The traditional marketing funnel is both real and not real at the same time. In this Global Conversation, Mark Evans hosted a great conversation with Ben Munroe (Vice President of Marketing APAC, CloudFlare) and Sandeep Pal (Founder, Flexx CMO) for a lively discussion with strong Member engagement on how CMOs are grappling with balancing brand building and performance delivery whilst most buyer activity happens in the dark funnel, invisible to traditional tracking. The conversation explored how leading marketers are rethinking funnel strategy, organisational alignment, and measurement to drive revenue in an increasingly complex landscape.
5 Key Points from the session:
The Funnel Exists But Buying Is Non-Linear
Buying committees are expanding, with 81% of winning deals involving buyers who already know the brand before any sales contact. The challenge is no longer tracking a single lead through stages, but engaging entire organisations with hidden influencers who research independently. Familiarity is not a bonus, it's the entry fee.Brand Creates Gravity, Not Just Awareness
Brand building pulls potential buyers towards you, creating gravitational force that drives engagement and revenue. Smart CMOs stop treating brand and demand as separate buckets. Running brand campaigns alongside demand generation lifts baseline website traffic over time, increases prospecting pools, and improves conversion rates throughout the funnel.Revenue Is the True North Metric
Stop obsessing over attribution models and MQL-to-SQL conversion rates. Use revenue as the agreed success metric across the organisation. When revenue becomes the target, everything else becomes a signpost on the journey. This creates healthier conversations with sales and finance teams.The Dark Funnel Holds 60-70% of the Buyer Journey
Most buying happens with little or no contact with sales teams. Third-party intent data often disappoints. First-party data wins: website visitors, anonymised browsing behaviour, and even BDR call recordings analysed by AI reveal true buyer intent. Focus technology investments on exposing these hidden signals.AI and Zero-Click Search Are Breaking the Economic Model
LLMs are creating exponential crawling of websites with minimal page delivery. The old exchange was two crawls for one page visit. Now it's tens of thousands of crawls for single visits. Marketers need to create thought leadership content that helps them be in the answer, not just the answer. Social channels and employee advocacy matter more than ever.The marketing funnel faces an identity crisis. As one participant noted, there is no funnel, or at least not the linear model we've relied on for decades. Yet sales pipelines still need filling, and revenue targets still demand hitting.
Ben Monroe from CloudFlare frames it perfectly: the funnel is a great signpost for organisational health, but if you focus on fixing it or obsessing over attribution, you miss the real business problems. The funnel tells you about velocity, about how quickly opportunities move towards revenue. It helps you engage the go-to-market organisation. But it doesn't capture the messy reality of how humans actually buy.
That reality is increasingly complex.
Buying committees have grown larger, often including finance, IT, and business buyers together in groups like FinOps. Sandeep Pal points out that 95% of your audience is not ready to buy at any given moment. Only 5% are in-market. But that 95% matters enormously because they are researching, forming opinions, and building the shortlists that determine who gets invited to compete.
This is where the dark funnel becomes critical. Between 60-70% of the buyer journey happens without sales contact. Buyers are researching on industry forums, in peer networks, through review sites, and increasingly through AI-powered search. They arrive at your website already 70% through their decision process. By the time they raise their hand, the game is often won or lost.
Traditional paid search and organic traffic are declining as LLMs create zero-click experiences. Searchers get answers without visiting sites. This breaks the economic model of the web, where two crawls delivered one page visit. Now bots crawl tens of thousands of times for minimal visits. Smart marketers are responding by pushing brand terms through social channels and employee advocacy, knowing that branded searches still convert.
The brand versus performance debate misses the point.
Brand creates gravity. It pulls buyers towards you. Performance drives engagement and conversion. But they work as a continuum, not as opposing forces. Organisations at different lifecycle stages need different balances. Hot technologies pulling inbound leads don't need paid search. Mature companies need always-on brand campaigns that lift the baseline of unique visitors over time.
Measurement needs simplifying. Marketing teams spend enormous energy on conversion rate optimisation and multi-touch attribution models that don't change business outcomes. The smarter approach: align everyone on revenue. Make revenue the shared goal across sales, marketing, and finance. Track marketing qualified accounts, not just marketing qualified leads. Understand that you're selling to committees, not individuals.
Personalisation has limits.
Marketing to an audience of one is inefficient and often impossible. But personalising the journey by industry or business type makes sense. Reverse engineer successful deals to find the optimal sequence of touchpoints. Use AI to analyse thousands of hours of BDR call recordings to spot patterns and intent signals human teams would miss.
Technology should integrate, not proliferate. The nightmare scenario is multiple disconnected systems with no unified view. Finance must be in the room when discussing measurement frameworks. The CMO must function as a hub, connecting conversations across the executive team. The best CMOs quarterback the go-to-market motion.
AI is accelerating faster than anyone can predict.
We're at the You've Got Mail stage of AI, where the internet was just emerging. The real impacts will be unpredictable. Smart teams experiment relentlessly with tools like notebook LLMs to speed up content creation and improve velocity. They test, learn, and iterate rather than waiting for perfect clarity.
Sandeep sums it up with a perfect metaphor: marketing needs to be like a bad party guest, arrive early and leave late. Stay through the entire customer journey. Don't just hand off leads and disappear. Own the revenue outcome.
The funnel is not dead. But it is a signpost, not a straitjacket. The organisations winning today measure what matters, embrace the complexity of modern buying, and use technology to gain visibility into the dark funnel where most decisions actually happen.
3 Takeaways
Stop Siloing Brand and Demand
Run brand campaigns alongside demand generation to lift baseline traffic and improve conversion rates. Brand creates gravity that makes all performance marketing more efficient. Measure brand impact on demand outcomes to justify investment to finance.Track Accounts, Not Just Leads
Shift to marketing qualified accounts (MQA) that measure engagement across buying committees. Define what constitutes meaningful account activity, such as 10-15 contacts engaging with your content. This drives better alignment with sales teams focused on account-based selling.Invest in First-Party Dark Funnel Visibility
Implement tools to track anonymised website visitors, brand searches, and intent signals from sources you own. Use AI to analyse BDR call recordings and customer conversations for hidden buying signals. First-party data beats third-party intent every time.
Marketing needs to be like a bad party guest, arrive early, leave late. Stay through the entire customer journey. Don't just hand off leads and disappear. Own the revenue outcome.
Sandeep Pal Founder, FlexxCMO
2 Action Items
to take from this...
1. Align Marketing KPIs With Finance and Sales Around Revenue
Stop presenting internal conversion metrics at business reviews. Instead, agree shared revenue goals across marketing, sales, and finance. Include finance in measurement discussions to build credibility and ensure everyone understands the complexities and trade-offs.2. Experiment With AI to Improve Funnel Velocity
Use tools like notebook LLMs to speed up content creation for BDRs and sales teams. Analyse large datasets of customer interactions to spot patterns and optimise touch points. Focus AI experiments on improving velocity, the speed at which opportunities move through the funnel towards revenue.This session was part of The Marketing Society's ongoing The Global Conversations
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