Who is actually on the other side of a B2B purchase?

A buying group, not a buyer. A buying group is the full set of people, typically five to 16 across up to four functions, who collectively decide a B2B purchase, most of whom the vendor never meets. Gartner calls it a buying group, sales teams often say buying committee; the label matters less than the size. The…

What is the 95:5 rule, and how many prospects are actually in market?

Very few. The 95:5 rule says that at any given moment, up to 95% of business clients are not in the market for a given category, and only about 5% are. It comes from Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, written in 2021 for the LinkedIn B2B Institute.

Which numbers about B2B buying are simply out of date?

This is the part almost nobody checks. Here is the received wisdom against what the same organisations publish now.

Why does personalising to the individual damage consensus?

Here is the finding from that same Gartner survey that ought to be famous and is not. Content tailored to the buying group improved consensus by 20%. Content tailored to the individual had a 59% negative impact on consensus. Gartner attributes the effect to confirmation bias.

What does prospecting that is not spam actually return?

Less than the tooling vendors imply, and the honest arithmetic is worth doing because it sets the rhythm of your week.

How B2B buying actually works: Buying Groups & Prospection

The four statistics everyone quotes about B2B buying are stale. Here are the current ones, and what they change about prospecting and positioning.

Most prospecting fails for a reason that has nothing to do with the wording of the message. It is addressed to a person who does not exist: one buyer, with authority, who happens to be shopping this quarter. The person actually on the other side is one seat at a table of five to sixteen people, most of whom you will never meet, and the odds that their organisation is buying anything at all in your category right now are small.

Those two facts are not a nuance. They decide what counts as a good message, a good piece of content and a good positioning statement. Accept them and roughly half of what passes for outreach is revealed as noise aimed at people who were never going to answer, no matter how well written it was.