The quality of marketing leads is an age-old sales gripe, captured best by Glengarry Glen Ross, the classic 1984 David Mamet play turned 1992 movie. Salesman Shelley Levene is constantly complaining that the leads are “weak”, and the focus of the plot is the question of who stole the golden “Glengarry” leads.
In B2B marketing, we have much better tools now to nurture and qualify leads — not just overall fit, but more importantly the context of whether people are actually in the market to buy.
In 2021, Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute revealed the 95:5 rule. He found that only 5% of potential B2B buyers are actually in the market to buy in any one time.
Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo from LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, which commissioned Dawes’ research, shared this insight:
“That means 95% of the buyers that you reach are out-of-market and won’t buy for months or even years. And, contrary to popular belief, you cannot persuade the buyer to go in-market because they already have what you’re selling and won’t need a newer version any time soon…”
The 95:5 rule flips the script often prioritized in B2B marketing, which can waste efforts trying to convince out-of-market buyers to buy (and can be really irritating). As they explain:
“Marketers don’t move buyers in-market – buyers move themselves in-market based on their needs…
“Effective marketing increases future sales in future buying situations. How? By increasing the probability that the brand comes to mind when the buyer goes in-market. Simply put, the brand that gets remembered is the brand that gets bought.
“You can’t push buyers down a funnel, but you can, to quote Professor Jenni Romaniuk, “catch buyers as they fall.”
I got to spend time this last week with Dawes’ colleague Jenni Romaniuk, when we both spoke at Marketing Festival in Brno, Czech Republic. She referenced the 95:5 idea in her talk about mental availability and what she calls Category Entry Points (CEPs).
Understanding category entry points helps keep our eye on where to place our marketing efforts — on helping ensure our brands will be thought of when people are actually ready to buy. This can also lead to a better handoff with sales.
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
