The 95-5 Rule: why most of your buyers aren't ready today
At any moment, roughly 5% of your category is in-market. The other 95% are future buyers. Your brand investment is for them.
“If you only market to the 5%, you compete on price. If you market to the 95%, you compete on memory.”
The number that changes the brief
Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, working with LinkedIn's B2B Institute, put a hard number on something the best CMOs had always sensed: at any given moment, only about 5% of B2B buyers in a category are actively in-market. The remaining 95% are out-of-market — they have a vendor, a contract, a roadmap, and no reason to switch this quarter. They are not leads. They are future buyers.
Visualising the 95/5 split. 5 of every 100 buyers are in-market today — the other 95 are who your brand is for.
Why MQL-only orgs over-invest in the wrong people
A funnel that only counts in-market signals — demo requests, form fills, pricing-page visits — optimises for the 5%. Every dollar gets pointed at the same handful of accounts the entire category is chasing. CAC inflates. Win rates fall. The brand goes quiet to the 95% who'll buy next year, and the next year they don't remember you exist.
What to do instead
Allocate a meaningful share of the brand budget to mental availability with the 95%: distinctive assets, founder-led content, category POVs, and a publishing cadence that earns share of mind long before the form-fill. When the buyer enters the 5% next quarter, your name is on the day-one shortlist — and the funnel converts dramatically faster, because the work was already done.
