My journey into the Dark Funnel begins

Yo! Welcome to the next episode of The Content Strategy Reeder where over 9,600 marketers, sellers, and creators get better at content strategy and creation in less than 5 minutes.

It was a BIG week for The Reeder. I’m stoked that this week I launched my digital playbook, Content That Converts. It was a beast of a project to put together — by far the biggest and most valuable of my career — and I’m proud of the response it’s gotten so far. Thank you to everyone who picked up a copy and supported my launch post. I appreciate y’all, for real.

OK, on to today’s episode.

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Pro tip: Go on a walk before (or during) your next brainstorm, jam session, or and “big thinking” meeting.

If you nearly break a sweat, even better.

Walking increases blood flow to your brain, enhances your mood, and improves focus — all quality ingredients for cooking up creative ideas and making decisions.

That’s what I did last week when I met up with my beloved boss and Frenchman, Julien Sauvage, at Clari’s HQ. We took good 25 min walk before white boarding my team’s H2 plan following the Groove acquisition.

One of my top priorities is increasing my team’s impact and communicating it to the organization and exec leadership.

We quickly got into the nitty gritty of how we are going to do that, then got into the weeds of analytics, operations, and what’s simply not doable (which unfortunately covers a lot of what we want to do).

Then at one point Julien very honestly asked, I know it’s hard to measure top of funnel… but like, why exactly?

To which I stated…

Attribution software really only “credits” activity that collects an email address.

Things like gated content, events, demo requests.

This forces one of two scenarios upon marketing teams:

Option A: Commit to the attribution model as “law” which inevitably leads to ineffective and “unnatural” decisions that mostly limit you to capturing demand.

Option B: Accept that your top of funnel marketing activities will never be completely measured accurately nor fully‚ and invest in it anyway, which allows you to effectively create demand.

I subscribe to B. Thankfully, so does Julien, our CMO, and our CEO. (This was critical in my decision to join Clari, btw.)

I even illustrated my answer to Julien, answered him, aptly titled Julien’s Sweaty Walk, (which was actually the lightbulb moment that our conversation would make it to this newsletter…)

For my team at Clari it means I can’t tie output to pipeline impact for:

• Thought leadership (runrevenue.pro)

• Clari’s LinkedIn content

• CEO’s LinkedIn content

• Corporate comms

• Brand campaigns

• Podcast

• Blog

And that list is roughly half of my team’s output!

That gap is why I half-joked with Julien that I’ve built my career on “leap of faith marketing” — which is doing all the marketing activities that I know create demand, BUT I cannot point to any dashboard and “prove” that it led to qualified pipeline.

In other words, it means subscribing to “brand fuels demand.”

Or as I say: you need to win mindshare before you can win market share.

*Worth noting: Despite your attribution model, or lack thereof, you can always measure the success of your demand creation on (1) web traffic (total and direct) and (2) inbound hand raisers.

This break down in B2B marketing is often called the “Dark Funnel”

Chris Walker coined the term and has evangelized its negative impact for years. He made his name and company on it.

Julien and I have heard about it, but we’ve never actually done it. Hell, we don’t even know any marketers that have. Which makes it even more entiticing

So we’re taking it on. We’re entering the Dark Funnel.

Wish us luck. It sounds… ominous.

Our goal is two-fold:

• Reshape how Clari views and measures top of funnel marketing, allowing us to make smarter investments and grow pipeline more efficiently.

• Increase our expertise as marketing leaders because we’ll be in a small group who can both create demand and measure our impact (thus raising our value).

If curious, our next steps are:

-Scope our wish list of requirements
-See what’s doable with what we have today
-Start talking to vendors (so far HockeyStack and refine Lab’s Watch Tower app" are on our radar)

I’m pretty excited tbh - I’ve always been drawn to “new things that most marketers aren’t doing that’s super hard to pull off.” I’ll keep you posted on our journey.

And if you’ve done this before, give me a shout and share your experience. Would love to hear what you learned.

Holler at you next Saturday,
Devin

🌊 Reeders makin’ waves 🌊

Introducing a new section dedicated to Reeders (that’s you!) putting up numbers and winningggg.

Fara hit me up this week with a sweet update about her LinkedIn game:

She ain’t lyin’! Just a casual +351% in impressions 👀

I asked for details on her newly discovered niche:

[I] started talking about freelancing from a decision-maker’s point of view. I started mentoring a few young women who were branching out into freelance and a lightbulb went off.

Solid work, Fara. Keep goin’ 🏁

(PS: Got a recent win? Send it over to get featured next week.)

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