Buyers have already decided before you know they exist

Even today, with all of the tech, metrics, and AI that even smaller B2B businesses have at their disposal, so many organizations seem intent on wasting ludicrous amounts of money and resources trying to be findable at the exact moment when buyers are the least open to being found.

What many businesses fail to factor into their demand generation planning is any understanding of how we, as humans, make buying decisions.

By the time a buyer starts looking for a potential vendor, they’ve already decided, at least provisionally, which products or brands are worth considering. In the weeks, months, or even years it’s taken for that person to move into an active buying phase, they haven’t been living under a rock, unexposed to any marketing output. The brands that are now in their heads as being possible buying choices, got in there a long time ago. They got in there because those brands understood the role that brand marketing plays, creating output (content, ads, PR, social, whatever) that would be seen and silently filed away by prospects, only coming into the fore when reactivated.

That active search that follows is mostly a formality. The buyer is simply performing the process of gathering evidence to support a preference that was already starting to form.

Most of us continue to design our marketing around that search moment, but that’s way too late as far as the prospect customer’s purchasing process is concerned. The buyer consideration shortlist, a list that’s effectively determining whether we’re thought about when a buyer’s ready to buy, has already been assembled during a period when we had no idea it was happening.

Buyers are doing their research way earlier than we think

According to 6sense, buyers complete more than four-fifths of their evaluation independently before making contact with any vendor. The business reached first wins the business around eight times out of ten. We can say the outcome of most sales conversations is largely decided well before the first calendar invite was emailed.

Since we have no idea it’s going on, the phase when this evaluation happens is almost entirely invisible to the businesses being assessed. A prospective client has been quietly reading, cross-referencing, asking trusted peers whether we’re worth talking to, perhaps being steered by an AI tool that has its own view of who the credible players are in a given category. But none of this customer intent data shows up in our CRM, for example. Nothing’s surfaced above the waterline, so for us it registers as silence.

By the time someone reaches out, the question they’re working through isn’t really, “Should I consider this business?” It’s more like, “Do I still feel good about the impression I’ve already formed?” While we’re thinking our conversation is the beginning of the sales process, we’re actually not far off from its conclusion.

AI: The research phase now has a second reader

Everything I’ve said so far comes from the assumption that the below-the waterline invisible product research phase happens entirely inside a buyer’s head, shaped by what they’ve noticed and half-remembered over time. But today a growing part of that research now runs through an AI platform that reads a prompt, forms its own view of who’s credible in a category, and hands the buyer something that looks a lot less like a list of options and far more like a suggestion or recommendation.

AI used like this means we have to review our thinking on the mental availability issue, since there’s something else in the room that’s influencing the buyer, and doesn’t form impressions the way a human being does. Unlike us, AI doesn’t half-remember a logo from a conference three years ago, or file away a colleague’s offhand comment. Researchers at Princeton and Georgia Tech, in a study that coined the term “Generative Engine Optimization”, found that citing credible sources and including specific statistics were among the strongest levers for getting a page cited in an AI-generated answer.

As with SEO, this second-guessing of an algorithm isn’t an exact science. What’s worse is that different LLMs give different results from the same prompt, and anything medium-term we do to influence them looking kindly at us can turn on a dime when the AI model gets its next update. Regardless, we’re talking about a different kind of presence to build than the one marketing has spent decades getting good at. Being memorable to a human buyer and being citable to an AI system doing research on that buyer’s behalf are related problems, but they’re not the same problem, and the infrastructure we’ve built for the first one wasn’t designed with the second one in mind.

For the past twenty-plus years we’ve worked at getting better at saying less. Our homepage copy has become shorter and punchier, because that’s what CRO told us it took to hold a stranger’s attention for the four seconds before they bounced. The system now reading that same page for evidence doesn’t have the same attention span problem we were optimizing for. The shortlist we’re trying to get onto now has a second gatekeeper, one that reads different signals than the ones marketing content has been optimized to produce. In fact, it’s looking wider and deeper for confirmation of its answer. An analysis of over a million AI-cited links from ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini found that earned media alone accounts for 82% of what AI systems cite, journalism most of all. PR, done properly, might be getting a second wind none of us saw coming.

Having a great product isn’t always enough

The businesses that have grown steadily, thanks to referrals and client reputation, misinterpret the reason potential buyers are knocking on their door. They’ll conclude these actions as proof that brand or product “quality” is doing most of the heavy lifting. But that’s only true for the percentage of prospects who were already minded to include them.

There’s a marketing term called Mental Availability, which is the likelihood of a brand coming to mind when a relevant purchase situation arises. Years of research and study by reputable institutions such as The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, into how buyers make category decisions, has found that mental availability is a stronger predictor of an organization’s market share than perceived quality or price competitiveness.

Most B2B businesses compete on demonstrated competence once a buyer is in front of them, assuming the buyer is already there and already disposed to listen. But the issue of building enough presence to be considered in the first place sits further upstream in the marketing process. It tends to go unaddressed because the symptoms, an erratic flow of inbound and a pipeline that leans too heavily on referrals, are misread as being a sales execution problem when they’re really a marketing one.

Demand generation spending is aimed at buyers already in active purchasing mode. Sounds like the obvious place to focus our efforts, right? That is, until you factor in that every competitor in the category has reached exactly the same (flawed) conclusion. We’re all showing up at the same party, wearing the same clothes and cologne, falling over each other to make an impression on people who already have a date.

But there’s an audience profile that no-one’s bothering with right now. It’s an audience profile that’s nineteen times as large as the profile we’re all trying to schmooze.

I’m talking about the businesses that will eventually be in the market to buy, who will eventually build a shortlist of their own, but as of right now don’t have budget approval and aren’t Googling anything relevant. Since these future customers aren’t going to convert this quarter, most of our competitors aren’t interested in what they see as wasting time playing the futures market. But it’s exactly where we should be spending part (certainly not all, but probably the majority) of our marketing budget.

Brand familiarity built during the period when someone isn’t buying is precisely what determines whether we’re on the list when they finally are. Business owners and marketing managers bet the farm on ultra-targeted demand generation campaigns and wonder why sales pipeline keeps fluctuating, while a competitor with a less sophisticated tech stack keeps showing up on buyer shortlists.

So what do we actually do about all of this?

From a business structure perspective, the way marketing currently gets planned and measured makes it impossible to fund the activity I’m talking about. Budget cycles only reward what’s attributable, but marketing is probabilistic and isn’t a 100% perfectly-attributable endeavor. Brand building, and the steady category presence that determines whether we’re on a shortlist we don’t even know exists yet, doesn’t show up in a neat spreadsheet cell, so rarely survives any kind of budget conversation. The activity with the greatest long-term effect on pipeline gets cut first when the quarter looks soft, and funded last when it looks healthy.

One way around this is to treat brand presence as a fixed cost rather than a discretionary one. The moment it becomes something the CFO chooses to fund only when the business can afford to, we’ve shot ourselves in the foot, and killed any compounding effect that made it worth doing.

Looking at this dispassionately, we could say this isn’t particularly complicated in principle. In practice, however, it crashes head first into every incentive structure that governs how most marketing budgets get approved, justified, and renewed. That makes it less a marketing problem than an organizational one, which is probably why the research behind it has been sitting in plain sight for years without changing how businesses actually allocate their spend.