Your pipeline report covers about 5% of your market

A B2B marketing agency helps a business win customers whose purchases involve multiple decision makers, formal evaluation and long timelines. In practice that means two jobs running at once: capturing demand from the small share of accounts evaluating now, and creating familiarity among the much larger share who will buy later. It also means producing material for a buying committee rather than a single buyer, and measuring in a way that survives a cycle where most of the decision happens before your sales team is involved.

It is the finding, published by Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute in 2021 and popularized by LinkedIn's B2B Institute, that only about 5% of business buyers are in market to purchase in any given quarter. The remaining 95% will buy eventually, often years later. Because in-market share is roughly the inverse of the category purchase cycle, a category where companies buy every five years has about 20% in market per year and 5% per quarter. It is a heuristic rather than a law, and intent data vendors argue the true share is higher in some categories, but the implication holds: marketing aimed only at active buyers ignores most of your future customers.

Gartner's 2024 B2B Buying Survey puts complex purchases at six to ten decision makers, each arriving with four or five pieces of information they gathered independently. Forrester reports an average of 13 people in enterprise buying groups, and more than half of committees include a VP-level stakeholder or above. The practical consequence is that a committee of eight brings roughly forty independently sourced facts into the room, most of which the vendor did not supply and cannot see.

About 17% of the total purchase journey, according to Gartner, and that figure covers all suppliers combined. Split across three or four vendors under consideration, any single sales team gets roughly 5 to 6% of the buyer's attention. Gartner also finds buyers spend around 27% of purchase time researching independently online, 75% would prefer a rep-free experience for as long as possible, and 77% describe their most recent purchase as complex or difficult. Your sales team is not driving the process, it is being briefly consulted during it.

Forrester benchmarks put enterprise technology purchases at 11 to 17 months from first touch to closed won. Analysis of anonymous buying behavior from 6sense suggests the portion visible to a vendor, from first sales conversation to signature, is typically only the final three to five months. Demand Gen Report found more than half of buyers spend three months or more in active research before speaking to a representative at all. Platform replacements and regulated industries run longer still.

Usually, at least partly. Forrester found 92% of B2B buyers begin their journey with at least one vendor already in mind, and 41% start with a single preferred vendor. That means the competition for a place on the shortlist happened before the buying process opened, during a period when the account was not in market and nothing was measurable. It is the strongest available argument for sustained brand presence, because mental availability at the moment of entry is decided beforehand.

Because consensus is hard. Forrester's State of Business Buying found 86% of B2B purchases stall at some point in the process, and 81% of buyers end up dissatisfied with the provider they chose. Gartner reported in 2025 that 74% of buying teams experience unhealthy conflict, while committees that reach genuine consensus are 2.5 times more likely to call the outcome a high-quality decision. Deals rarely stall because your champion stopped believing. They stall because your champion could not win an internal argument you were not present for, which is why forwardable business case material matters more than another product demo.

Both, and the split depends on your category cycle. If companies in your market buy every five years, only about 5% are in market this quarter, so a budget spent entirely on capture is competing for a twentieth of the opportunity while ignoring the accounts that will buy in years two through five. Equally, abandoning capture to build brand means losing the deals happening right now. The practical answer is to fund both and, crucially, to measure them differently, because judging brand work on this month's pipeline guarantees you will cancel it.