Kerry Cunningham on this episode
Kerry Cunningham, research and thought leadership expert at 6sense, joins host Eddie Reynolds to explore dark funnel attribution in B2B SaaS. Cunningham brings credibility from his background at Forrester (where he developed the Demand Unit Waterfall framework) and his current role leading research initiatives at 6sense, including the 2023 6sense B2B Buyer Experience Report.
The core insight: buyers are 70% through their purchase journey before contacting a vendor, and most of the signal marketers need to understand buyer behavior happens invisibly in the "dark funnel"—research on third-party sites, internal team discussions, and anonymous website traffic that traditional marketing attribution misses. Cunningham reframes attribution entirely: instead of lead-based metrics that track individual form fills, B2B organizations must shift to account-level behavioral analysis that maps when groups of buying team members engage across all channels, even when their names remain unknown.
The episode dives deep into why traditional attribution (especially last-touch) actively misleads marketers, how intent data should be understood as aggregate interest signals rather than individual buying signals, and why AI makes account-based pattern-matching possible. Cunningham reveals that in a typical 11-month buying cycle with 10 decision-makers, buying teams generate 4,000 interactions—only 150-160 on the vendor's website, and just 40-50 from people who filled out forms. The rest are dark. The conversation covers how to use intent data responsibly (feeding it to marketing teams for targeting, not SDRs for cold calling), how the best BDRs add value through content and executive conversations rather than meeting requests, and how organizations can correlate activities across dozens of channels to outcomes using AI-driven analysis.
What we cover in this episode
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4:38
Defining the Dark Funnel All research buying teams conduct that isn't visible through form fills or vendor tracking, including third-party sites and anonymous website traffic.
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7:00
The Anonymous Traffic Problem 70% of visitors from accounts that will eventually buy never fill out a form. Most signal comes from anonymous behavior marketing can't see.
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12:30
Why Lead-Based Attribution Fails Tracking individual form fills misses 4,000 interactions per buying cycle. Account-level analysis of behavioral patterns is needed instead.
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19:49
How Buying Teams Decide Together Typical buying groups avoid seller contact until 70% through the journey. Teams build consensus first by researching independently on external sites and peer networks.
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24:18
AI and Pattern Recognition AI enables correlation between marketing activities (ads, content, sponsorships) and downstream outcomes across channels without perfect tracking of every interaction.
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32:38
Intent Data as Interest Signals Intent should show aggregate company interest in topics, not individual behaviors. Useful for targeting accounts in early buying stages via marketing, not SDR prospecting.
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38:23
Account-Level Targeting Strategy Map closed deals backward to identify behavioral patterns. Identify in-market accounts matching those patterns, then scale messaging and seller effort by buying stage.
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45:08
High-Performing BDR Activities Top BDRs focus on account mapping, sharing valuable content, and offering executive conversations—not requesting meetings until accounts are deep in buying process.
The lines worth sharing
Buyers do 85, 87% of their research on sites that are not vendor websites. If you're not buying that data and looking at it, that's dark to you.
Kerry Cunningham · 7:00
The single best sign that a company is in market is many people from that account coming to your website and looking at your stuff. But marketing automation systems have zero way of telling you that.
Kerry Cunningham · 10:45
In a typical B2B process, buyers have 4,000 digital and human interactions. On your website, you'll see 150. Only 40-50 come from people who filled out forms.
Kerry Cunningham · 13:15
If you don't know which part of your ideal customer profile is actually making noises about being in market, then it's malpractice. You need to know that now.
Kerry Cunningham · 32:00
Common questions from this episode
What is dark funnel attribution in B2B SaaS?
Dark funnel is all research and interactions happening outside visible channels—86% of buyer research on non-vendor sites, anonymous website traffic, peer discussions, and group decision-making that traditional marketing can't track. It represents most of the signal marketers need.
Why do buyers wait 70% into their journey to contact vendors?
Buying teams (average 10 people) conduct independent research first to align on requirements and reduce confusion from competing vendor pitches. They avoid sellers until they've built internal consensus, making early outreach ineffective.
How can AI improve B2B marketing attribution?
AI enables pattern recognition across all channels to correlate marketing activities (ads, content, sponsorships) with downstream outcomes like pipeline and revenue without needing perfect data on every interaction. It finds mathematical relationships across dozens of signals.
Should SDRs and BDRs use intent data to cold call prospects?
No. Intent data is best fed to marketing for account targeting and stage-based messaging. SDRs should focus on account mapping, sharing valuable content, and offering executive conversations to prospects already in-market—not cold calling intent signals.
What's the difference between intent data and interest data?
Intent implies buying readiness; interest is more accurate. Intent data should show aggregate interest across multiple people from a company in specific topics, indicating which accounts are in-market and where in the buying journey they sit.
How do the best BDRs increase revenue if they don't focus on meetings?
Top BDRs map accounts, share relevant content and resources proactively, offer valuable conversations with executives or subject matter experts, and track engagement with those resources—building trust and understanding rather than forcing early meetings.
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Kerry Cunningham of 6sense explores dark funnel attribution in B2B SaaS. Learn why buyers are 70% through their journey before contacting vendors and how to track invisible buying signals.
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Read the full transcript · 54 KB · Kerry Cunningham
EDDIE REYNOLDSWelcome to RevOps Corner, where we talk about how B2B SaaS companies scale through revenue operations by interviewing amazing guests and sharing what we see in the trenches every day here at Union Square Consulting. All right, welcome to another episode of RevOps Corner. Today, we're going to do a deep dive into dark funnel attribution with my guest, Kerry Cunningham, who runs research and thought leadership at Sixth Sense. Kerry, thank you so much for joining me today.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's my pleasure. Good to be here.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI'm really excited to dive into this with you. And you and your team recently published a report, the 2023 Sixth Sense B2B Buyer Experience Report. And in this report, you surveyed over 900 B2B buyers to better understand the black box that is the current buyer experience, including a lot of things happening in the dark funnel. And I'm very excited to ask you a number of questions about your findings in this report and some other things that you're seeing outside of the report, because I think it's increasingly difficult for marketers, especially to understand where buyers are coming from. More and more marketing spend goes into this black box. There's more and more activity happening in the dark funnel long before we ever have any real understanding that this person or this company is considering buying from us. And what I'd love to do in this podcast is dive in and understand how we can solve for this. So I want to start with a very simple question. In your report, you talked about how buyers are 70% of the way through their journey at the first time they contact a vendor. Can you expand on this?
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. And this is a number that really validates a lot of things that people have been saying for a while. So we're not the first people to find that buyers are saying their first direct interactions with sellers happen two-thirds of the way through the buying journey, essentially. My old firm was saying two-thirds of the buying journey was digital 10 years ago. And lots of other folks have said similar things since then. But it's very specific this time. We're saying at 70%, that's when anybody who's involved in a buying purchase, a buying process in P2P says that they have their first direct back and forth interaction with the seller. What we dive into the report is why. Like a lot of people have been saying that forever. And without really digging into, well, why is that? What's so magical about that? And in a way, it does kind of seem like a magic number because in our report, one of the things that we show is that everybody who's involved in a purchase, and that's typical. The average buying process is 10 people. It can be a lot more. It can be fewer. Two things really determine how big that buying team is. One is the size of the deal. Bigger deals have bigger buying teams running them. But then also how many competitors are involved, which was a surprise to me. It wasn't a factor I had been thinking about. That's the biggest factor in how long a buying process is and also one of the biggest in how many people get involved.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. When I read the report, I agree with you. I've been hearing this stuff for over 10 years. And it wasn't new information for me personally, but I thought it really sets a solid foundation for what I'm going to talk about with you today. And there were some insights on top of this that were a little bit more interesting. And I'll set this foundation by saying, I think that even with this knowledge, we fall into the trap of thinking that we're going to put an ad out somewhere, or we're going to have
EDDIE REYNOLDSan SDR cold call somebody, and they're going to pick up the phone, you know, because that happens all the time, right? And they're going to talk to an SDR, or they're going to click on that ad, and all of a sudden, they're going to be in a buying cycle. And we engineer these go-to-market engines around this concept, even though I think we all kind of know it doesn't work that way. But when you're actually looking at your findings from this report and the things that we're going to discuss in this podcast, you realize how much you're missing by looking at your go-to-market engine in that way.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. To me, that's the single most important thing. We've been spending our money the wrong way. And then, you know, we'll talk about this too, I'm sure, but if you go out on LinkedIn and do a search for intent data, for instance, find a lot of people saying, oh, intent sucks, I hate intent, I'm not, you know. And I think it's largely because people don't understand what it really is and how it really should be used. So when you think about the B2B buying process and buyers are saying they don't talk to you until 70% of the way through the journey. And the other way to think about that is 70% of their journey happens, you use the term
EDDIE REYNOLDSdark funnel, maybe not everybody's familiar with that, but it happens in places and in ways that you can't see if what you're looking for is purely leads. Yeah, forgive me for interrupting, but let's define dark funnel.
SPEAKER_17You're right. A lot of people aren't familiar with that.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. So we think of the dark funnel and to be honest with you, it should be called the dark buying journey and not the dark funnel because it's not in your funnel. But think of it as all of the research that buying teams do that you can't see on your
EDDIE REYNOLDSwebsite through form fills and some of it that you can. So all of the stuff that, so buyers do, by the way, Gartner says buyers do 85, 87% of their research on sites that are not vendor websites.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo someplace else, you know, influencers, publications, all that stuff. So they're doing most of their research out on the internet somewhere. All of that is dark to you.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIf you're not, if you're not buying that data and looking at it, that's dark to you. That's part of the dark funnel. Then there's what's on your own website. So if you've got a B2B website, there's a bunch of stuff that we know about that. One is about 3% of the people who come to your website, fill out a form of the people who come to your website, like 40% of them are bots. So they're not really people anyway. And who cares about them? Plus there's a whole bunch of other people we don't care about who come to your website.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo you take that 3%, you say, okay, nobody fills out a form, but how about the people from accounts that I care about? Like the ones that fit my ICP and all of that. There's a bunch of research. Our friends at Pathfactory did that with some of our data, in fact.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd that's about 20%. So of the people who come from accounts that you would like to be selling to, about 2 in 10 of those people will fill out a form. And then in our research, the one that we're talking about now, we ask people, okay, the
EDDIE REYNOLDSvendor that you bought from, did you fill out a form on their website? And that's 3 out of 10, right? So 7 out of the 10 people from the website, from the company that bought from you, did not fill out a form on your website. Almost all of your traffic, even from the accounts that are going to buy from you, is anonymous.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo if you don't know what's happening in there, that's also dark fun. That's people who are, that's companies that are shopping you and shopping you maybe for months and months at a time without you knowing about it, if you're not looking at that anonymous traffic. And then there's one more very expensive piece of the dark funnel.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd that is, so 2 out of 10 people from companies that are shopping you, 3 out of 10 from the ones that are going to buy you fill out forms. Do you know when you have more than one person from an account who's filled out a form on your website? Does that, does your marketing engine know that? Does sales find out about that? And the answer in B2B has largely been no, we don't. Like marketing automation systems have been some of the dumbest systems on the planet, as
EDDIE REYNOLDSfar as I can tell. Like the best sign that you could have that a company is in market for your stuff is that many people from that company come to your website and look at your stuff. But marketing automation systems by themselves have zero way of telling you that that's happening. It's the single best signal available and we've been blind to it. So that's all, all of that is the dark funnel. And it's most of the signal that you have to tell you where you should be spending your time and your resources. That's a full lecture on.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, man, we could go down. There's a few rabbit holes that we could go deep down, but you talk about like the marketing automation system. I mean, as a rev ops consultancy, like that's the, one of the first things that we look at when a company has marketing is a properly integrated with sales. And this whole idea of, you know, like just the fact that, like I haven't used leads in Salesforce and God, I don't know how long forever. We put everything in as an opportunity. It's like a stage zero opportunity, which is effectively a lead because we need to see the entire account. We're selling to a company, not to an individual. So you have like Bob and Jane go and fill out a form on your website and that's sitting in two separate records and your marketing automation tool or in your CRM. It's like, that's absolutely ridiculous. Right. And so when I first heard about ABM, I'm thinking, I don't get it.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI still, to this day, don't get ABM. It's like, isn't that just what we're supposed to be doing? Looking at an account and trying to market and sell to an entire account? Like, isn't that just the way we should be doing it?
SPEAKER_10It is absolutely the way we should be doing it.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo, you know, and, and, you know, for years, um, and I'll say like for five years or six years, uh, you know, we were talking to folks who were doing ABM and they're still just operating on the lead basis and like, okay, think about what it's going to look like. If one of those accounts that you're focusing on a market, what is it going to look like if they're in market and they come to your website, is that going to be one person?
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd if it is, they're not going to look any different from every other company, right? If that's all you can see, they're going to look just like everybody else. But no, that's not what they're going to look like. What it's going to look like if you're, if your marketing works is you're going to have
EDDIE REYNOLDSa bunch of people from that company come to your website, some fill out forms, some don't. Can you tell if they're there? That's like the simple, can you CMO, VP of demand, VP of ABM? Can you tell if that stuff that you're doing is working? And if the answer is no, then exactly what you said is what back at Forrester, we were advising people, uh, over the last few years was. You've got to get rid of the lead and use the opportunity object instead. It's the container for the opportunity and the opportunity is always going to be represented by multiple people. Uh, and that's, it's what sales needs to be working from and marketing should be pouring what they learn into that as well.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd just to clarify, like, I don't have a problem using leads in the sense of like, when I worked at Salesforce, every time somebody filled out a form or downloaded a white paper, it would show up as a lead and then it would get attached to the account. And then as the AE, I could see all that stuff happening and who's downloading what. And that was nice to, nice to know. Um, but when we take this back, like what we're ultimately trying to accomplish here, especially on this podcast is what are the best ways for us to figure out what is working and what is not working in marketing. And you described the dark funnel. And I think that that's what creates such a challenge because we're not just seeing buyers
EDDIE REYNOLDSgo and click on the ad or answer the call from the SDR and immediately go into a buying cycle. They're going onto these review websites.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThey're going into these Slack channels like Pavilion and asking peers in the industry what tools they recommend. They're, you know, doing all kinds of Google searches that don't take them to the vendor's website. Um, they're listening to podcasts like this one and accessing the data is very difficult. So when we think about attribution and we think about ultimately, what are we trying to solve for? We want to understand the things that we're doing in marketing and what's driving revenue and what's not. And I think we've all accepted that this is not a perfect science.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYou've got your, you know, first touch or last touch attribution. You've got your multi-channel attribution. You've got all these crazy mathematical models that mean absolutely nothing.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBecause how are we to say that like you listen to this podcast and then you download this white paper and each of those things, you know, influence your decision 50%. I think that that's the real challenge in marketing attribution, not to mention the data itself.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd so when we just look at marketing attribution software and we look, we see this, uh, we see a lot of folks in the market talking about this. We see this with our customers. We see this with our own data. Someone goes and listens to this podcast and they go Google Union Square Consulting and they end up on our website and it shows up as organic search. Um, which is kind of funny because we don't do anything with search. So it's kind of hard for me to believe that half of our traffic is coming from, from search when we haven't invested a single minute or dollar in Google. What we know is happening is they're coming from that dark funnel, right?
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd so one of the ways that we solve for this is with this, how did you hear about us question on the form, which is only going to get filled out once they're ready to enter a buying cycle at the bottom of the marketing funnel, so to speak. What I'm curious about though, is what more can we do? So when you think about all the things that are happening in the dark funnel and from the
EDDIE REYNOLDSperspective of a CMO that wants to better understand what is influencing their buyer journey, what do you see we can do to get more insight beyond traditional marketing attribution software or
EDDIE REYNOLDSthat simple? How did you hear about us form or even a sales rep asking that same question?
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo understanding that most attribution today is done purely from leads. Where did the lead come from? What campaign was the thing that somebody clicked on that got them to my website and filled out the form? So everybody who's doing that today and thinking that they're getting some sort of answer about what's causing, what's working and what's not, what's causing opportunities of revenue or not, should stop doing that because they're getting the wrong answer. It's not just that it isn't the right answer. It's almost always going to point you in a very, very wrong direction. That there is absolutely nothing that is interesting or unique. Somebody coming to your website and filling out a form, one person from a buying team doing that. It just doesn't matter. At some point, if they're going to buy from you, somebody's probably going to have to do that. But to get them to that point involves. So in that research report that we were talking about earlier, buyers told us that they're having in a typical B2B process, which is 11 month buying process, 10 people on that buying team. They're having 4,000 digital and human interactions across that buying journey, 4,000, right? On your website, you're going to see 150, 160 of those.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThe other vendors that they're looking at, we'll see about 150, 160, and the rest of them are going to happen somewhere else altogether. Of the ones that you see, if there are 150 interactions on your website, 40 or 50 of those will come from people who have filled out a form whose name that you can know. So today, B2B, both the lead gen, demand gen, and the attribution audit are based on the 50. Like those 50 interactions and people filled out the form. And for the most part, only probably 10 to 15 of those.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBecause for the most part, what people are doing is they're only looking at one of the people who came to the website. Like the last one. People love last touch attribution for this stuff. Almost nothing could be dumber, right? It's what we've been taught. It's what's been available. It's what the tools allow. It just doesn't make any sense. That person who filled out the form, who was the last one before you produced the opportunity, had to do it because somebody else told them to do it. Why did somebody else told them to do it? Well, because somebody else was on your website. And their other eight colleagues from the buying team were on your website for months in the typical buying process for eight months before they did that. So the first thing we have to do is set aside the notion that lead-based attribution tells you anything useful at all. It's sending you in the wrong direction. The second thing is the next money that you have spent is the money that did get people to your website that we can track. And there's plenty of it, right? So yes, there'll be plenty of people who come to your website that look like organic traffic. And by the way, when we ask people, did you click on an ad for the vendor that you bought from, or did you view an ad? Almost nobody views an ad or clicks on an ad because we all know what that's going to do. And we just see the ad. Okay, now I'm going to go to the website. And besides, I don't want to go to a landing page. I want to go to your website. Landing pages suck.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThere's like two things there and I can download a white paper and that's not what I want to do. What I want to do is go to your website and go around. So even when we see an ad, we go and it looks like it's organic, right?
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo if you're not looking at, for instance, the rate at which companies where I put an ad and contacts where I put an ad and the people who come to my website, then you're missing a big part of the picture. So if I want to see, I want to see traffic from a company on my website and I want to know how much effort I put into advertising into that account. And I can relate those two things. It's not hard. And by the way, most of the things that you have to do now in B2B are what people in B2C have been doing forever, right? So we spent money in a market. What's the return that we got from that? We don't measure every click that turned into something immediately. First, we first measure, I invested in this market. I ran ads. I did a Super Bowl ad. I did whatever. And then here's what came as a result. Traffic on the website, clicks, things in my cart, et cetera. So unfortunately, we've got to think about things that way.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd I say unfortunately, because it's not what we want in B2B. We want people filled out forms, became an opportunity, revenue, clear.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI ran a campaign, click, revenue, boom.
EDDIE REYNOLDSJust doesn't work that way. People don't click on the things.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIn fact, people, the buyers in our report, they said that they were, that 30% of them responded
EDDIE REYNOLDSto a BDR or SDR email. But 50% of them said that at some point in the buyer's journey, they actually reached out on their own to the organization that they bought from. So they're more likely to reach out and ask a question or do something directly than they are to respond even to your BDRs and SDRs.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd those numbers were dramatically higher than even the ones who click on leads.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, just to touch on that for a second. I mean, I've personally experienced this as a buyer where, to your point, when you're a buyer, you first have to identify that you even have a problem we're solving. And so there's a lot of times where you're consuming content that's just informing you
EDDIE REYNOLDSthat you have a problem, that there's this problem out there that people like you face and there are potential solutions to it. Before you've even logically gotten to the step of, I want to go find a solution to that problem. And then once you go and want to find a solution to that problem, you start thinking about, who do I know? Who do I trust? Where can I go to try to get information on which vendors I could be looking at? And I have many times been in a situation where I'm going on Pavilion and I'm asking other people who they recommend. I'm asking my contacts who they recommend. I'm doing Google searches. And at the same time, these companies that I'm finding, their competitors are reaching out to me with SDRs and they're saying, hey, I know that you might want XYZ. Can we book a call? And I'm looking at this going, I have no understanding of your brand. I don't know anything about you as a company. And I don't want to invest 30 minutes of my time just because you happen to call or email me at the time that I'm in the market. I would much rather go and spend my time with a vendor who's put out content that I appreciate and I feel like maybe they know what they're doing.
EDDIE REYNOLDSRight. That's exactly what buyers in our report said. So that report says really clearly, you know, people are not going to, so, you know, if we go back to that 70%, you can ping people and call people all you want prior to that 70%. They're not going to respond for the exact reason that you just said, because what a member of a buying team and the buying team as a collective wants to do is they want to
EDDIE REYNOLDShave their act together. They want to know what their requirements are, have that clear. It's tough enough for 10 people to agree on what they want as a company, you know, much less if they're doing it in the company of salespeople who are trying to convince them to do it this way or that and using different language about it and all of that. Buying teams stay on their own. They do their research. They talk to friends. They talk to colleagues. You know, one of the, you know, we saw those numbers in that report. People value that. They also value talking to salespeople, but they don't value it until they've already gotten way, way, way down the line and they're clear about what they want.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo, you know, one of the things I, I use Sixth Sense as an example, we do a lot to make sure that our potential buyers, even if they're not in a buying process, have access to everything. Like the report you're talking about, ungated. You know, we spent a lot of money on that. We spent a lot of time on that. It's completely ungated. It's available to everybody. Same thing with, with actually my time. So, you know, I'm an in-house former Forrester, serious decisions analyst. You don't have to be a Sixth Sense customer prospect to ping me on LinkedIn and have a conversation with me. It's part of my job. We do a lot of things like that. We sponsor communities. A great example is a CMO coffee talk community. We sponsor that and have for years. There are 500 or so CMOs who participate in that on a weekly basis. We don't pitch in that. There's no selling by Sixth Sense. We just sponsor it. Our CMO hosts it with somebody else. But that's it. Well, as a result, there are hundreds and hundreds of the people who are the prime decision makers for the stuff that we sell who have a relationship with Sixth Sense outside of the buying process. They get value from us. Likewise, you know, I mentioned all of our content, but we also have other subject matter experts inside Sixth Sense who are available to people outside of a process. So you don't have to be, it's not a demo from our sales rep or a qualifying conversation with a sales rep. It's a conversation with a peer or a conversation with a subject matter expert. And that's what buyers want and how they want to be able to figure out what they need for their organizations. But if what you're offering is just a pitch, you're going to have to wait until they've already decided what they want.
SPEAKER_17And then that gets into capturing demand versus creating demand, right? And where you're influencing buyers in their journey.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd, you know, you kind of hit the nail on the head. Your marketing organization, your organization overall is spending hard money for you to be here on this podcast. And I assume they and you didn't decide to show up here just because I'm such a likable guy, right? You're hoping that this message in some way, shape or form gets in front of your target audience, which I hope it should. And I'm sure that somebody in the organization would love if there was some UTM code on our little podcast description and they click it and they just do perfect attribution back to this podcast. But even if we put that in there, which we could, by the way, most people would click it. You know, they'd go Google Sixth Sense and you'd never know. So I think that this creates this disparity in this sort of this idea of lead generation versus demand generation, where if you're a CMO, you're looking at this and you're saying, OK, on the one hand, I know that if we put great content in front of our audience, if we build a community, if we go and participate with other folks in the market that are influencing our audience, if we just add value again and again and again through various channels, many of which we can't track, we are going to build up this consensus within the industry that people are going to look at us. And when they are ready to consume content and or make a buying decision, they're going to come to us. And the way that we do that is by ungating content, by just putting stuff out into the world and making it really valuable. Whereas lead generation is the opposite. And it's OK, we're going to put out this white paper and we're going to gate it and we're going to measure the ROI of it. And this creates a friction filled buyer experience, which doesn't work. But if you are being beholden to a certain number of MQLs that you need to generate or perfect attribution, then you're not able to do the former. You're not able to put out really great content because you're constantly asking, how am I going to track this? How do we know what's working? That being said, there's this gray area that I wanted to talk to you about today, which is what can we do? When we're doing things right from a marketing perspective and an ABM perspective, how can we use tools like AI to get a better understanding of who's listening to this podcast and whether or not all the podcasts that you're doing, Kerry, might have an influence on people coming to your organization and evaluating purchase decisions?
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, unfortunately, now we have to start talking about math and stats. So understanding that if a buying team is going to have 4000 interactions across their buying journey and only some of them are with you and some of them are elsewhere.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAlready, we know that it's not a simple matter of understanding who clicked on a form and when.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThat math, that very simple math, it simply doesn't get you there. So now you've got to start thinking more broadly. But and without AI, you couldn't do it. With AI, you can't, because what we want to know is we're we're interacting with the market across, you know, almost almost every B2B company, dozens of channels, you know, at least.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd then if you add in all of your salespeople, hundreds of channels, I mean, everybody is out there making noise and you're on LinkedIn and you're doing all kinds of things. What you absolutely what what AI absolutely can do is start to look at the relationship, the mathematical relationship between the number of things,
EDDIE REYNOLDSlike just the sheer number of things that you're doing and outcomes that occur later on. Like if I have three podcasts and we sponsor two communities that had 500 people each and we did this and we did that.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIf we did that in June, then what is the mathematical relationship between doing that with June and traffic on our Web site in July and opportunities that occur and are put into Salesforce in August and revenue in September, October and November?
EDDIE REYNOLDSThat's possible. That's possible. That's possible. Now, you couldn't, you just couldn't do that without, you know, pretty sophisticated math, right? But when you have it, yeah, you can start to do that.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYou can start to say, all right, well, you know, we ran, let's say we ran 50 ads. We had 10 people click on each ad and none of them converted even to elite, right?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWas that a total disaster? Well, it seems like it's a total disaster, but let's look at the accounts that the people who saw your ad came from. Did you have anonymous traffic from those accounts on your website after that happened? Answer is probably going to be yes, right? Okay. Now, if you had anonymous traffic on your website, did you have any form fills?
EDDIE REYNOLDSThe answer may or may not be yes, right? But let's look at that. If you had form fills or not, was that anonymous traffic associated with the production of conversations that sales ended up having with people from those accounts later on?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWe're not going to say that it caused it. We just want to know, did it proceeded? And if there are accounts, and this is where the math comes in, if there are accounts where I produced 50 people, or I'm not even going to say I produced, I ran ads in these two accounts.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd from one of those accounts, 50 people came to my website that month. From the other account, 10 did, right?
EDDIE REYNOLDSNow, did the one that had 50, was that more likely to become an opportunity? And now let's say that we've got many accounts that kind of look like this or somewhere in between. Now I can start to find a relationship between I ran ads, I didn't run ads, I ran two ads, I ran three ads. And when I did, did the outcomes that I'm interested in start to occur? And that math is not complicated. It's really just, do I have the data? Can I feed it into a model that's going to do that math for me? And that is what, you know, when B2C companies have been looking at how their advertising works, et cetera, for a long time, that's how it was done. And you can make very good decisions now.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo what I'm hearing from you is, it's not necessarily about the interaction with the ad or the content.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIt's about looking at the outputs and comparing it to the end results and using AI as what AI is, is pattern recognition to understand, well, if we do these things, these are the results that are being produced.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBecause I think where I, and you're nodding yes. And so I'm going to continue with this for people that are listening.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWhere I think I get wrapped around the axle on this, because we recently published a newsletter talking about how AI is going to revolutionize attribution. And I was asking my team about why they came to this conclusion.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd this led us to you and I having this podcast here, because I reached out to you and I had some questions about it. I'm thinking, okay, great. I get it, but you can't do math without the data points, right? You can't figure out a percentage without a numerator and a denominator. So like, how do we get those data points? Like, how do we know who's listening to this podcast? How do we know who is like looking at like the LinkedIn post or who looks at the ad, but then skips over it and then goes to our website? There's going to be a limitation as to like what data points we can actually access. But what you're saying is, and this is what I see anecdotally.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAll right, well, if we produce a bunch of podcasts, we have more people coming through our funnel saying, hey, I listened to your podcast. And it's like, well, that's not perfect math.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI can see that it's worth investing more money in our podcast, right? It's not complicated, but it's also easier for my organization because we're small. So as you scale up to an organization spending tens of millions of dollars a year in marketing or hundreds, how do you start to say, okay, here are all the things that we're doing. And here's all the results that we're producing. And how do we correlate those two things? And it sounds like what you're saying is AI gives you the opportunity to do that pattern recognition to understand how month over month the inputs and the outputs are changing.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, that's true. And then, you know, I'll say, I don't know what the, say, podcast companies like Riverside are doing behind the scenes. I don't think we're partnered with them yet, for instance, but we should be. And why we should be is because you can know where a lot of the people who are listening to your podcast are coming from. And it doesn't matter that you know their name. It matters that you know what company they represent. That's the first most important thing. If you want to think about account-based, that's really what we want to understand.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo if you have five people from account A who listen to a podcast and you've got another target account where nobody did, are you more likely to get business from the account where people listen to the podcast?
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. And if the answer is no, then you probably ought to look at what you're saying on your podcast, but the answer is probably going to be yes, right? So ultimately, you want to know that, right? Right now, we can know that about your website, right? So we de-anonymize web traffic. We have a great engine for doing that. It's very robust and robust in terms of cookies and all that stuff, too. You regularly get 50% to 60% account match visitors to your website. So that's the first thing. That's the data that has to go into this. What accounts are coming to your website? And then what's the volume of that traffic, right? So we don't care so much about one person coming, but if you get a bunch of people, now we care a lot about that. And what's the relationship between that and the outcomes that you get? Same thing, third-party intent. Not if I saw intent and I sent a sales rep at it, did that turn into business? Because the answer is almost always going to be no. That's a really low success rate activity. But if there is a set of 10 accounts and in half of those I'm seeing strong intent signals and the other half I'm not, and then I go do my marketing into that set of 10 accounts, does it work better when I'm marketing into accounts that are giving signs of being in market? The answer is going to be yes, right? That's what we need to be looking at. That's where you aim your marketing. And then afterwards you can say, okay, well, here's what the intent signals look like when the advertising and all that did result in traffic on my website that was meaningful.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd here's what it, you know, here may be the kind of intense signals where that didn't turn into anything, right?
EDDIE REYNOLDSNow we can start to get more and more granular about how we target who's actually in market and where we put our marketing dollars or ad dollars and where we ultimately send our sales reps. And then I know that like, if we take ABM to sort of like it's, it's ultimate end, it comes down to, or correct me if I'm wrong, cause I'm no expert in ABM.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIt can come down to placing targeted ads in front of specific accounts that you believe are in market and could be the best potential opportunities for you.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, no, that's absolutely what you should be doing. So, you know, the way that we think about this is, and this is kind of a, you know, like I started back at Serious Decisions in Forrester where we developed the demand unit waterfall, which is all about targeting accounts. The next thing you can and should know now is which of those accounts are giving off some sort of signals of being actively in the market. That's where you want to focus your dollars because that's always a really small fragment. If you think about, if you've got a thousand accounts in your addressable market, like they're a good fit thousand accounts, how many of those are actually going to be in market in any period of time? 50, if you're lucky, maybe a hundred, right? Small fraction of that big space. So fine, do some branding and awareness stuff for the big mass of them, but there's only a small fragment that's going to produce something from that now.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd you need to know which one that is. And today I would say to marketers, if you don't know which part of your ideal customer profile market is actually making some sort of noises about being in market, then it's malpractice. You need to know that now. And when you know that, now you can be much more targeted with what you're doing.
SPEAKER_08And now you've got a really nice circumscribed set of accounts that you're spending your money in. You're watching the other ones to see if any signals arise, and then you're responding to those signals. But these ones are the ones that you're going to focus on, and you're spending more time and dollars there, and then you're going to track how that goes.
EDDIE REYNOLDSTo me, that's the big difference over the last five years or so in B2B, is that we should no longer be thinking about the addressable market or the ICP as the place where we focus our energy. Just a fraction of that is going to be productive at any given point in time.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI think that makes a lot of sense. And when I think about AVM, I try to think about it in a more simpler context, assuming that your organization, like mine for sure, wouldn't be able to place targeted ads as an example. So what can we do instead, right? We go back to the comment we made earlier about not using the lead object in Salesforce and having everything tracked on the opportunity or the account level. When I think about those thousand target accounts, I mean, just that alone is already a step ahead of many organizations. There's far too many companies out there saying, we've got 10,000, 100,000 companies we're trying to go after. And it's like, okay, you don't have the resources to do that. Why are you doing that? How do we narrow that into like our ICP?
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd then from there, how do we aggregate all the data we have? You know, we keep touching on podcasts. I don't know either whether or not, you know, this wouldn't be Riverside. This would be Spotify or Apple. Of course, Apple and Spotify have the data. But are they going to give me that data on who's actually listening to this podcast? I don't know. But if I could get that data, I'd like to pipe it in. What we can do is we can see at least some of the people that are visiting our website and the organizations that they belong to. We can, of course, see anybody that fills out forms, attends webinars, downloads any type of gated content. I do think there is a place for some gated content. We can see who's actually had meetings with us. We can aggregate all that information together, which to me is still just sort of like go-to-market or RevOps 101. I mean, this is the kind of stuff Salesforce was doing when I worked there as an AE 10 years ago. So many organizations still aren't there. And now you have this view on each account to understand what's going on. And then we take it a step further and we talk about intent data. And this data that's out there, it's not our own proprietary data. And we start to get a more holistic picture of who we should target. And this could be targeted ads, you know, at a sophisticated level. This could be something as simple as like, I have a friend that runs quite a decent size company. And they're landing a lot of their customers by sending like gift baskets and snail mail. There's lots of things that we can do once we understand the accounts that we want to target our energies towards, right? Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And I would say that's actually the key to everything.
EDDIE REYNOLDSLike the more targeted and the more precise you can be, the more money you can spend. Everybody's got limited money. How are you going to spend it? Well, targeting is the key. And five years ago, we couldn't say you can target precisely with behavioral data, but now you can. And that behavioral data is what allows you to get really, really granular. Understanding which accounts are actually making noises about being in market. They're out looking around for something. That's a great place to start. And the more granular you can get there, the better. And then, you know, the other thing about the podcast. So, you know, maybe Apple, Spotify aren't going to share what accounts they should. They should partner with us and we can tell them which accounts are actually looking at that.
EDDIE REYNOLDSEven if they don't, if you do anything to promote that podcast, you have a chance to understand at least where you promoted it and who you promoted it to. You can be very targeted on LinkedIn, et cetera. And then follow the path for, you know, viewership or listening there as well.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. I mean, that's certainly what we're trying to do. And we're putting our time and money behind all of these concepts. And so it's a thing that we try to figure out both for our customers who are much larger than us and for ourselves.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd it's a fascinating thing to try to crack. And every day there's this new channel that comes out. Like, all of a sudden, Pavilion is blowing up in the B2B SaaS community. And you're like, okay, this is great. But, like, I can't track any of this stuff. So what do we do with that? But I think you've shared a lot of really good insights. And I would love, like, for the audience and also for myself, while we're on the topic, I'll set you up for a little bit of a pitch for Sixth Sense. If you could explain a little bit more about intent data and what are the most common signals that you guys are able to capture that tells us whether or not somebody is in the market for what we're selling?
EDDIE REYNOLDSYep. Great. So, you know, we have relationships with, I think it's 2.1 million different websites, B2B websites. So a lot of websites covering every industry imaginable. You know, these are informational websites, publications, places like that. For the most part, those guys, they do some gating of their content.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThey have memberships and those kinds of things.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBut even if they don't, they might have pixel on their website. We are able to acquire data from all of those folks. We do an awful lot of data science to understand the accounts that the traffic from all of these different places is coming from. And if I see a mobile device over here and a computer over here, those two things have both been going to this office building where this company is for the last three years. They also show up at this address that is a residential neighborhood or something like that for years. Now this mobile device starts going to this other company once a week or twice a week or something like that. Oh, there's a person who's changed jobs, but they're the same person. We don't know the person's name. We know their IP address. And we know, and the device, we might know the device ID, right?
EDDIE REYNOLDSLots of different of these clues that people find, I think, naturally a little bit creepy to think about, but they're all non-personally identifying.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBut they help you triangulate on the fact that this is somebody who works for this company. And we see that across literally billions of people every day, across millions of websites. And we know the content that they're looking at. All right. So all of these websites have content. The content is about something. That's what a big part of what the AI is able to do is to characterize what all of this content is about. And so now we know that there are people from companies, they're looking at content, and we know what they're looking at.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAll right. So now we know.
EDDIE REYNOLDSNow, I wish back in the day that this had not been called intent data. And in fact, at Forrester, we put out a report that tried to get people to call it interest data rather than intent data, because it's really what it is. You're seeing what people are interested in. And if you see what one person from a company is interested in, who cares? If you see what 10 or 20 or 50 people from a company are interested in at the same time, we care a lot. And that's what intent data is. Intent data is an aggregate view of what people from companies are interested in. And so if you're selling to big companies, you should have, you know, and if you sell five different things, you should have five different views of the interests of people inside those companies. Not just, hey, we've got traffic from, or I see an intent signal from Cisco. Okay, you know, fine. What is that about? And where is it coming from? So that I can understand, you know, what that part of Cisco is interested in and maybe where in Cisco that interest is coming from. Right. So all of that is a huge part of how you know which accounts are out in market for the kind of thing that you might be selling. What we don't want people to do is to think first about that as, okay, so now let's give that to our salespeople.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThey didn't like the leads. Let's give them that. Right. No, that's going to be even worse than the leads.
SPEAKER_48But wait, Kerry, who are our SDRs going to call if we don't give them a list?
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, they should sit on their hands until they have something better. But what we are going to do is give that to marketing. And so what we do inside Sixth Sense is we actually build. So for every customer, we look at your recent deals that you've worked, and then we look back in time.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWe look at that big record of behavior, intent data, and the anonymous traffic on your website. We look at that big record of behavior, and we say, okay, well, here's a set of 100 accounts that you just worked. And let's say that you closed those. What did all of that activity, both on your website and elsewhere, look like in the six, nine months or a year prior to the time they became an opportunity?
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo now we're looking back. And this is the same thing that you would do. I came from a social science background. Like if you're a sociologist or you're a psychologist and you want to know why, why do some kids end up doing drugs?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWhy do some people become alcoholics? Why do some people, right? You understand their lives today, and you look back in time, and you look at what happened. How did, you know, what are the patterns and behavior that got this person to this point? What are the characteristics of the person and then the situations they were in that can explain how they got here?
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd that's what we're doing here. We're just using big data and a lot of signals to look back in time and say, how did those accounts get to the point where they became an opportunity?
EDDIE REYNOLDSOnce we have that pattern, then we look at every account that pops up their head and say, okay, what does that look like? Does it look like one of these accounts that becomes an opportunity? And if so, where along that path? Is it early? Is it middle? Is it late? That's what's possible with the data science today. And that's what we do. And we're not asking anybody to say, oh, there's a signal. Go call that. What we're saying is there's a signal. What it tells us is this is an account that's in the very early stages of a buying journey for this solution that you offer. What we suggest is a very high scale, low cost ad campaign into the set of accounts that look like they're just kind of poking their heads up. Right. Don't spend a lot of money there yet. We don't have confidence that that's going to turn into anything. We'll get in there a little bit. Right. Then when we see them moving further along and we see them matching a pattern that says these guys are deep into a buying process and they're going to buy from somebody. Then we say, okay, now get your ass in there. Go at now. Now is the time. Those BDRs have been sitting on their hands. Now is the time. Get in there. Find out what's going on and don't go home until you know. Right. When you have a much smaller set of accounts where you have a much higher confidence level in where they are, now your approach to them changes.
EDDIE REYNOLDSNow you invest much more heavily. Maybe you send in your big guns, your AEs. Maybe you go have your SDRs invite their head of whatever function you sell to to have a conversation with your CEO or some other important person that you have. Right. You do something to get their attention, to offer value that will get you in the door. Right. So that's the, you know, big picture. That's kind of it. You know, like see all of the potential signals and then use that to develop a pattern, use the pattern to match the accounts that are in market and then prioritize accordingly.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, I really love that. And I think, you know, we don't have a lot of time left for this episode, but we start to touch on like, what is it that we should have SDRs doing?
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd it's like, okay, well, we started with, let's generate a bunch of MQLs for them to call. And that hasn't worked very effectively. Those people don't want to be called. They oftentimes fill out fake information. You touched on the challenges with intent data in that regard. But like where I'm left is, okay, well, let's just give them a highly targeted list of accounts. That does work or it can work if you're doing the right things. If you're bringing the right type of messaging to folks to say, you're the exact type of company and the exact type of persona that we should be in front of. And here are some things that I can offer to add value. Would you like to engage with us? It's a very low hit rate, but that can and does work. What you're talking about is taking it even a step further and trying to say, okay, like let's narrow that list down to the even better prospects. The folks that have not only expressed some level of intent, but have also seen some of our ads and responded and started to engage in a more meaningful way so that those SDRs are really laser focused on the absolute best prospects to spend their time calling on.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, exactly right. And then the thing that we got to come back to the thing that we talked about early on and use these words a couple of times, add value. So at that point where you've got those highly targeted accounts that are in market, if you just call them and ask them for meetings, they're still not going to meet with you until they've already decided whether they want to buy from you. You are not going to get them to talk to you until they have decided. So you have to get them to decide for you without actually having that conversation with you. And what that looks like is, one, if you've got any content at all that will help them, if you've got a podcast that you think is going to help their senior leader understand why they need what you do, your BDR, SDR should be calling to make sure that they know about that, have access to it. The link is in their box, all of that. That's what they should be doing, right? And yeah, if you want to meet with me or if you want to meet with RAE or if you want to meet with Eddie, great. We can set that up, but first and foremost, here's this thing that we think would be helpful. Here's a, you know, you're from this industry, you're trying to do this. We have a customer who did that and filmed a video about what they went through to make that decision, how they did that transformation.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThink you might find that interesting. Here's that video.
EDDIE REYNOLDSLike, don't make them come find it. You know they're in market? Make sure that they have it. It's there waiting. And they'll love that. They'll love having the access to it. It will help them understand the value that you deliver and you've just given them a great experience. It's not going to turn into- And now all of a sudden you have a sales rep that's actually being helpful. Right, yeah. Now the thing is, that's not going to turn into a meeting that day for that BDR. So if that's the way you pay your BDRs, now we have to think about that. And I know that that's a pain in the ass. I managed an organization of 500 BDRs for a long time.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd they don't respond to paying them six months later for something either. No, you've got to have something you reward them with now. Right? But then we have to start looking at things like if a BDR, one, they need to be out working these accounts, mapping the accounts, understanding the players. They can do all of that without actually talking to most of them.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd then getting the content to them.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThen we can look at whether that content gets used. If a BDR is dropping links in people's mailboxes, are those links being looked at? Are the videos being looked at? Are people taking them up on conversations? That's one of the things that our SDRs and BDRs do all the time. They offer conversations with me, with our VP of marketing, with our VP of revenue analytics. And the reps who knock it out of the park in terms of revenue production are the ones that also knock it out of the park and producing a lot of conversations with folks like me. Your prospects and customers will take that very high value offer, even when they won't talk to you. They'll say, yeah, I'll talk to your VP of marketing, but you can't be on the call. That kind of thing. Yep.
SPEAKER_17I've seen it. Well, Kerry, thank you so much for your time. This has been really great. Lots of really great nuggets, and I appreciate everything you shared.
SPEAKER_37Yeah, my pleasure. it being there.
