Most of the B2B marketing budget is chasing the buyers who have already made a decision. The real decision happens much earlier, in the research phase that most businesses never see.
Even today, with all the technology, metrics, and AI that small B2B businesses have at their disposal, many organizations seem intent on wasting money and resources trying to get to the moment when they don’t buy. at least open to availability.
What most businesses fail to incorporate into demand generation planning is any understanding of how we, as humans, make purchasing decisions.
When a buyer starts looking for a potential seller, he has already decided, at least temporarily, which products or brands to consider. In the weeks, months, or even years it takes for that person to enter the active buying stage, they have not been living under a rock, not exposed to any marketing production. The products that are in their heads now as shopping options, went in there a long time ago. They got in there because those types of brands understood the role of product marketing, creating output (content, ads, PR, social, whatever) that could be seen and quietly filled with prospects, which only comes when renewed.
That next active search is usually the rule. The buyer simply goes through the process of gathering evidence to support the option that was just beginning to form.
Most of us continue to design our marketing at that time of the search, but that’s too late in the customer’s buying process. A buyer’s consideration shortlist, a list that effectively determines whether or not a buyer is ready to buy, has already been compiled at a time when we didn’t know it was happening.
Consumers do their research earlier than we think
According to 6sense, consumers complete more than four-fifths of their surveys independently before contacting any salesperson. The business that is reached first wins the business about eight out of ten times. We can say that the outcome of most sales negotiations is decided well before the first calendar invitation is emailed.
Since we don’t know it’s going on, the phase in which this assessment takes place is almost entirely invisible to the businesses being assessed. A potential client has been quietly reading, cross-referencing, asking trusted peers if it’s worth talking to, perhaps being guided by an AI tool that has its own view of who the trusted players are in a certain category. But none of this customer intent data from our CRM, for example. Nothing appeared above the waterline, so to us it registered as silence.
When someone reaches out, the question they are working on is not, “Should I consider this business?” It’s like, “Do I still feel good about the idea I’ve already created?” While we think our conversation is the beginning of the sales process, we are actually not far from its end.
AI: The research section now has a second student
Everything I’ve said so far comes from the assumption that the bottom-stage of invisible product research takes place entirely inside the consumer’s head, made up of what they’ve noticed and remembered little over time. But today a growing part of that research is now working with an AI platform that reads the information, creates its own opinion of who is trustworthy in the category, and gives the consumer something that looks less like a list of options and more like a suggestion or recommendation.
AI used in this way means that we have to revise our thinking on the issue of cognitive acquisition, since there is something else in the room that influences the consumer, and does not form opinions in the way that a person does. Unlike us, AI doesn’t remember part of a logo from a conference three years ago, or delete a colleague’s comment. Researchers at Princeton and Georgia Tech, in a study that coined the term “Generative Engine Optimization”, found that citing reliable sources and including specific statistics were among the strongest factors in getting a page cited in an AI-generated response.
Like SEO, this second-guessing algorithm is not an exact science. What’s worse is that different LLMs give different results on the same information, and whatever mid-term we do to influence them kindly can turn on a dime when the AI model gets its next update. Regardless, we’re talking about a different kind of presence that we can build than the one that advertising has spent decades perfecting. Being memorable to a human consumer and engaging an AI system to conduct research on behalf of that consumer are related, but not mutually exclusive, issues. the same problem, and the infrastructure we built for the first was not designed with the second in mind.
Over the past twenty-plus years we have worked to become better, to say the least. Our homepage copy has become shorter and punchier, because that’s what our CRO told us is to grab a stranger’s attention four seconds before they bounce. The system now reading that page for evidence doesn’t have the same attention problem we were working on. The shortlist we’re trying to tap into now has a second gatekeeper, one that reads different signals than what the content marketing was developed to produce. In fact, it looks wide and deep to confirm its answer. An analysis of over a million links to AI citations from ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini found that earned media alone accounted for 82% of what AI programs said, journalism above all. PR, done right, might get a second wind none of us saw coming.
Having a good product is not always enough
Businesses that have grown slowly, due to referrals and customer reputation, misinterpret the reason for potential buyers knocking on their door. They will conclude these actions as proof that the product or product “quality” is very high. But that’s only true for the percentage of prospects he’s already willing to put in.
There is a marketing term called Mental Availability, which is the likelihood that a product will come to mind when an appropriate buying situation arises. Years of research and research by prestigious institutions such as the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, regarding how consumers make category decisions, has found that cognitive availability is a stronger predictor of an organization’s market share than perceived quality or price competitiveness.
Many B2B businesses compete on demonstrated ability when the buyer is in front of them, assuming the buyer is already there and willing to listen. But the issue of building a strong enough presence to consider in the first place sits very high on the marketing agenda. It often goes unsolved because signals, ambiguous inbound flows and a pipeline that relies heavily on referrals, are misread as a sales problem when it’s a marketing problem.
Demand generation costs are aimed at consumers who are already in active buying mode. Sounds like an obvious place to focus our efforts, right? That is, until you consider that every competitor in the category has come to the same (erroneous) conclusion. We all show up at the same party, wearing the same clothes and cologne, falling over each other to make an impression on people who are already on a date.
But there is an audience profile that no one is bothering with right now. An audience profile nineteen times larger than the profile we’re all trying to remove.
I’m talking about businesses that will do it in the end be in the market to buy, who will do it in the end create their own shortlist, but so far I don’t have budget approval and nothing Google related. Since these futures customers will not change this quarter, most of their competitors are not interested in what they see as a waste of time playing the futures market. But that’s exactly where we should be spending part (certainly not all, but maybe a large part) of our marketing budget.
Brand familiarity is built when someone this is not the case shopping is what determines whether we are listed when they are. Business owners and marketing managers are betting the farm on highly targeted production campaigns and wondering why sales pipelines keep changing, while a competitor with a bunch of inferior technology keeps appearing on the short list of buyers.
So what do we actually do with all this?
From a business structure perspective, the way marketing is currently structured and measured makes it impossible to support the work I’m talking about. Budget cycles only reward what is specified, but marketing is a dynamic and not a 100% predictable endeavor. The creation of a product, and the presence of a stable category that determines whether it is on the short list and does not even exist, does not appear in a clean spreadsheet cell, so it rarely survives any kind of budget discussion. The most significant long-term work in the pipeline is terminated first when the quarter looks soft, and financed last when it looks healthy.
One way to deal with this is to treat product availability as a fixed cost instead of an option. The minute it becomes something the CFO chooses to fund only if the business can afford it, we’ve shot ourselves in the foot, and killed any cumulative effect that made it worth doing.
If we look at this casually, we can say that this is not particularly complicated. In practice, however, it hits head-on with all the incentive structures that govern how most marketing budgets are approved, adjusted, and renewed. That makes it less of a marketing problem than an organizational one, which is probably why the research behind it has sat in the open for years without changing how businesses spend money.
