95% Of Your B2B Marketing Could Be Wasted Trying to Sell

I recently came across this research which so perfectly encapsulates my approach to marketing. It's not new. You know it's true in your long-term relationships, but we ignore it when we start thinking about software.

The reason we ignore it? Immediate sales pressure. Ironically, too much attention on lower-funnel marketing initiates a death spiral in a business. In exchange for micro-optimizing a very tiny portion of the buyers out there, you leave open the entire 95% portion of marketing activities to your competitors to those buyers who are not in a consideration cycle?

Who came up with this? Professor John Dawes originally did the research for LinkedIn and then published it more broadly. The math looks something like this, and as soon as you see it, it's blindingly obvious:

* Suppose someone might buy a product every 3 years. That means only 33% of buyers will be in the market in any given year. Or 8.25% in any given fiscal quarter. (check or estimate your cycle)

Put another way, 91.75% of your buyers are not in the market right now and there is not much you can do about it.

Now this is a baseline. If your largest competitor is EOL a product, or making some huge mistake, perhaps the market behavior might be different. But in an average market with average dynamics, this helps you uncover how you should be looking at your marketing content playbook:

* 75% of people are not going to buy this year. The valuable content here is brand-building and education. Make those positive brand associations.

* 25% of people in this example will be looking to buy "this year". The valuable content here is to help buyers recognize what they might be missing, and how to recognize they should move into this category.

* 8% of people are in a buying cycle. These people are in active evaluation, even if they have not yet entered your pipeline. The challenge here, in B2B SaaS most companies are spending almost all the time on "evaluation-style" content, rather than brand-building and market education.

Now what % of your marketing dollars are you investing in each part of the funnel? Why? I'm not being prescriptive, but you should know why.

Similar to how it works in B2C marketing, your 8% there is the lowest-hanging fruit. Think of it like the "abandoned cart", retargeting, or direct response-type marketing. The issue is

If you are eCommerce platform, your math looks different (and worse!!). How often does the mid-market replatform? Enterprise?

RMW Commerce research says "not unless forced" and if a consideration cycle takes 3-6 months, and an implementation cycle takes another 3-18 months depending on the merchant's complexity, then that just adds to your worries.