ICP clear? Campaigns chugging? But leads not dropping into the pipeline or pipeline feels stuck? Putting yourself in your customers shoes a little more might help.
Thinking a little different about the psychology of your buyers, when it comes to your value proposition and how you position your points of difference, can help. It’s about ensuring you’re always in the initial consideration set.
Here’s a story we hear quite a bit; Marketing are “doing all the right things”, running campaigns, events, content, qualifying well. Leads are being logged, the Sales team activity is high, getting the leads in, qualifying, pitching, closing.
But whenever a real buying opportunity comes to the table, you get the feeling (or they even tell you) that the same two or three competitors are already in the mix, they got the RFP first. They always do, it seems.
Feels like you often arrive late to the conversation, and then you’re trying hard to squeeze into an already‑crowded shortlist.
You know it’s not that their value proposition was stronger, it’s clearly weaker on paper.
So what was it then?
Something in this quote from an HBR article in 2022 might provide an answer, “Fully 80%–90% of respondents, depending on what they are buying, have a set of vendors in mind before they do any research. Just as important, 90% of them will ultimately choose a vendor from the day one list.”
So, the competitors had been living rent‑free in the buyer’s head from the start, AND the winning vendor almost always one of that initial consideration set. How did this happen?
The intersect of two concepts
To really understand what’s going on here we need to dig into two concepts, one developed by John Dawes, Professor of Marketing, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute called the 95:5 rule which explains why your lead / demand generation campaigns end up with pitifully poor conversion or response rates. The other, possibly better known, was developed by Daniel Kahneman and outlined in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, showing why there’s almost always a ‘day 1 list’.
The 95:5 reality that most outreach ignores
For most B2B businesses, only a small minority of your addressable market is actively buying what you sell at any given time. The rest already have a supplier, with a 3-year contract, or some kind of workaround that “does the job for now”.
Dawes showed that roughly (the % changes depending on category):
- ~5% are in a genuine buying cycle.
- ~95% are out of market – but many of them will buy in the next 1–3 years.
Yet a lot of commercial outreach plans are built as if everyone is always in that 5%, either that or you’re just hoping you hit enough people in the 5%. There’s almost an assumption they’re ready and want to read your deck, evaluate your features, compare ROI, and respond to your clever CTA.
That’s not how real life looks from the customer’s side.
Most of the time, in reality, they aren’t thinking about buying anything, they’re thinking about optimising what they have and, in the moment they see your email/Ad/DM coming in they might be…
…on the train, between meetings, half‑skimming LinkedIn.
…glancing at an email on their phone while waiting for a coffee.
…sitting through yet another Teams call with their existing vendor who they’re quite happy with at the moment.
As mentioned above, commercial leaders often get this, so campaigns are sent at sufficient scale to hit enough 5%’ers to make the growth plan work. But the next concept will show how that might be short-sighted too.
Fast and slow: how decisions really get made
Kahneman talked about two broad “systems” in the way we think:
- System 1: fast, automatic, emotional, effortless.
- System 2: slow, deliberate, analytical, effortful.
When there’s a live decision on the table, a big renewal or a major new vendor, System 2 shows up. Clients are reading your proposal, looking at the numbers, running comparisons, asking the tough questions.
But most of the time, the 95%, they’re operating almost entirely in System 1. They’re…
- Forming loose impressions of vendors and what they offer (to them).
- Filing away little memory associations of which vendor seems relevant to which situations.
- Picking up feelings about who looks credible, modern, risky, expensive, safe.
But the interesting point comes, just as the client moves into the ‘buying window’, just as we saw it in the HBR article. Before they engage System 2 and start to rationalise the decisions they’re making, System 1 has already kicked in. Before they can ‘think’, an idea for possible vendor options will already be in their heads.
Importance of being in the initial consideration set
Ultimately if 90% of the winners come from the list of vendors that 80% of buyers already had in their heads this means that;
- Most of the System 2 thinking, the good diligent effort of choosing you vs. your competitors was just dressing up the decision that already happened in System 1, and,
- Somehow those vendors arrived in the heads of the buyers at a time they weren’t looking for a new option (or they remembered from the last time).
It means that if you’re not in the initial consideration set you’re down to a 28% chance of winning.
Now let’s revisit your campaign in light of the 95:5 rule, that moment when your email/advert/dm hits them, most future buyers are not cracking open the spreadsheet to evaluate you in those moments. They’re not in “detailed assessment” mode. They’re in “fast, automatic, light attention” mode. So it’s likely that the messages you’re sending them, tuned to ‘in-market’ buyers might not be resonating.
So there are really two very different jobs to do with your outreach:
- When people are not buying (the 95%): You’re shaping what their System 1 quietly believes about you. The mental shortcuts to you being the obvious choice.
- When people are buying (the 5%): You’re giving System 2 the evidence it needs to justify the choice their System 1 already leans towards (hopefully you).
Most put nearly all their effort into #2.
The companies that grow faster do a much better job at balancing with #1.
Your value proposition as something their System 1 can use
This is where value propositions and clearly outlining your points of difference in a way that resonate with clients who aren’t already in a buying window matters.
For your future customers, your outreach and your value proposition only matters if it can do something much simpler:
- Provide interest, entertainment or intrigue.
- Sit in the back of their mind, attaching itself to a handful of situations they recognise (and know they feel pain).
- Pop up automatically when a relevant project appears.
By way of example, if I asked you to imagine you suddenly have a need for a new laptop in your personal life or a new pair of trainers, there are probably one or two brands that jumped into your head immediately. Often, they’ll be the big brands that are remembered and while that’s an advantage they have (capital to invest in share of voice) smaller players often cut through with clear, specific propositions (Ugg was mentioned in a post I saw recently as clearly owning the ‘comfort’ shoe category in people’s minds)
What does this all mean for your business and using marketing and outreach to grow.
It’s about shifting from pure lead and demand gen to balancing with ‘memory imprinting’ as a driver of commercial outcomes. Sounds fluffy maybe? Memory imprinting when all you really want is warm leads?
But remember, in any given campaign; brand, lead gen, awareness, etc, remember that 95% of the impressions you’re driving are landing on people who might buy one day but aren’t buying now. 95% of your effort is a waste of money.
Looking at it a different way, if you’ve got your ICP and targeting right in your outreach, 100% of your impressions will land on someone that ‘will’ buy, one day but not now. So it’s about tipping the balance so your outreach converts in-market buyers today and becomes memorable to those who aren’t, ensuring you have a fighting chance when they do as you’ll be in the initial consideration set.
The impressions you are getting are processed on autopilot, remember; on the train, grabbing a coffee or otherwise distracted. You might generate interest and a click, but ultimately attention will move on as they’re not buying right now and you need to hope you’ve done enough, so that when a buying window opens, System 1 quietly injects your business into the conversation, forming the initial consideration set.
Questions worth asking in your business
If you’re leading growth in your business, a few quiet questions might be worth sitting with:
- Could a future customer, six months from now, repeat your value proposition in a sentence, especially when the need for your solutions arises in their business?
- Do your campaigns help potential buyers connect you to specific situations where you’re the obvious choice?
- When a need does arise, for your proposition, do you feel your business will be the one that comes to mind in the eye of the buying committee?
If the honest answer is “not yet”, it doesn’t necessarily mean you need to rip up your strategy.
It might just mean there’s work to do on how your value proposition and points of difference are showing up for the 95% of people who aren’t buying today, but will be tomorrow.
Because when their buying window finally opens, you want their System 1 to do something very simple:
Automatically inject your business into their mind…
before your competitors ever get a chance.
We have a Proposition Calculator that’ll help you review your own proposition and whether you might need to revisit it in order to be in that initial consideration set more often and win more deals: https://form.typeform.com/to/Al46mWhV
