From the buyer's side, this is even more true below the enterprise. A lot of companies under a few hundred people have no CIO at all. Technology decisions get made by the CFO, the ops lead, the owner, and often the outside IT provider who quietly shapes every recommendation. That last one is the shadow buyer nobody targets, and often the one whose "we already have something that does this" ends the deal.
Great points Kevin. On a typical engagement at FunnelFuel, we are provided with a TAL and a list of personas like CIO. The TAL could be 500,000 companies spread globally, from micro businesses to enterprise. One list and one set of job titles is far too basic. Every account/business sets up differently, with different roles, roles which may carry the same title but different responsibilities when compared with peer businesses. Or jobs that do not exist but you would expect them to because they have 1k people (e.g. CIO). Then there is no consideration for the advisory committee or external help. In reality, are signals going to resolve all of this? of course not, but they can help. A combination of signals and casting a wider net into each account would be more valuable - because the unit costs of some extra account level impressions is so low versus the potential value of reaching a key stakeholder, it has to be worth it. Especially when those imps have a contextual resonance
ABM unfortunately created the delusion that you can ‘signal’ the hell of the buyer. You can’t.
At an enterprise level, when an account engages, they usually had a first day consideration set from the category.
Just because you are bombarding, it doesn’t create demand. Demand is created by the category and the market.
Also another issue here- Average SaaS enterprise buying committee is now at 22; economic buyer, champion, direct/indirect/end user, legal, data privacy, Info Sec, procurement. Unlike the assumption; the entire buying committee gets into the journey at the same time. ( and no buyer journey doesn’t start when they engage with you, it starts at the dark funnel only brand saliency can influence)
Hidden figures have FOMU- fear of messing up. 70% of all deals die there.
ICP is triggered and circumstance based. VP of Marketing at a Series B is a shopping list- one just raised and building a growth function/other 12 months off raise and the product stalled.
Same title, same industry but the triggers and pain points are not the same.
So no, there is no funnel, these processes are open ended, highly non linear, probabilistic and time lagged.
What a superb comment full of salient points. My gut reaction leads me to “taking all of this into account; shouldn’t our priority as B2B marketers now be to drive the brand saliency that you referenced”. A huge brand push is arguably the way to position a vendor in the day one consideration set, to direct the dark funnel behaviour (perhaps inspiring the vendors name to enter the prompts); strong brand becomes the only way to have a hope of impacting a ghost committee that’s so big. A strong brand is the only way to start to alleviate the fear of messing up. Much easier said than done but the building the IBM of a category and the old adage that you don’t get fired for buying blue?
You know why that has been the case; the heavy load on demand capture push.
I am a tech marketer, been in market over two decades. But I think marketing boxed itself into only one of the 7Ps for B2B, and that is promotion.
CMO tenures are 12-24 months top. The biggest issue is financial literacy along with lack of causal measurement understanding.
Marketing is a multiplier. It amplifies all other functions.
The 1% of top CMOs are framing marketin as safe guarding tangible and intangible assets. This makes marketing CapEx which meana when you run brand, you can look at time lagged, non linear, open system that is and make causal inferences on what moves and what doesn’t with counterfactuals.
I find myself talking to CFOs more than CMOs for exactly that reason.
You can’t protect your brand budgets if the entire function works as an on/off switch when the margins get slim.
Your CapEx framing is the sharpest reframe in this whole thread. Treating BRAND as an asset you safeguard rather than a lever you switch on and off changes the measurement conversation, because the question stops being "what did this campaign convert" and becomes "what would we lose if this asset degraded". We are probably guilty of doing this ourselves at FF - slightly tight quarter, dial it back etc
That's a different kind of model to build, and it's probably why so few CMOs get there esp with short tenure. Causal inference on a non-linear, time lagged system needs proper econometric thinking, not the dashboard attribution most martech is built to produce. It also needs a CFO willing to underwrite a novel hypothesis over several quarters rather than demand a monthly ROAS number, which is exactly why you're finding more traction in those conversations than with CMOs.
The tenure point hammers it. You can't build a multi year asset case in an 18 month window in a business chasing 22 stakeholdders in each account which in turn, is in motion for longer then the CMO is in tenure - so the incentive always defaults to whatever metric proves **something** this quarter. Maybe evaluating CMOs on a longer horizon would go some way to fixing this
More and more, the person the CFO quietly asks is ChatGPT. That's one member of the shadow group who never leaves a device signal. Forrester's 2025 buyer survey had AI beating every other source two to one. That includes vendor sites and sales. So some accounts will look cold in your data while they're already picking a vendor.
It’s very true Kedar. You’re absolutely right and the chatbot channel is the defining light behind the dark funnel. Besides attempts to influence via SEO/GEO/AIO a strong brand building push is about the best defence and offence imo. The demand chasers have skewed and corkscrewed down the wrong avenue
Agree on brand. It's what gets you named in the prompt in the first place. The gap is the follow-up questions. Once you're on the list, the buyer asks if you do SSO or what enterprise costs. If ChatGPT gets that wrong, brand got you shortlisted and the answer took you off.
Salient points - and not easy ones to navigate as its a big enough job to get referenced by these engines let alone to steer them in their responses in a personalised thread
From the buyer's side, this is even more true below the enterprise. A lot of companies under a few hundred people have no CIO at all. Technology decisions get made by the CFO, the ops lead, the owner, and often the outside IT provider who quietly shapes every recommendation. That last one is the shadow buyer nobody targets, and often the one whose "we already have something that does this" ends the deal.
Great points Kevin. On a typical engagement at FunnelFuel, we are provided with a TAL and a list of personas like CIO. The TAL could be 500,000 companies spread globally, from micro businesses to enterprise. One list and one set of job titles is far too basic. Every account/business sets up differently, with different roles, roles which may carry the same title but different responsibilities when compared with peer businesses. Or jobs that do not exist but you would expect them to because they have 1k people (e.g. CIO). Then there is no consideration for the advisory committee or external help. In reality, are signals going to resolve all of this? of course not, but they can help. A combination of signals and casting a wider net into each account would be more valuable - because the unit costs of some extra account level impressions is so low versus the potential value of reaching a key stakeholder, it has to be worth it. Especially when those imps have a contextual resonance
ABM unfortunately created the delusion that you can ‘signal’ the hell of the buyer. You can’t.
At an enterprise level, when an account engages, they usually had a first day consideration set from the category.
Just because you are bombarding, it doesn’t create demand. Demand is created by the category and the market.
Also another issue here- Average SaaS enterprise buying committee is now at 22; economic buyer, champion, direct/indirect/end user, legal, data privacy, Info Sec, procurement. Unlike the assumption; the entire buying committee gets into the journey at the same time. ( and no buyer journey doesn’t start when they engage with you, it starts at the dark funnel only brand saliency can influence)
Hidden figures have FOMU- fear of messing up. 70% of all deals die there.
ICP is triggered and circumstance based. VP of Marketing at a Series B is a shopping list- one just raised and building a growth function/other 12 months off raise and the product stalled.
Same title, same industry but the triggers and pain points are not the same.
So no, there is no funnel, these processes are open ended, highly non linear, probabilistic and time lagged.
We should start treating them that way.
Lovely piece🙏
What a superb comment full of salient points. My gut reaction leads me to “taking all of this into account; shouldn’t our priority as B2B marketers now be to drive the brand saliency that you referenced”. A huge brand push is arguably the way to position a vendor in the day one consideration set, to direct the dark funnel behaviour (perhaps inspiring the vendors name to enter the prompts); strong brand becomes the only way to have a hope of impacting a ghost committee that’s so big. A strong brand is the only way to start to alleviate the fear of messing up. Much easier said than done but the building the IBM of a category and the old adage that you don’t get fired for buying blue?
I say the brand push as a counterpoint to much of the B2B market which remains preoccupied by demand and low quality content syndication pushes
You know why that has been the case; the heavy load on demand capture push.
I am a tech marketer, been in market over two decades. But I think marketing boxed itself into only one of the 7Ps for B2B, and that is promotion.
CMO tenures are 12-24 months top. The biggest issue is financial literacy along with lack of causal measurement understanding.
Marketing is a multiplier. It amplifies all other functions.
The 1% of top CMOs are framing marketin as safe guarding tangible and intangible assets. This makes marketing CapEx which meana when you run brand, you can look at time lagged, non linear, open system that is and make causal inferences on what moves and what doesn’t with counterfactuals.
I find myself talking to CFOs more than CMOs for exactly that reason.
You can’t protect your brand budgets if the entire function works as an on/off switch when the margins get slim.
Your CapEx framing is the sharpest reframe in this whole thread. Treating BRAND as an asset you safeguard rather than a lever you switch on and off changes the measurement conversation, because the question stops being "what did this campaign convert" and becomes "what would we lose if this asset degraded". We are probably guilty of doing this ourselves at FF - slightly tight quarter, dial it back etc
That's a different kind of model to build, and it's probably why so few CMOs get there esp with short tenure. Causal inference on a non-linear, time lagged system needs proper econometric thinking, not the dashboard attribution most martech is built to produce. It also needs a CFO willing to underwrite a novel hypothesis over several quarters rather than demand a monthly ROAS number, which is exactly why you're finding more traction in those conversations than with CMOs.
The tenure point hammers it. You can't build a multi year asset case in an 18 month window in a business chasing 22 stakeholdders in each account which in turn, is in motion for longer then the CMO is in tenure - so the incentive always defaults to whatever metric proves **something** this quarter. Maybe evaluating CMOs on a longer horizon would go some way to fixing this
More and more, the person the CFO quietly asks is ChatGPT. That's one member of the shadow group who never leaves a device signal. Forrester's 2025 buyer survey had AI beating every other source two to one. That includes vendor sites and sales. So some accounts will look cold in your data while they're already picking a vendor.
It’s very true Kedar. You’re absolutely right and the chatbot channel is the defining light behind the dark funnel. Besides attempts to influence via SEO/GEO/AIO a strong brand building push is about the best defence and offence imo. The demand chasers have skewed and corkscrewed down the wrong avenue
Agree on brand. It's what gets you named in the prompt in the first place. The gap is the follow-up questions. Once you're on the list, the buyer asks if you do SSO or what enterprise costs. If ChatGPT gets that wrong, brand got you shortlisted and the answer took you off.
Salient points - and not easy ones to navigate as its a big enough job to get referenced by these engines let alone to steer them in their responses in a personalised thread
Agreed, steering is mostly out of reach. Checking isn't. You can see what the answer says on the basic facts and get the wrong ones to sales first.