The Dark Funnel: Why Tech Marketing Attribution Fails and What to Do About It

CMOs, CROs and CEOs are in a tough spot. Marketing attribution models (Google Analytics, Salesforce, etc.) only capture 30% of the factors that impact a purchase decision. The other 70%, which Gartner terms the “Dark Funnel,” is, well, opaque. We looked at Remidi data to dig deeper into the numbers and found new light in the darkness.

Marketing Attribution and Marketing Mix: what they are and why they matter

Consumer products companies are best in class at data-driven marketing. When I was running Nielsen’s global consumer panel business, 20% of our business was from advanced analytics, and specifically marketing attribution and marketing mix. We combined purchase data from millions of shoppers with marketing touchpoints: media, in-store, promotional offers, pricing, and any other factor where the brand reached consumers and there was data at scale to measure it.

• Marketing Attribution models the total and relative impact of every element on purchase behavior so marketers know what worked and what didn’t.
• Data is typically fed into a Marketing Mix Model that optimizes marketing spend across the different buckets to maximize sales.

Both models only work at scale and with sufficient data. Everyone from McKinsey on down has a proprietary Marketing Mix model; they just need the data to feed it.

Why doesn’t SaaS marketing attribution look like this?

I’ve worked with dozens of early- and growth-stage SaaS companies, often as CMO. The quarterly board meeting process usually goes something like this:

1. The CEO has to report on the company’s GTM and pipeline.
2. The CRO deep dives into Salesforce and other internal systems (like Gong, for example) and pulls up a plethora of stats and facts to show what their team is doing, down to the most minute details by rep and customer.
3. The CMO deep dives where numbers exist: top-of-funnel demand gen, email, webinar conversions. They can report down to the keyword how their SEO is doing. Any strategic marketing initiatives are usually avoided.

The Dark Funnel

Here’s the issue. The CRO and CMO are only reporting on that 30%, the highly measurable elements of the GTM. The Dark Funnel is all the other things that are not easily measurable: Pricing, Positioning, ICP accuracy, Trust Building, and the rest of commercial strategy. The marketing attribution models companies use either don’t account for these elements or don’t accurately measure their impact.

The question is whether it’s possible to measure the impact of these commercial strategy elements at all. That is the critical first step to taking smarter action.

What Remidi’s data shows

Remidi scored the Dark Funnel commercial strategy elements on a standard health scale to give operators the data they need to make smarter and faster decisions. We’ve scored 800+ technology and tech-enabled services companies using AI, deep research, and a methodology we developed over the past 20 years. Companies are scored on a scale of 1-100 and across 28 sub-dimensions. Operators and investors can benchmark and track performance against the database.

To prove that the model works and accurately measures impact, we assigned each company a Winner Score, based on a combination of independent review-site classification (G2 Crowd, primarily), number of reviews, and other independent markers of success. You can read a full description of the methodology here.

The findings were clear. Companies with a top-quartile Remidi score were 11x more likely to be a Winner than those in the bottom quartile.

The winner rate rises as the score rises, with the steepest gains concentrated in the 60s and 70s. Modest score improvements at the inflection points translate into outsized changes in winner odds. A company moving from the high-40s into the low-60s, or from the mid-60s into the mid-70s, sees a winner-odds shift that is much larger than the score-point shift would suggest.

And winners score better across the board. Pricing & Packaging is the biggest difference, though there are plenty of value-creation opportunities in the other dimensions too.

What this looks like in practice

A vertical SaaS growth-stage company we recently rescored is a clean example. The company had performed a website refresh and wanted to measure the impact.

In March 2026, they were sitting at an overall score of 42, rated Needs Attention. After they launched their new site, we rescored them to measure the improvement.

The results showed the refresh was high impact, and the company had hit on most, but not all, of their weakest points. They still have a pricing challenge, but they moved toward much greater transparency.

The CMO can walk into the next board meeting with a measurable, third-party-validated picture of what changed and what it means for win odds. The board can see that an objective third party found that the company’s GTM is actually getting better.

What this means for you

It’s easy to avoid activities that don’t get measured, especially if you are a CMO. Sales wants more leads, and it’s easy to show that you delivered them. But that only measures 30% of the marketing activities that actually generate demand. We recommend the following:

• Sales and marketing agree on shared KPIs and an evaluation framework.
• Evaluate all strategy elements for their impact on the mutual KPIs and prioritize work accordingly.
• Use a robust marketing attribution model that doesn’t only look at the last touchpoint, but can perform multi-touch attribution across the entire buyer journey.

If you need help thinking through how to accomplish all of this, reach out.

Michael Himmelfarb

Founder, Remidi

30 years building measurement businesses at Nielsen across 27 countries. 4x CxO. 3x Operating Partner. Now measuring what matters in commercial strategy for PE-backed B2B software companies.

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