By the Time They Call You, They’ve Already Picked the Winner
- Richard McClurg
- 4 days ago
- 10 min read
You want more leads
Of course you do. Pipeline feels like oxygen. So you buy a list. You fire up cold email. You put a keen college grad on the phones. You gate a halfway-decent white paper behind a form and wait for the names to roll in.
Here’s the awkward part. Almost none of us would ever do the thing we’re asking buyers to do. When was the last time you filled in a form for a PDF, then happily took the cold call that followed? Right. Me neither.
And it gets worse. By the time a buyer actually takes that call, they’ve usually already picked the winner. (Spoiler: it’s often not you.)
“But my outbound does produce pipeline,” you’re thinking. Sure it does. The catch: it’s mostly retargeting (you’re reaching people already shopping for you). The ones who pick up already had you on their list and were probably about to call anyway.
Your BDR (the rep doing the outbound) didn’t create that deal. They caught a buyer already in motion and took credit for the momentum. Outbound harvests demand that already exists. It rarely (if ever) generates it.
I get the instinct. Leads feel like progress. A full pipeline feels like safety. No judgment here. But once you understand how B2B buying actually works now, you’ll spend your limited time and money very differently.
The 95/5 rule and why you’re reading it wrong
You’ve probably heard the 95/5 rule: at any given moment, only about 5% of your market is ready to buy. B2B buying journey research from Kerry Cunningham and Sara Boostani at 6sense puts the final stages of buying at around 5 to 6%. So the ready-to-buy number holds up fine.
The problem is what people did with the first number. They heard “95% aren’t buying” and quietly concluded “so there’s no point doing anything for them.” That’s a dangerous assumption, Sherlock.
Now the fuller picture. At any moment, roughly 60% of your ideal customers are genuinely dormant, with no active buying going on. About a third (34%) are somewhere in the selection phase of the buying journey: researching, building a shortlist, and arguing internally. Only 6% or so are anywhere near a decision and making the purchase.
Sixty, thirty-four, six, give or take. And I mean give or take: these are averages from data that leans heavily toward tech companies (so, probably you). Your own split will shift with deal size, geography, and what you're selling. Don't treat it as a forecast. Treat it as the shape of the thing.
That middle third matters enormously. They’re in motion. And they don’t want to talk to you. They are doing their own research.
A long, crowded process that’s decided in advance
A few more numbers worth holding onto.
The typical B2B buying cycle runs about 10 months (10.1 on average in the latest data, and 12 to 18 months for bigger, riskier deals).
The buying group is around 10 people (anywhere from 5 to 20-plus, and it grows with the price tag: more money, more risk, and more people who want others’ fingerprints on the decision so they don’t get all the blame if it goes sideways).
And the part that quietly undoes most of what we do: these people aren’t blank slates. The average B2B buyer has been through eight prior evaluations in your product/service category before this one. Eight. And that’s true of the finance, IT, and procurement folks too, not just your main contact. They arrive with opinions, scar tissue, and preferences already formed.
There’s a wrinkle worth being honest about. If your category is genuinely new, they may not know how to buy it yet, and part of your job becomes teaching them how to evaluate (that’s its own kind of advantage if you do it well).
But in an established category, you’re not educating a novice. You’re walking into a room full of people who’ve done this before and already have a hunch about who they’d pick. Either way, what kills these deals isn’t ignorance. It’s fear of getting it wrong. And if you’re the small, lesser-known name, you’re the risky pick, so lowering that fear is your job, not theirs.
And buyers don’t engage a seller until they’re about 60% of the way through the process. That’s roughly six months of researching, debating, and deciding before they’ll pick up your call. (And by the way, the buyer initiates contact about 80% of the time).
By then, the deciding is mostly done. Four of the five vendors that make the shortlist are identified on day one. (Yep, read that again.) And here’s the kicker: the eventual winner is on that day-one list about 95% of the time.
If you are not the market leader (who’s probably top of the list), there’s a bit more discouragement to share: that pre-contact favourite, the one they quietly preferred before they ever spoke to a salesperson, goes on to win 77 to 80% of the time.
I’m now going to guesstimate that 99% of you feel like a stiff drink at this point. I ain’t judging you. But do read on.
Your real risk isn’t losing. It’s never being in the room.
If you’re not on the day-one shortlist, you’re not losing the deal. You’re not even in the room.
For a smallish company (let’s say less than a hundred employees) with limited resources, the risk was never losing a fair fight on features and price. The risk is never making the shortlist. Never being one of those names someone scribbles down on day one. And you earn that spot by being known before anyone’s in the market to buy something.
Which means the 95% you thought you could ignore? That’s exactly who you should be making familiar with your name. Familiarity is the price of admission. People don’t need to remember a clever thing you said. They just need to have seen you around enough to think, “Oh, them. Yeah, put them on the list.”
The rub is this. You can’t pin a tidy ROI on building that familiarity. Many will try. And sink serious dough into fabricating ROI with fancy attribution software. But I’m telling you. It’s BS.
Did they talk to you at a tradeshow? Or one of those fancy parties the big vendors throw that you snuck into? Did they see you on an expert panel? Read about you in an article? Or did a former colleague recommend you in a Slack chat? They don’t remember. And you don’t really know how they heard about you. That means you can’t accurately calculate if that groundbreaking piece of swag for the tradeshow was worth it. (Miranda Priestly pro tip: skip the florals in spring).
So the money you spend on building that awareness is the first thing cut and the most starved, which is precisely why so many good small companies are invisible at the only moment that counts.
A quick word on AI, because everyone’s asking
“Is Google AI Overviews eating my website traffic?” It’s the question floating around a lot these days. Here’s what we do know: 94% of buyers now use AI somewhere in their buying process.
The takeaway for you isn’t “panic about traffic.” It’s this. More and more, LLMs are the ones describing your company to buyers, and you don’t control what they say. So when a buyer (or their AI) pulls up information about you, is it accurate, current, and relevant? Most B2B websites are dated and quite frankly, crap. Fix that. That’s in your control. And then you can optimize for the LLMs.
But remember this. Humans talk to humans still. They ask for recommendations from people they trust. It’s peer conversations (aka “word of mouth”) that hold the most weight. (I recently wrote more about the referral engine that nobody builds).
What to actually do: three jobs, three different rooms
So the picture’s a bit grim when you’re not the market leader. But here’s the good news: once you stop treating every buyer the same, the job gets clearer. There are really three groups, and each needs something completely different from you. Most small companies pour everything into the smallest group and wonder why it’s a slog.
Out-of-market (~60%): get remembered. These folks aren’t buying, and most won’t for the better part of a year or more. Easy to write off. Don’t. They’re the people who’ll someday scribble names on a list, and you want to be one of them. The job here is memory, plain and simple. Be present and useful where they already are (that could be tradeshows, conferences, online communities). Show up consistently. Say something worth their time.
For small, founder-led companies without a big budget, that means your face, your point of view, and your name turning up often enough to feel familiar. (One nuance: a brand-new category needs PR, analysts, and thought leaders telling the story of why the category should exist; an established category just needs you known and trusted.) You can’t measure it cleanly, and you do it anyway, because it’s the price of admission to everything that follows.
Selection (~34%): influence the silent evaluation. Here’s where the real work lives, and where most small companies do nothing because they can’t see it happening. This third of your market is actively in motion: building a shortlist, setting requirements, and quietly arguing it out internally. Now, the list isn't sealed. One of those five slots usually opens up mid-journey, and a weak name can be bumped, so yes, you can still break in. (In a brand-new category, where there's no settled shortlist yet, the door's wide open.)
But here's the catch: you won't break in by booking a demo. They'll research you, form opinions about you, and rank you, all without raising a hand, and they will not talk to you, no matter how in-market they are. So stop trying to book the meeting. You get on the list the same way the first four vendors did: by being visible and credible where they're quietly researching.
And that job is bigger than most people think. The trap: you find one champion, arm them with a deck, and assume they’ll carry you across the line. They won’t, because they can’t. The buying group is ten people. Your champion can’t be in every room, can’t answer every objection, and frankly doesn’t carry equal weight with the CFO, the head of IT, compliance, the actual users, or Gerald in procurement (it’s always Gerald).
Each of those people is doing their own quiet homework, in their own corners: peer communities, Slack groups, analyst takes, LinkedIn, podcasts, a quick “who do you use for this?” to someone they trust.
So you’ve got two jobs in this phase, not one.
First, influence the buying group directly. Be credible and present in the places each of those roles actually goes for insight. The CFO isn’t reading your product page; they’re asking a peer whether anyone’s regretted buying something like you. Thought leadership, community presence, and other people vouching for you do the work your champion can’t. This is where being genuinely known, by more than one person in that building, quietly tips the shortlist your way.
Picture a sharp LinkedIn post that one of them screenshots and drops into their team’s Slack channel. That’s you, shaping the conversation in a room you’ll never get invited to.
Second, enable the champion for the rooms you’ll never see. Influencing the group directly doesn’t replace your champion. It backs them up. You still need that advocate, because the deal dies in the rooms you’re not in. And it dies more often than you’d think: between 40 and 60% of B2B deals end in no decision, not because a competitor won but because the buying group couldn’t get to yes.
One thing to understand about your content: buyers don’t read it to be sold to. They read it to win the argument happening inside their own building. So arm your champion for the objections you’ll never hear. Every piece of content should pass one test: what does this help my champion say to someone else in their organization? (Champion enablement is one of the most underrated jobs in B2B marketing.)
Win the silent evaluation and you’re the pre-contact favourite, the one who wins 77 to 80% of the time. Lose it, and you’ll never even know you were in the running.
Decision and purchase (~6%): let sales do the heavy lifting. Now, finally, they’ll engage, and usually they start the conversation. This is the sales-led phase, full stop. Overcoming objections, advising, providing proof and references, smoothing the path to internal consensus, negotiating the contract. Do it well; it absolutely still matters.
But be honest with yourself about what’s really happening here: if you did the first two jobs, you walk in as the favourite and sales is closing a race you already led. If you didn’t, sales is being asked to win a deal that was quietly decided weeks or months ago, without you. Good luck closing that one. That’s not a sales problem. It’s everything you didn’t do upstream.
Where to start
Stop pouring everything into the 6% who’ll talk to you. They’re the smallest group, the most fought-over, and mostly already decided.
Spend where it counts, across all three groups. Be remembered by the 60% who aren’t in market yet, so you make the list when they are. Influence the 34% who are silently evaluating you right now, by being known and credible with the whole buying group, not just one champion. And give sales what it needs to win the 6% who finally pick up the phone.
Do that, and by the time they’re ready to talk, you’re already in the room and a serious contender, instead of cold-calling your way toward a decision that’s quietly been made without you. You may not walk in as the favourite. When you’re small, you’re the riskier choice. But a known, trusted option in the room beats not being in it, every time.
That’s not a lead-gen problem. It’s a positioning and presence problem. And it’s a fixable one.
Not sure whether your company would make the day-one shortlist in your market? That's a conversation worth having.
