19 out of 20 buyers are not in the market today

19 out of 20 buyers are not in the market today

Sep 15, 2026

Sep 15, 2026

Here is a number worth sitting with. At any given moment, roughly 5% of the businesses that could buy from you are actually looking. The other 95% are getting on with their year.

Here is a number worth sitting with. At any given moment, roughly 5% of the businesses that could buy from you are actually looking. The other 95% are getting on with their year.

man in black long sleeve shirt sitting on chair beside woman in black and white stripe
man in black long sleeve shirt sitting on chair beside woman in black and white stripe

That figure comes from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute working with LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, and it holds up when you look at how often businesses actually buy anything. Around three quarters of companies replace their computers once every four years. Four in five change banking services once every five years. If a buying cycle runs that long, then on any given Tuesday almost nobody in your market is shopping.

Now the part that stings. In the same body of work, 96% of B2B marketers said they expected to see the main effect of an advertising campaign within two weeks.

So there is a gap between how businesses buy and how most of us market. We run campaigns built for a fortnight at an audience operating on a four-year cycle, then call the campaign a failure when the phone stays quiet.

What the 95% are doing while they are not buying from you

They are not thinking about you. That much is true and there is no point pretending otherwise.

But when the moment does arrive, and it always eventually does, they do not open a blank page and start researching from scratch. They start from a shortlist that already exists in their head, made up of the names they have heard of, the businesses a colleague mentioned, and the one whose thinking they read something of last winter.

Edelman and LinkedIn put numbers on this. They surveyed nearly 3,500 management-level professionals in December 2023 across seven countries, Australia among them. More than 75% said a piece of thought leadership had led them to research a product or service they were not previously considering. 86% said good thinking made them moderately or very likely to invite that organisation into an RFP. 60% said it made them willing to pay a premium to work with them.

And 52% said they spend an hour or more every week reading this sort of material.

That last one is the most useful number in the set, because it tells you the attention is already there. Your buyer has the hour set aside most weeks, and somebody’s thinking is filling it.

The person who decides about you and never speaks to you

The 2025 edition of the same research, covering close to 2,000 professionals, went looking for what they call hidden buyers. These are the people inside the buying group who shape the decision without ever appearing on a call, sending an email or joining a site visit.

The finding that should change how you write is that more than 40% of B2B deals stall because the buying group cannot get aligned internally. Price is not usually what kills those deals. They die because the person who liked you could not make the case to the people who had never met you.

This reframes what your material is for. A capability statement, a case study, a one-pager, none of them exist to impress the person you are talking to. They exist so that person can forward something to a colleague and win an argument they will have without you.

If your best document only works when you are in the room narrating it, it is not doing the job.

What Australian buyers say they actually trust

Prime Creative Media, Australia’s largest B2B trade publisher, surveyed 856 decision makers across nine industries on how they buy.

Case studies, expert commentary and real-world success stories consistently outperformed sales-led content. 57% said they use trade media to learn from case studies, 46% to identify new suppliers, and 27% to support a purchasing decision directly. Close to half engage with industry media daily or several times a week, with another 22% weekly.

Read that alongside the Edelman numbers and a pattern shows up. The thing buyers are tired of is being sold to, and the thing they will give an hour a week to is evidence. Evidence has a fairly specific shape in B2B. A job you did, a problem it solved, a number attached to the result, and a client willing to be named.

Five things worth doing about it

1. Write down the three moments your buyer is genuinely in the market.

Moments rather than personas. A contract coming up for renewal, a project win that suddenly needs capacity, a compliance deadline, a piece of equipment reaching end of life, a key person leaving. For most businesses there are three or four and they are entirely predictable. Everything you publish should be aimed at being the name they remember when one of those moments lands.

2. Publish proof over opinion.

One properly built case study a quarter will do more for you than twelve posts of general commentary. Name the client, name the problem, put a number on the outcome. If a number is genuinely not available, use the client’s own words instead. Both beat an adjective.

3. Build one document that can be forwarded.

Given that four in ten deals stall on internal disagreement, assume your contact will need to persuade three people you will never meet. Give them one page that does it. What you do, who you have done it for, what it costs, and why the risk is low. Written so it makes sense with nobody there to explain it.

4. Stop measuring on a two-week window.

If your buyers replace something once every four years, a fortnight tells you nothing except whether the 5% who were already looking happened to see you. Assess visibility work on whether the right people know who you are and what you are known for, and look at it over quarters rather than weeks.

5. Go where your industry actually reads.

For a lot of Australian B2B, that is still trade media, an industry association, a conference floor and a supplier’s newsletter, sitting alongside LinkedIn rather than behind it. The Prime Creative numbers say the audience is there almost daily. Being genuinely useful in those places compounds in a way that a burst of advertising does not.

The uncomfortable summary

Most of the value of your marketing this year will be collected by a version of your business that exists in two years’ time.

That is a hard thing to sell internally, and it is the single most common reason good businesses give up on visibility just before it starts working. It is also why the businesses that keep showing up quietly end up on shortlists their competitors never see being written.

Your brand is doing the talking long before you are, and for the nineteen buyers in twenty who are not looking today, it is the only version of you they will meet this year. That seems like a reasonable argument for making it as good as the work.

Sources

That figure comes from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute working with LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, and it holds up when you look at how often businesses actually buy anything. Around three quarters of companies replace their computers once every four years. Four in five change banking services once every five years. If a buying cycle runs that long, then on any given Tuesday almost nobody in your market is shopping.

Now the part that stings. In the same body of work, 96% of B2B marketers said they expected to see the main effect of an advertising campaign within two weeks.

So there is a gap between how businesses buy and how most of us market. We run campaigns built for a fortnight at an audience operating on a four-year cycle, then call the campaign a failure when the phone stays quiet.

What the 95% are doing while they are not buying from you

They are not thinking about you. That much is true and there is no point pretending otherwise.

But when the moment does arrive, and it always eventually does, they do not open a blank page and start researching from scratch. They start from a shortlist that already exists in their head, made up of the names they have heard of, the businesses a colleague mentioned, and the one whose thinking they read something of last winter.

Edelman and LinkedIn put numbers on this. They surveyed nearly 3,500 management-level professionals in December 2023 across seven countries, Australia among them. More than 75% said a piece of thought leadership had led them to research a product or service they were not previously considering. 86% said good thinking made them moderately or very likely to invite that organisation into an RFP. 60% said it made them willing to pay a premium to work with them.

And 52% said they spend an hour or more every week reading this sort of material.

That last one is the most useful number in the set, because it tells you the attention is already there. Your buyer has the hour set aside most weeks, and somebody’s thinking is filling it.

The person who decides about you and never speaks to you

The 2025 edition of the same research, covering close to 2,000 professionals, went looking for what they call hidden buyers. These are the people inside the buying group who shape the decision without ever appearing on a call, sending an email or joining a site visit.

The finding that should change how you write is that more than 40% of B2B deals stall because the buying group cannot get aligned internally. Price is not usually what kills those deals. They die because the person who liked you could not make the case to the people who had never met you.

This reframes what your material is for. A capability statement, a case study, a one-pager, none of them exist to impress the person you are talking to. They exist so that person can forward something to a colleague and win an argument they will have without you.

If your best document only works when you are in the room narrating it, it is not doing the job.

What Australian buyers say they actually trust

Prime Creative Media, Australia’s largest B2B trade publisher, surveyed 856 decision makers across nine industries on how they buy.

Case studies, expert commentary and real-world success stories consistently outperformed sales-led content. 57% said they use trade media to learn from case studies, 46% to identify new suppliers, and 27% to support a purchasing decision directly. Close to half engage with industry media daily or several times a week, with another 22% weekly.

Read that alongside the Edelman numbers and a pattern shows up. The thing buyers are tired of is being sold to, and the thing they will give an hour a week to is evidence. Evidence has a fairly specific shape in B2B. A job you did, a problem it solved, a number attached to the result, and a client willing to be named.

Five things worth doing about it

1. Write down the three moments your buyer is genuinely in the market.

Moments rather than personas. A contract coming up for renewal, a project win that suddenly needs capacity, a compliance deadline, a piece of equipment reaching end of life, a key person leaving. For most businesses there are three or four and they are entirely predictable. Everything you publish should be aimed at being the name they remember when one of those moments lands.

2. Publish proof over opinion.

One properly built case study a quarter will do more for you than twelve posts of general commentary. Name the client, name the problem, put a number on the outcome. If a number is genuinely not available, use the client’s own words instead. Both beat an adjective.

3. Build one document that can be forwarded.

Given that four in ten deals stall on internal disagreement, assume your contact will need to persuade three people you will never meet. Give them one page that does it. What you do, who you have done it for, what it costs, and why the risk is low. Written so it makes sense with nobody there to explain it.

4. Stop measuring on a two-week window.

If your buyers replace something once every four years, a fortnight tells you nothing except whether the 5% who were already looking happened to see you. Assess visibility work on whether the right people know who you are and what you are known for, and look at it over quarters rather than weeks.

5. Go where your industry actually reads.

For a lot of Australian B2B, that is still trade media, an industry association, a conference floor and a supplier’s newsletter, sitting alongside LinkedIn rather than behind it. The Prime Creative numbers say the audience is there almost daily. Being genuinely useful in those places compounds in a way that a burst of advertising does not.

The uncomfortable summary

Most of the value of your marketing this year will be collected by a version of your business that exists in two years’ time.

That is a hard thing to sell internally, and it is the single most common reason good businesses give up on visibility just before it starts working. It is also why the businesses that keep showing up quietly end up on shortlists their competitors never see being written.

Your brand is doing the talking long before you are, and for the nineteen buyers in twenty who are not looking today, it is the only version of you they will meet this year. That seems like a reasonable argument for making it as good as the work.

Sources