Why the Best Deals Never Show Up in Your CRM
Buyers are somewhere between 57% and 70% of the way through a purchase decision before they ever contact a supplier, according to Forrester's research on how buyers actually behave. That's a separate finding from a separate body of research -- RadiumOne's work on general web-sharing behaviour, which found that most content sharing online happens through private channels rather than public share buttons. The two studies measure different things. Put them side by side, though, and they point at the same blind spot from two directions: a lot of the decision-making happens somewhere no dashboard is watching. Call it dark social if you want the industry term. It's really just word-of-mouth that happens to be encrypted. The CRM tells a story. It's not always the true one A deal closes, the CRM says the source was organic search, or a referral form, or a webinar signup, but somewhere further back, invisible to any dashboard, a prospect's own network already decid...
