Your Customer Experience Is Your Demand Generation

I saw a stat that not only stopped me in my tracks, but confirmed something I've been sensing for a while. 80% of the buying journey now takes place without direct vendor contact. People show up eventually in sales, so we know we must be doing something right before that. Something we're doing is working.

But what people do in the first four-fifths of that journey is increasingly invisible to us. They show up with clearly formed preferences, and we're stuck trying to figure out where and how they got those opinions. We can sense they're out there, but because they don't measurably engage with our standard marketing funnel and its touchpoints, the traditional linear funnel does not work the way we think it does.

The rule used to be simple: speak to buyers' problems, nudge them toward your solution, then nudge them a little further until they connect with sales. Clean, reassuring, and trackable.

It's become increasingly difficult to tie the process of discovery and opinion-forming to the things we put out there: landing pages, websites, campaigns. We see fire before we ever see smoke. Buyer journeys don't necessarily begin with intent signals we can measure. More often, they begin with a conversation we weren't part of.

Don’t Buy into the Dark Funnel Paniclink to this section

The dark funnel is not new. Marketers have always accepted some degree of invisible influence as part of how persuasion works. But the lack of insight and analytics around it is the real challenge—and I think many of us despair before we figure out how to adapt.

Where we could once see spikes in direct traffic and trace them back to something, now we have the "zero-click" reality. First-page search results, LLM-driven search, and AI summaries give people the answers they're looking for without them ever clicking through to a web page. For those of us who built our measurement frameworks around trackable touchpoints, this can feel like the ground shifting underfoot.

But for those of us working in B2B SaaS, we can afford to scale down the panic. According to McKinsey, the average B2B buyer engages with over 10 channels throughout their journey. We were never going to capture all of them. The real challenge isn't recovering what we've lost; it's getting comfortable with not being able to track every touchpoint, and investing in the places where preference actually forms.

"How do we get more marketing qualified leads?" is not the only question we should be asking. Marketing theorist Byron Sharp argues that the most important thing a brand can do is be mentally available: present in memory at the moment a buyer enters a purchase situation. Rather than chasing intent signals, we need to figure out how to become one of the first vendors people can name. That means making ourselves easier to choose:

• Show up where buyers are actually forming preferences: peer networks, community conversations, Slack, and Teams channels. Not just the channels we can attribute.
• Invest in brand awareness and thought leadership alongside attribution-driven campaigns, not instead of them.
• Replace polish with proof: case studies, peer validation, and real customer voices carry more weight in the dark funnel than any ad placement.
• Create content that helps buyers feel confident explaining their choice internally because in most B2B purchases, someone has to sell the decision upward before a contract gets signed.

The buying process itself is non-linear. It loops and doubles back across our carefully defined funnel stages. And here's the part that often gets overlooked: the first sale is only the beginning. 78% of buyers find reasons to like a brand only after they first buy something from it. Which means your post-purchase customer experience isn't a separate workstream from demand generation — it is demand generation. Every support interaction, every onboarding conversation, every moment a customer feels heard or ignored is quietly shaping the next referral, the next case study, the next peer recommendation that shows up in someone else's dark funnel.

As someone who holds both a creative and analytical lens on this work, I feel the tension here in equal measure. My creative side sees genuine opportunity: when the pathways to purchase multiply, so do the opportunities to build brand loyalty and get imaginative with content. But my analytical side shudders a little at the ambiguity. I like being able to see what's working.

What I keep coming back to is this: once we've accepted that there are limits to how far we can see in the dark, we need to start treating "mystery" signals as valuable information rather than failures.

Untracked Pipeline Is Still Pipelinelink to this section

A pipeline generated by an unknown source is not a failure of measurement. It's a signal—and often, it's a CX signal.

If sales opportunities arrive with clear intent and no recorded touchpoints, something happened to get them there. So ask your prospects directly how they learned about a product. It could be that the champions at each prospective account are all part of the same professional network. Or that they all heard the product mentioned on the same podcast. Or that a customer had a standout experience and talked about it somewhere you'll never be able to track.

That last one matters more than we give it credit for. The conversations happening in peer communities, in internal communication channels, in post-meeting debriefs; these are customer experience touchpoints. They're just not ones we control or measure in the traditional sense. Companies that invest in communications infrastructure—in making every customer interaction clearer, faster, and more consistent—are quietly building the conditions for word-of-mouth that the funnel will never fully capture.

The competition isn't winning because they're measuring the traditional funnel better. They've figured out they need to show up in the spaces where the usual metrics don't reach. And in many cases, they're earning that presence by delivering experiences worth talking about.

Show Up Anywaylink to this section

The role of marketers has changed. We can no longer assume our audience is a blank slate, just waiting for our influence. By the time most buyers engage with us directly, they've already done the work. Content should build confidence, minimize risk, and bolster early preferences, not just introduce them.

But the deeper shift is this: the funnel and the customer experience are no longer separate. The dark funnel is fed by every interaction a customer has ever had with your brand—before, during, and after the sale. Marketers who understand this are the ones who will stop chasing attribution and start investing in the full conversation lifecycle.

The next time you're staring at your scrambled attribution report, shift your perspective. Just because you can't see where things are happening doesn't mean you can't influence them. Conversations have always contained the most valuable data we have. As customer pathways multiply, the companies that invest in the quality of those conversations (not just the quantity of their campaigns) are the ones that will show up first when it matters most.

The funnel isn't dead. It just got a lot more interesting.

Camila Cook

VP, Demand Generation, 8x8

Camila Cook is Vice President of Global Demand Generation at 8x8, leading programs across paid media, ABM, web, and lifecycle channels to drive pipeline and revenue growth. With more than a decade of B2B marketing experience across communications, SaaS, and cybersecurity – including prior roles at Twilio, Freshworks, and Genesys – she focuses on building full-funnel demand engines that connect marketing directly to revenue outcomes.