MOFU is dead. Long live MOFU.

We have been through a lot of B2B websites lately, and the navigation menus keep having the same hole in them: there is plenty of material for a stranger who has never heard of the company and a clear path for anyone who has already decided to buy, but nothing, ever, for the person somewhere in between.

That in-between person used to be the most fussed-over prospect in the whole of B2B marketing, back when the done thing was to catch them with a flashy downloadable PDF and then walk them gently toward a demo. So we went looking for whatever had replaced the gated PDF, and what we came back with instead was pretty existential: did the middle of the funnel really ever exist in the first place?

The middle that never was

The premise was reasonable enough at the time. You have a target market, some proportion of which are actively buying while the rest are not. The ones who are not are assumed to need nurturing until they are. Getting them to the point of being ready to convert was presumed to be the job of marketing. This is how a generation of marketers ended up behaving like persistence hunters, following prospects across the digital savanna at a patient jog while luring them in with a whitepaper.

The flaw in the arrangement is that, unsurprisingly, people do not like being told what to do. It turns out that they do not convert on other people's timelines. 

The old TOFU/MOFU/BOFU funnel structure has been losing its grip for a couple of years now. The view du jour is the 95-5 rule, which holds that roughly 5% of potential buyers are in-market at any given moment while the other 95% are not. In this view, the 95% need to remember you for when they turn into the 5% who are ready to buy, driven by whatever internal pressures they face. So the job becomes building demand broadly and capturing whatever happens to be in the market. 

This shift from viewing out-of-market prospects as needing active management to viewing them as people who need to be kept aware is one that informs many things, from the way a website is structured to what voices are being amplified.

The funnel that went dark

Forrester's 2024 Buyers' Journey Survey found that 92% of B2B buyers begin the purchase process with at least one vendor already in mind, and that 41% have settled on a single preferred vendor before formal evaluation even starts. Forrester summarizes this by saying that B2B buying has become a process of confirmation rather than selection. In other words, by the time somebody actually requests that demo the interesting part of the decision is already behind them.

So, the website’s job description has changed along the way, from a discovery tool into a verification tool. Anyone landing on your site now already knows roughly who you are because someone or something told them first, and they have arrived not to be introduced but to check.

The considering itself still happened, of course, and it simply happened somewhere nobody could watch. The industry has taken to calling this region “the dark funnel”, which is an appropriately ominous name for something as ordinary as people talking to each other. The venues are Slack and Discord communities, LinkedIn DMs, Reddit threads, the group chat, and now the LLM window. It’s so scary because these are spaces in which prospects make decisions and interact with brands, and marketers have precisely zero visibility or control over those spaces.

So MOFU is not dead in the sense of having stopped happening, because consideration is alive and in excellent health. What died is the belief that consideration was a stage you owned, sitting tidily on your property somewhere between an ad and a demo.

So… what IS the new PDF?

Something did eventually grow into the whitepaper-shaped hole in website navigation. The survivors of the great downloadable PDF extinction event are the ROI calculators and maturity assessments and diagnostics and sandboxes and interactive demos. These are, overwhelmingly, interactive tools, which is a fairly narrow band of formats to have outlived everything else in the category.

What separates them is that they do a piece of the buyer's work rather than asking the buyer to  give something away. A gated guide requested an email address and offered in exchange a document assembling material the reader could mostly have assembled themselves. A calculator takes the buyer's own numbers and returns an answer about their situation. That answer did not exist anywhere in the world before they arrived to generate it. 

This also happens to fit the confirmation job the site has inherited. Someone arriving to check rather than to be introduced is not in the market for an explanation of the category. What they want is evidence that the thing applies to them in particular. An assessment that tells a visitor their migration is more complicated than average has done a piece of their due diligence for them. This is the closest thing available to sending a representative into the dark funnel on your behalf.

None of which is an argument that every company should go and build a calculator, not least because a good number of the ones already out there are lead capture forms in disguise. A tool that withholds the result until an email address turns up is a gated PDF wearing a trench coat and sunglasses. Buyers today are too discerning to fall for this. The mechanic only works when the useful part is handed over first and the conversation is offered afterward, which means giving the value away before knowing who received it. That is uncomfortable, and it is also the whole point.

Learning to let go

More than just the funnel went dark, and a single interactive tool is not going to solve the whole thing. The straightforward dance of attributed leads, raised up by marketing and shepherded toward a waiting sales representative, does not really exist anymore. We wrote about that here, but two more things are worth pointing out alongside it.

Standard multi-touch CRM attribution has stopped describing anything real as of late. With so many parts of user behavior going dark, attribution becomes problematic. Many marketers now say they have had to go back toward self-reported attribution, which means humbly asking the age-old question of where somebody heard about you. After two decades of building instrumentation for the express purpose of never having to ask, we are asking again. And then there is the sales conversation itself, which has become harder to reach. Gartner found that 67% of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free experience, up from 61% just last year.

Put all of that together, and if you work in B2B marketing or sales, the decisions about your product are happening without you, in rooms you cannot see. Which brings us back to the question of consideration. The thing that does a piece of the buyer's work is precisely the thing that gets mentioned in the room you cannot see. A number somebody generated about their own situation is portable in a way that a whitepaper never was, because it can be pasted into the group chat with a sentence attached to it. 

Your website and everything it contains is not there to move anyone through anything anymore. It is there to hand somebody a reason to mention you when you are not in the room.

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