The dark funnel

Around eighty per cent of a B2B buying decision is made before a seller is engaged. Ninety-five per cent of winning suppliers were on the buyer’s first list. And the journey from first question to shortlist, once eleven months, is now closer to twelve weeks. Joshi, Buche and Schwaer put the three together in Harvard Business Review and named what they describe: the dark funnel, in which a growing share of the research, comparison and elimination happens inside an AI conversation the supplier never sees.

You cannot sell into a conversation you are not in. What you can do is make sure that when the buyer, or the buyer’s agent, asks the question, the answer it finds is specific enough to be worth repeating. That is the case for a high-impact value proposition written in the customer’s language rather than yours, and it is the reason the book spends so long on the words.