Three meditations: something to think about, a “how-to” resource, and a marketing deep dive. Ommmmmm.
Something to Think About
“How To”
This is my favorite “how-to” tutorial of 2025 so far.
Jen Allen-Knuthis a great follow on LinkedIn and frequently posts useful and insightful info. While this is more individual-focused (like LinkedIn itself), it’s a great playbook for building up your recommendations with positive and relevant input from actual people/companies you’ve worked with.
A Marketing Deep Dive
The Dark Funnel Playbook
My dad annoyed salespeople.
He was a “reader.”
I don’t mean that he read a lot (which he did).
Rather, when he made a significant purchase, he would read up on it beforehand. He did his research.
He didn’t go out to buy a car expecting to come home with a car.
He went out first to talk to the salespeople and collect literature.
Then he came home and thoroughly read it.
Before he bought a car, he knew more about it than the reps. He would often correct them about particular features of the car he was considering.
By the time he bought anything, he knew exactly what he wanted and why.
He didn’t just read up on features. He shopped prices, looked at the cost difference from out of state dealers. He compared the total cost of ownership, licensing fees, taxes, and mileage.
He also did normal things like test drives—except he always took more than one.
As a result, he was not the kind of buyer that salespeople preferred.
He moved at his own pace. Sometimes they didn’t want to take time with him. He was okay with that.
I saw him with all kinds of sales reps.
Some were pushy, some tried to tell him things that weren’t true (which he knew because he was a reader), some gave up.
He didn’t look down on sales people (unless they lied)
The sales cycle was just going to be longer with him.
He didn’t feel like he owed them anything for the privilege of being a customer.
And he knew the sales cycle would represent a very short part of his experience as a customer. When he was ready, he didn’t agonize about paying.
He had done the work to hand over his money without regret.
He followed the philosophy of “buy good and cry once.”
There are a lot more “readers” today.
Here’s the deal.
Back then, my dad was unusual
His approach only worked if you had his type of personality.
In the old days, it took a lot of patience and effort to do that kind of research before you bought something.
Nowadays, however, it’s the norm.
And it’s a piece of cake.
It requires almost zero patience to read up on a company, a product, or a service.
It’s SO much easier to get information.
Welcome to the “dark funnel.”
The Dark Funnel
You can learn a lot in a hurry before you make a purchase today.
Not only do you not need a salesperson, often you don’t want one.
At least not yet.
Websites, review sites, our connected communities on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are all gold mines of pre-engagement research.
Contacts here (whether friends or anonymous) with no ulterior motive are willing to share their opinions and experiences.
And those opinions are generally more trusted than salespeople (who can’t escape being biased).
Buyers today will probe in Slack channels, Discord servers, subreddits, WhatsApp groups, and other social channels. And every response they get is laced with copious amounts of social proof.
Increasingly they will follow up via ChatGPT, Perplexity, or other AI tools for information and to help them perform their purchase research.
None of these platforms deliver a page 1 SERP with 10 results.
There are maybe 2 or 3.
Then the customer might look at Google, but not for first-party data.
They’re looking for reviews, comments, complaints, and stars. And you can’t measure or track almost any of this interest.
Buyers move through the funnel, mostly incognito now.
In this post by Wynter CEO Peep Laja, he shared 2025 survey results from 100 B2B SaaS CMO/VPs.
Maybe after all of that, they’ll hit your website.
Simultaneously, customers are increasingly hostile to the tools of our trade: cookies, tracking pixels, genuine open rates, gated content, and clicks.
All of this creates a problem for marketers like me.
So, what do we do?
A new playbook
It’s important to keep in mind:
- Conversations are happening about key purchases
- If your product isn’t part of the conversation, you’re invisible
- Often word-of-mouth gets you into the conversation, so people have to be part of your strategy.
Get into the conversation by
- Deliver great experiences. Create more happy customers.
- Doggedly hunt for customer insights. Build a process for capturing these.
- Find other voices and communities that can carry your message
- Create content that can be found and shared.
- Optimize now for AI-powered purchasing
At CMO Zen, we’re helping clients tackle this constantly.
People are still buying things. They still have problems to be solved.
They are just going to new watering holes to solve them.
Tech is giving them the freedom to respond to feelings they’ve always had in the buying process, but weren’t empowered to express.
And that is…
…people are looking to be served, not sold.
Namaste,
Chad Jardine, CEO
CMO Zen
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