually connect the dots when identity becomes known. Traditional lead-scoring models that archive or discard a contact after 30 days of inactivity are no longer fit for purpose. Buyers disappear into the dark funnel and re-emerge weeks or months later, ready to act. If you’ve removed them from your database, you’ve lost the thread.

At WoolfHodson, we’re increasingly focused on what we call signal orchestration, the capability to capture, categorise and act on buyer signals across the entire lifecycle, including the portions that are anonymous or AI-mediated. The question isn’t just “where did this lead come from?” It’s “what signals have we captured over time, and what do they collectively tell us?”

If you’re a CEO or business leader, you need to be asking serious questions of both your marketing and sales leadership right now. If your marketing leaders are not raising this agenda with you, that is itself a signal worth investigating.

The dark funnel has structural implications. It should be prompting conversations about how your sales organisation is structured, how people are incentivised, how content is produced and distributed, and how technology is deployed. The risk of inaction isn’t just operational inefficiency it’s competitive loss. Your competitors could already be working on this.

We don’t have all the answers. Nobody does. The dark funnel is still relatively new territory, and the tools and practices to navigate it are evolving rapidly, often faster than organisations can adapt. What we can do is acknowledge it, get curious about it, and start building the capabilities to operate within it. 

The dark funnel is not going away. If anything, it’s getting darker for longer. The question for every C-suite leader is simply this: are you building for the journey your buyers are actually taking, or the one you wish they used to take?

About the author: Caroline Hodson is the Founder and CEO of WoolfHodson, a marketing technology consultancy specialising in go-to-market strategy, signal orchestration and buyer engagement. With a strong strategic and operational background in the selection, deployment and optimisation of marketing technologies, she works with marketing leaders to harness the power of technology, bringing together deep marketing expertise and technological capability to design solutions that drive growth and deliver lasting change.