Why 95% of your B2B SaaS market is not buying today

How much of a B2B market is in market at any one time

Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute quantified something advertising understood intuitively for most of its history. At any given time, the vast majority of potential buyers are not actively shopping. In B2B he puts the number at 95%.

Ninety-five percent of your B2B market does not have a problem that needs solving today.

They are not comparing vendors. They are not reading your whitepaper. They are not looking at your pricing page. They are, for all practical purposes, invisible to your demand generation machine, and your demand generation machine is invisible to them. Reaching them anyway is the practical meaning of brand as the competitive moat in enterprise SaaS.

Why advertising was built to plant memory rather than trigger action

For most of advertising's history, the primary job of an ad was not to get someone to do something. It was to plant a memory.

A television spot aired during prime time. A print ad ran in a trade publication. A billboard stood on a highway. The people who saw those ads were, overwhelmingly, not in the market for what was being advertised. Everyone knew it. Success was not measured by whether someone picked up the phone that afternoon. Success was measured by whether, months or years later, when a need finally arose, that brand came to mind.

Digital advertising collapsed the distinction between brand and direct response. Suddenly every ad could be measured by whether someone clicked. Every impression could be tied to an action. Every dollar could be traced to a behavior. The direct response mindset, which had always been a supporting discipline, absorbed the entire field. The SaaS industry was born directly into that world.

Most SaaS marketers have never known anything else. They grew up in a system where every dollar was expected to produce a measurable behavior, a click, a form fill, a demo request, a pipeline contribution. The idea of spending money on advertising where the desired outcome is nothing happening right now, where the return arrives six months or two years later when a buyer enters the market and your brand is already in their head, is genuinely foreign. It does not fit the dashboard. It does not fit the attribution model. It does not fit the quarterly business review.

An entire generation of marketers was trained to believe that marketing is about shaping behavior. That is not how advertising works. That is how direct response works, and direct response was never meant to be the whole system.

The 46/54 split between brand and activation in B2B

This is where the Binet and Field framework becomes essential. Their analysis of the IPA Databank, the first-ever B2B cut of one of the world's most rigorous effectiveness datasets, found that the optimal balance of investment in B2B is approximately 46% brand and 54% activation.

Brand to build memory with future buyers. Activation to convert current ones. Not one or the other. Both, in the right proportion and measured in the right way.

Most B2B companies spend close to nothing on brand. That is the gap the number exposes. What that spend should actually produce is covered in B2B soft selling.

How share of voice converts into share of market

The ESOV principle reinforces this. You may not be able to calculate your exact share of voice. In B2B, where advertising spend data is not publicly tracked, precise measurement is difficult.

You can ask a simpler, directional question instead. Are you investing enough to be visible to a larger share of the category than you currently serve? If the answer is no, the empirical evidence is clear. In B2B, 10% extra share of voice yields approximately 0.7% additional market share per year.

In B2B, brands that set their share of voice above their share of market tend to grow. Brands that set it below tend to shrink.

Stated plainly, the shift runs from optimizing for what a buyer does today to investing in what a buyer remembers tomorrow. From capturing demand to creating it. Getting that reallocation approved is a separate job, covered in the business case for brand investment.

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Adapted from Day 1 or Die, Part 1 of a four-part series on brand in enterprise SaaS.