The 95% Who Aren't Buying Yet: Why Presence Beats Timing

Most growth budget chases today's buyers.

The bigger part of the job is much earlier.

It happens in the months they're not buying.

Easy to miss. The buyers who are ready reply and close this quarter.

But buying runs on a longer clock. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has a rule of thumb for B2B: at any moment, up to 95% of buyers are not in the market.

They derived it from banking. A company changes its main bank about once every five years.

Financing runs on a similar clock. A company can go years without needing any.

Then when the need hits, they go to the name they already know, usually their main bank.

So the job is bigger than catching whoever is ready this quarter. It's being that known name through the months a buyer isn't buying at all.

There are three ways to pay for that presence.

With ads, you rent it. You pay every month, and the month you stop paying, you're gone.

Outreach tries to catch the moment. Every message goes out aimed at the point where the need appears, and it gets spent whether or not it lands on the right week.

Content is the one you end up owning, because every post adds to the last and it keeps building your presence.

That's why we believe publishing on LinkedIn is worth the effort in this market, and why we build it into every system we design.