
Here's what I've learned after decades of selling: Your customers aren't progressing in an orderly manner through a carefully crafted sales funnel. They don’t moving predictably from awareness to consideration to purchase, as we were taught in Marketing 101.
The harsh reality? Most early decision-making for your leads doesn’t involve you at all, which is why selling often feels like you are screaming into the void.
There is a term for this coined by the marketing tech firm 6sense: the "Dark Funnel."
The dark funnel describes the invisible early stages of buying, when prospects research and form opinions. Happening within the dark funnel are all those mysterious and untraceable factors that influence whether a buyer ever agrees to a meeting: emails that are scanned but not acknowledged, voicemails that are listened to, exploratory visits to a website or your social media profile, and word-of-mouth recommendations. Essentially, we are referring to all the actions taken by leads that influence decisions without leaving visible-to-you traces.
When the outcomes are invisible, it’s easy to say, “This isn’t working,” and stop taking the actions. That is a bad plan. Why? Because there’s solid science behind why consistent and repeated steps to achieve and maintain visibility are necessary to win. Here are some things to consider:
The Exposure Effect: This psychological concept suggests that familiarity breeds preference, rather than contempt. When leads see your name, your insights, or your helpful comments repeatedly (even casually), they develop a subconscious preference for you. You become the familiar choice, which feels like the safe choice.
Priming and the Halo Effect: These work together to help you get “filed” into the right places in the lead’s memory. Share helpful information about a recent project, celebrate your new equipment purchase, or answer technical questions. These actions help you get mentally filed under “possible printers” and "knowledgeable." Even if the lead can't remember exactly what you said a month later when they are quoting a project, they are likely to remember that you are worth being considered as a vendor.
Cognitive Ease is perhaps the most powerful principle at play. Human brains are lazy. We all prefer things that feel effortless and familiar. When repeated exposure makes it easy for potential buyers to remember you, outreach feels like a natural next step.
The Printing Industry's Dark Funnel Reality
In printing, the dark funnel is both a real and powerful phenomenon. Marketers are busy, and buying printing is an intermittent purchasing activity. When a lead needs a solution, they want recommendations from people they already know, even if they have not interacted with you. If you have been reaching out, and they haven’t said, “STOP CONTACTING ME!” then they may have been quietly watching and assessing you.
So, how do you win? You don't need a massive budget or complex strategy to succeed in the dark funnel. You need consistent outreach, accompanied by demonstrations of expertise and visible trust signals. You need to do this, even when it doesn’t yield immediate results.
For more information on how to set up a long-term approach, check out my article, “When Leads Don’t Respond, You Have to Nurture.”
The Long Game Pays Off
Working in the dark funnel is a strategic approach. It requires patience. You're building influence slowly, relationship by relationship, interaction by interaction. The dark funnel rewards authentic relationship building over aggressive selling. It favors consistent value creation over short contact bursts. And in an industry built on relationships, this approach helps you get meetings and turn leads into customers.
The preceding content was provided by a contributor unaffiliated with Printing Impressions. The views expressed within may not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of the staff of Printing Impressions. Artificial Intelligence may have been used in part to create or edit this content.
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- Business Management - Marketing/Sales

Linda Bishop is the founder and president of Thought Transformation, a national sales and marketing consulting group helping printers and other companies achieve top-line growth through a combination of strategies, tools, training and tactics.
Her expertise includes all aspects of outbound selling and account acquisition, account retention and development, solution selling, marketing, and aligning sales processes with marketing strategies. Most recently, she published The ChatGPT Sales Playbook: Revolutionizing Sales with AI and believes AI will offer sales pros new tools for achieving revenue goals.
Before starting Thought Transformation in 2004, Linda sold commercial printing for seventeen years, working as a commission salesperson for the Atlanta division of RR Donnelley Company. She was one of the top performers in the Atlanta marketplace and had annual sales exceeding $9 million.
Linda has a BS degree in accounting from Purdue University and an MBA in marketing from Georgia State. She has written several books on sales topics, speaks nationally on sales and marketing, and has published many articles.