The Rise of the Invisible Funnel: How to Win Buyers Before They Fill Out a Form

The Funnel Still Exists But Your Buyer Has Gone Dark

Here’s the uncomfortable truth for B2B fintech and treasury tech marketers:

Your buyers aren’t filling out forms anymore.

They’re not downloading your whitepapers.

They’re not clicking your lead gen ads.

But somehow… they’re still buying — largely on their own terms. In fact, B2B buyers are now nearly 70% through their purchase journey before they ever engage a sales rep, and in 80% of cases it’s the buyer (not the vendor) who initiates the first contact. - Demand Gen Report

This is the Invisible Funnel — the network of touchpoints, impressions, and signals your buyers engage with long before they show up in your CRM. And if your marketing is still built around gated assets and tracked conversions, you’re missing the moment of influence.

What Is the Invisible Funnel? 🔍

The Invisible Funnel is everything your prospect does before they raise their hand:

Reading a market outlook in The Global Treasurer
Sharing a quote from your article in a CFO Slack channel
Hearing your exec speak at a virtual panel
Spotting your brand name across multiple analyst features
Reading an industry trend report without ever downloading it

There’s no pixel to track. No form to fill. No UTM in sight. But it’s in these moments that brand trust is built, positioning is shaped, and preference is formed. By the time someone books a demo, they’ve already decided who’s worth talking to – in fact, 81% of buyers have a preferred vendor in mind when they first reach out to sales as per Demand Gen Report's article.

Performance marketing isn’t dead. But it’s no longer the alpha channel it once was. And most treasury tech vendors aren’t even aware they were in the running.

Why Traditional B2B Funnels Are Failing in Treasury Tech 📉

1. Finance Buyers Are Cautious, Not Clicky

CFOs, treasurers, and risk officers don’t browse like your average lead. They rely on trusted sources — not random landing pages. If you’re not showing up in their world, you’re invisible. It’s telling that only about 15% of buyers even consult vendor-produced marketing materials when making a purchase decision — the vast majority turn to independent research and peer input instead.

2. Long Cycles, Hidden Influence

Enterprise finance deals involve multiple stakeholders and long evaluation windows. Most buying signals don’t happen on your site — they happen in research mode, in dark social, or across media ecosystems. Indeed, 59% of B2B buyers now involve at least four people in their buying committees, and 25% include seven or more stakeholders in the decision. Somewhere along the way, performance marketing stopped being about growth — and started being about metrics theatre. Influence is dispersed and largely invisible to vendors.

3. Gated Content Equals Friction

If your most valuable content is buried behind a form, it’s not getting read. Your ICP won’t trade their contact info for a pitch deck disguised as a whitepaper. No wonder barely half of B2B buyers (only 48%) say they’re even “very willing” to provide their email for gated content. Ungated content, by contrast, generates about 26% higher engagement than gated assets. In short, every form fill requirement is an off-ramp for a skeptical prospect.

4. Sales Signals Come Too Late

Lead forms tell you someone’s ready to talk. But by then, the shortlist is set. You needed to earn attention weeks (or months) earlier. If you wait until the demo request to engage, you’re chasing a buyer who’s already 10 steps ahead in their journey.

What Smart Treasury Tech Marketers Are Doing Instead 🔁

image-png-2

✅ 1. Embedding Content in Trusted Finance Ecosystems

Instead of relying solely on branded blogs and gated PDFs, leading fintech and treasury tech marketers are partnering with trusted industry media, analyst-aligned outlets, and peer communities to distribute insight-led content. Why it matters: B2B buyers heavily weight independent voices when forming a shortlist; Forrester research shows buyers place high trust in non-vendor sources such as peers, industry experts, and analysts (trust levels in the mid-60s to low-70s percent range), while trust in “cold” vendor outreach lags far behind incumbent relationships. Showing up inside channels buyers already regard as objective credibility builders dramatically increases downstream consideration.

✅ 2. Tracking Engagement Signals Over Lead Forms

If your attribution model still starts at “form submit,” you’re only seeing the loudest 20%. Modern buying teams self-educate across digital touchpoints and actively avoid interruptive outreach. Gartner’s 2025 buyer survey found 61% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience — and 73% say they avoid suppliers that bombard them with irrelevant contact attempts. That’s a clear mandate to monitor behavioral intent signals (repeat article views, topic depth, return frequency, account-level readership in trusted finance media) rather than forcing every interaction through a gate.

✅ 3. Prioritising Buyer Signals, Not Just Leads

Buying groups circulate insight internally long before procurement steps in. Make your most useful material — regulatory explainers, liquidity benchmarks, FX risk scenarios, ROI models — easy to access and forward across treasury, finance, and risk teams. Omnichannel access matters: McKinsey’s 2024 Global B2B Pulse shows buyers now use an average of ~10 interaction channels across their journey and expect to move fluidly between self-serve digital, remote, and human-assisted touchpoints (“rule of thirds”). Content that’s locked in one channel or tied to heavy forms falls out of that flow.

They’re using engagement data — content topics consumed, scroll depth, return visits — to identify in-market accounts before they fill out a form.

✅ 4. Aligning Content Strategy With the Research Window

Complex treasury and finance platform decisions involve extended discovery across those multiple channels. Plan programmed content “waves” that map to early problem framing (market shifts, regulatory triggers), mid-stage comparison (integration checklists, TCO frameworks), and late-stage validation (case proof, risk mitigation). Meeting buyers in-channel during their research cycle keeps you in consideration as stakeholders rotate in and requirements harden. The same McKinsey Pulse data highlights that seamless movement across mixed interaction modes is now table stakes; missing the early digital research window means fighting uphill later in procurement.

Proof It Works: A Look Inside The Global Treasurer 📊

A recent fintech client embedded a native report series on cross-border liquidity trends within The Global Treasurer, targeting CFOs and global treasury leads.

Over 8 weeks:

72% of downstream demo requests came from accounts that first engaged with the report — but never filled out a form.
41% of readers viewed 3+ articles before eventually hitting a conversion page.
Engagement time on the native report was 4.5× higher than the client’s own gated eBook.

The campaign worked — but only because it started long before the form fill. By the time the prospects requested a demo, they already knew the brand and saw it as a trusted voice on the topic.

Final Thought for Treasury Tech Marketers 🧠

In a world where finance buyers are cautious, risk-averse, and hard to reach, your biggest competitor isn’t another vendor — it’s an invisible journey you’re not even part of.

Stop waiting for your audience to convert.

Start showing up where they’re already researching.

And invest in the signals before the sale.

Because in treasury tech marketing, the deal doesn’t start at the demo — it starts in the shadows.

Sources:

Gated content, B2B Marketing, Lead Generation, Fintech Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Marketing Attribution