ABM Blogs

The dark funnel is the portion of a buyer’s research and decision-making process that happens outside the direct view of sales and marketing teams. It includes conversations on Slack, Teams, private Slack groups, internal emails, phone calls, Zoom meetings between account team members, conversations with peers at other companies, Reddit threads, private Discord communities, analyst calls, and word-of-mouth recommendations. It’s called “dark” not because anything nefarious is happening, but because it’s invisible to standard marketing and sales tracking systems.

Introduction

Purchase intent signals are everywhere. A company is hiring a VP of Sales (intent signal: they’re scaling revenue). A company is suing a competitor (intent signal: they’re dissatisfied). A company downloaded your competitor’s pricing page (intent signal: they’re evaluating solutions).

G2 has become a fixture in software buying journeys. Buyers research solutions on G2, compare reviews, and make informed purchasing decisions. For vendors, G2 intent data signals that accounts are actively researching your category. However, G2 is only one source of buyer intelligence, and relying solely on G2 data can create blind spots.

G2 has become a fixture in software buying journeys. Buyers research solutions on G2, compare reviews, and make informed purchasing decisions. For vendors, G2 intent data signals that accounts are actively researching your category. However, G2 is only one source of buyer intelligence, and relying solely on G2 data can create blind spots.

Canadian SaaS founders face a scaling challenge unique to the North American landscape. You’re in a market that’s large enough to sustain a standalone business but competitive enough that you can’t grow efficiently without help. You’re too small to dominate the US market on your own, but close enough geographically and culturally to see it as a natural expansion. And you’ve built a product that integrates well with other solutions, sits alongside infrastructure vendors, and serves the same teams your partner vendors serve.

UK B2B revenue teams are facing a common crunch: traditional demand generation costs are climbing, outbound response rates are flattening, and sales teams are stretched thin. Meanwhile, your ecosystem of partners, integrations, and complementary vendors sits largely untapped as a source of qualified pipeline. This is exactly where nearbound marketing enters the picture.

Your product doesn’t exist in isolation. Your customer uses your product alongside five other tools: a CRM, a data platform, a content management system, and two point solutions. The vendors behind those tools are either your competitors (fighting for the same budget and use cases) or your partners (with aligned customer bases and complementary capabilities).

Revenue intelligence is the collection, analysis, and actionable delivery of real-time data about sales activities, customer engagement, deal progress, and market signals that help teams predict revenue outcomes and intervene to accelerate deals and reduce churn.

Partner-led growth (PLG) is a go-to-market strategy where revenue flows primarily through channel partners, resellers, and integrations rather than through direct sales teams.

Nearbound marketing is a go-to-market strategy that uses partnerships, ecosystems, and existing buyer communities to drive awareness and pipeline growth, rather than relying solely on paid acquisition or cold outreach.

IP targeting for B2B is the practice of using company Internet Protocol (IP) addresses to identify which organizations have visited your website, digital properties, or ad networks, then using that data to target those accounts with personalized campaigns, ads, or outreach.

Identity resolution in B2B marketing is the technology and process of taking an anonymous website visitor (identified only by IP address, device, or email hash) and matching them to known identity data (company, person, email, job title, account details) using data enrichment, databases, and algorithmic matching.