Most of what a B2B buyer does before they talk to you is invisible.
First-party data is the easy part. Someone fills a form, opens an email, books a demo, and it lands in your CRM where you can act on it.
But that's the tail end of the journey. The part before the hand-raise is mostly a black box: the LinkedIn ads they scroll past, the few they actually click, the third time they quietly check your pricing page. LinkedIn especially.
At Everstage we put that signal back in the funnel.
Here's the plumbing. Factors.ai gives us company-level LinkedIn touchpoints (impressions served to an account, clicks from an account, paid and organic) as a daily drop into an S3 bucket. And it's not just ad signals — de-anonymized web visits come through the same pipe, so we see which company hit which page before they ever fill anything out. That's the dark social and dark funnel part of B2B buying, finally captured in one place.
A Snowflake S3 integration pulls all of it into our warehouse every morning, and a set of scripts rolls every touchpoint up to the account: LinkedIn, web, email, forms, CRM activity, intent score. The output is one field per account — what stage is it in right now.
The four early stages, with the kind of signal that lands an account there:
1. Unidentified: no deal, no signal. We don't know they're looking yet.
2. Identified: first faint touch. 40+ LinkedIn impressions, a couple of marketing email opens, or a single page view. They've crossed our radar.
3. Aware: they're starting to notice us. 85+ LinkedIn impressions, a first ad click, two or more site visits, a form fill, or a mid-range intent score.
4. Engaged: actual buying behavior. 100+ LinkedIn impressions, multiple ad clicks, a demo or pricing form fill, a two-way conversation, or a high intent score.
One definition, two teams. Marketing sees which accounts their LinkedIn spend is actually warming, and where to nurture next. Sales watches an account climb from Aware to Engaged before anyone fills a form, and reaches out while the intent is still fresh.
The signal was always there. It just lived in three tools that didn't talk to each other.