At any moment, only 5% of B2B buyers are actively in-market. Yet 80% of your budget is probably chasing them. This short-term focus is turning your growth engine into a costly treadmill. Here’s how to fix it by shifting your focus to the 95%.

Your demand generation program is fighting over scraps.

Every campaign. Every LinkedIn ad. Every gated eBook. All competing for the same tiny slice of buyers who are in-market right now.

Meanwhile, 95% of your future customers are out there. Not looking. Not comparing. Not responding to your ads.

And your competitors are quietly building the brand awareness that will

The Maths Is Brutal: The 95:5 Rule

Press enter or click to view image in full size

The foundational research, known as the 95:5 Rule, comes from Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science (EBI), in partnership with the LinkedIn B2B Institute and Bain. It tells us something uncomfortable.

At any given moment, only 5% of B2B buyers are actively in the market. This 5% isn’t an arbitrary number; it’s a derived figure based on the long, predictable interpurchase cycles of most high-value B2B products (often 2–5 years).

The critical finding: When those 95% eventually transition into the 5%, 81% of buyers already know which product will win. Not after they’ve filled in a single demo form. On Day One of their active evaluation.

The decision is basically made. Based on brand familiarity built long before they started actively looking.

Why Everyone Fights Over the 5%

Demand generation programs are built to capture intent. Someone downloads your eBook. They’re showing interest. Your marketing automation scores them. Sales gets an alert. Hot lead.

It’s measurable. It’s trackable. It feels productive. Your dashboard shows MQLs going up. Everyone’s happy.

Until you look at what’s actually happening to your customer acquisition costs (CAC).

CAC has jumped 222% since 2013. Not because marketing stopped working. Because everyone’s fishing in the same tiny pond.

The 5% who are in-market right now are being hammered by every competitor. Everything costs more because you’re all fighting over the same scarce resource.

Meanwhile, the 95% who will eventually buy remain almost completely ignored.

The Day One Problem

B2B purchase decisions involve 6.3 stakeholders on average. For the deal to close, enough of those people need to already know your brand, trust it, and believe it’s the right choice.

The LinkedIn/Bain research found that 81% of successful deals were with brands known by almost everyone in the buying group on Day One.

That familiarity isn’t built during active evaluation. It’s built during the months and years before. When buyers weren’t looking. When they were in the 95%.

The Strategic Paradox

Les Binet and Peter Field analysed decades of campaigns and found something simple: brands that spend 60% on long-term building and 40% on short-term activation grow faster. Most B2B companies do the opposite.

Most B2B companies do the opposite. Maybe 20% brand, 80% demand gen. Some do 10/90.

The result? You’re optimising for short-term efficiency whilst slowly losing long-term effectiveness.

What Brand Building Actually Means

Brand building in B2B isn’t about logo redesigns or purpose statements. It’s about mental availability.

When a buyer enters the market, which brands come to mind? When they start researching, which companies do they already know?

That’s brand. And it’s built by being consistently visible when buyers aren’t looking.

Thought leadership content. Consistent, strategic LinkedIn presence. Industry events. Podcast sponsorships. Original research. Founder visibility.

None of it generates leads this quarter. All of it determines who wins deals next year.

Here’s What This Looks Like in Practice

When we work with SaaS companies, the rebalancing usually means:

• Shift 20–30% of ad spend from Google Search (pure demand capture) to LinkedIn organic + sponsored content (brand building)
• Publish 2–3 thought leadership pieces per week from your sales team, not just marketing
• Measure different metrics: Track share of voice in your category, not just MQLs
• Accept a 6-month lag: Brand metrics move slower than lead gen, but the ROI is higher

One client we advised moved from 90% demand gen to 60/40 brand/activation. After 5 months, their cost per SQL dropped 40% because inbound leads were pre-qualified.”

The Rebalancing Act

You can’t ignore the 5%. Someone’s got to capture demand when buyers are ready.

But if that’s all you’re doing, you’re building a business on increasingly expensive land whilst competitors buy up everything around you.

The fix isn’t complicated. It’s just uncomfortable.

Shift budget from bottom of funnel to top. Invest in brand before buyers are actively looking. Accept that results take six months, not six weeks.

Run campaigns that build familiarity rather than capturing intent. Put your founders and subject matter experts out there. Create content that actually helps rather than gates everything for lead gen.

Stop fighting over today’s 5%. Start building for tomorrow’s 100%.

Because by the time they enter the market, 81% will have already decided. The only question is whether they’ll choose you or the competitor who figured this out first.

If you are ready to stop fighting for today’s 5% and start systematically building the mental availability that guarantees tomorrow’s deals, the rebalancing act begins now.