Research on B2B buying consistently shows that buyers complete the majority of their decision journey before ever contacting a vendor. Commonly cited figures put it around 70%, with buyers spending only about 17% of their total buying time in conversation with potential suppliers. In practice: by the time your phone rings, the buyer has usually defined their problem, researched the options, formed a shortlist and developed a preference. Your marketing isn't warming people up for the sales conversation anymore. For most of the journey, your marketing is the sales conversation, happening without you in the room.
They're reading: your website, competitors' websites, comparison articles and reviews. They're asking: colleagues, peer networks, LinkedIn connections, and increasingly AI assistants ("what should we look for in a [category] provider?"). They're lurking: following your experts' posts for months without liking a single one. And they're forming the shortlist criteria you'll later be judged against, based on whoever's content taught them what "good" looks like. That last point is the strategic heart of it: the vendor who educates the buyer usually writes the shortlist criteria, and the criteria tend to favour their strengths.
At any moment, only a small fraction of your market is actively buying. The well-known 95:5 heuristic suggests about 5% are in-market in a given period. Marketing aimed exclusively at that 5% (pure lead-gen, "book a demo" everything) arrives after preferences have formed, competing on price against a shortlist someone else shaped. The counter-move is building familiarity with the 95% before they're in-market (useful content, consistent expert presence, a memorable position) so that when their trigger event arrives, you're already the default. That work looks unproductive in monthly dashboards and decides most deals.
Since buyers self-serve their evaluation, your public content must answer what a good first sales call would: what does it cost (ranges are fine; silence sends buyers elsewhere), how does it work, who is it for and not for, what results has it produced, and how do you compare to alternatives? Businesses resist publishing this ("we want the conversation first") but the buyer's rules changed: no answers, no conversation. Publishing honest pricing guidance, real case studies with numbers, and genuine comparison content doesn't leak advantage; it puts you in the 30% of the journey you're currently locked out of.
An unaccompanied buyer can't ask follow-up questions, so they weight evidence heavily: named clients, specific outcomes, detailed reviews, recognisable logos, credible authors. Every claim on your site gets silently tested against what the buyer can verify. This is also where AI assistants sharpen the stakes. When a buyer asks ChatGPT about you, it synthesises what the wider web says. A business with a thin external footprint fails the invisible reference check, and never learns the deal existed.
A buyer who arrives 70% decided doesn't want your standard discovery-and-pitch sequence re-litigating what they already know. First conversations should start by locating them: "What have you already looked at? What's prompted this now? What would need to be true for this to go ahead?" Sales teams that treat inbound enquiries as informed evaluations to be completed, not cold prospects to be educated, convert dramatically better, and buyers routinely cite it as the reason: "they didn't make us start over."
The 70% journey argues for a deliberate split: roughly half your effort on being findable and persuasive during the invisible phase (answer-shaped content, expert visibility, proof assets, presence in AI answers and comparisons), and half on capturing and converting the moment of contact (high-intent search, a website built to convert, fast follow-up). Most B2B budgets are inverted: 90% on capture, treating the surface of the iceberg as the whole thing. The businesses winning consistently are the ones marketing to the part of the journey nobody can see.
Where does the 70% figure come from? It's a consistent finding across B2B buying research (Gartner, Forrester, 6sense and others report figures in the 60–80% range). The precise number matters less than the pattern: most of the journey precedes contact.
Does this apply to small local businesses too? Yes. The journey is shorter but shaped the same: check the website, read reviews, ask around, then call one or two providers, not five.
How do we measure marketing that works invisibly? Branded search growth, self-reported attribution ("how did you hear about us?"), share of AI answers, and win-rate on inbound versus outbound. Inbound buyers who arrive pre-sold are the metric.
Isn't publishing pricing and comparisons risky? The information reaches your buyer either way. The only question is whether it comes from you or from a competitor framing it in their favour.