06 July 2025
Recently I was watching a YouTune video where a "B2B Expert" made the statement "When a B2B buyer enters a category, 85% of the time they choose a brand that came to mind on Day One."
If true, that is an extraordinary statistic that has powerful ramifications for B2B companies attempting to pursue growth through minimal marketing spend focused ONLY on online lead generation from buyers who are in-market NOW.
Subsequent research to verify this claim revealed that the stat checks out—but with a couple of important caveats around wording and source:
Bain & Company’s own data shows that 85% of B2B buyers end up buying from their “Day-One” list—that is, the set of vendors they had in mind before they even started researching alternatives. A Google + Bain study of 1,208 U.S. B2B buyers in 2022 actually found an even higher figure—92% of purchases came from that initial shortlist
Nuances to bear in mind
“Entering a category” vs. “initial consideration set”
The research isn’t about every time someone randomly shops a category. It’s about those buyers who deliberately engage in a purchase process: they form a tiny shortlist (their “Day-One” list) and then almost always buy from it.
Framing around zero-click search
Bain’s article on “zero-click” highlights that buyers often never click beyond the AI-generated summary or top sponsored links—so whatever brands you had top of mind before the search dominate final choice.
Implication for B2B marketers
The takeaway is not just to win keyword auctions, but to build brand mental availability long before any active search begins—so you’re already on that Day-One list.
Bottom line: Yes, most B2B purchases come from the brands buyers thought of on Day One; 85% by Bain’s count, and up to 92% in some Google-Bain analyses—but the real insight is that you must shape that initial shortlist through sustained brand-building, not just last-mile search tactics.
B2B marketers often feel the pressure to drive immediate pipeline outcomes: meetings booked, opportunities created, and deals closed—now. As a result, they pour budget into intent‐based channels (search ads, account-based advertising, lead-gen forms) that target buyers already “in market.” While these tactics can deliver quick wins, they systematically under invest in the top of the funnel: brand building, broad awareness, and mental availability.
Yet the evidence is clear: when a buyer formally enters a purchase process, they overwhelmingly choose from the small set of vendors they already had in mind on Day One. By neglecting brand-building activities, marketers leave their companies off that critical shortlist, ceding choice to better‐known competitors.
Over-reliance on lower-funnel tactics thus paradoxically starves the very demand pool those tactics are meant to convert.
Best practice is to fund both brand building and in-market focus
Contrast two investment approaches: one allocates 100% to search keywords and intent advertising vendors (Pay-Per-Click marketing); the other splits spend between broad‐reach advertising (digital out-of-home, sponsorships, content marketing) and targeted re-marketing. In the first case, your brand may bid on (say) “enterprise ERP software,” but if buyers have never seen your logo or heard your messaging, they’ll scroll past or click a rival they know (for example SAP Business One). In the second, by combining reach and re-marketing, you build memory structures, linking your brand to Category Entry Points such as “inventory management” or “supply-chain resilience”, so that when buyers do search, your name already feels familiar and credible.
Ultimately, a purely in-market focus is akin to fishing with only a net around the boat: you capture today’s nibblers but miss the schools swimming just beyond casting range.
Buyers of B2B products and services typically spend a large amount of time in research mode before directly reaching out to vendors through online search. Good practice is to have them aware of your brand BEFORE they reach out. Best practice is to be already talking to them.
This article explains this concept more fully: Are digital technologies killing the sales representative?
The majority of B2B marketing is focused on buyers in-market now; it's a highly competitive space.
Effective B2B growth requires casting a wider net, building mental availability among light‐category buyers and later reminding them when they become heavy users. Only by balancing top-of-funnel brand building with bottom-of-funnel activation can marketers ensure they’re on that Day-One shortlist, and thus in the running for 85% of the deals they hope to win.
SEO, SEM, and AEM all work better when your brand is known
SEO = Search Engine Optimization is specific actions done on a regular basis with the aim of having your website appear in search results when potential customers are in-market searching for providers and solutions.
SEM = is similar to SEO except the focus is on paid search results achieved through bidding for relevant search terms through so-called "pay-for-click" advertising.
AEM = Answer Engine Optimization. An emerging content tactic for optimizing how your information surfaces in AI-powered answer engines and chatbots (think “position zero” in a world of generative search).
These are the popular techniques used by B2B marketers to generate leads - but here is the challenge. A valuable prospect goes onto Google and searches for a product or solution and up pops a range of companies all claiming to offer solutions.
Three are brands they have already heard of it, one is a company they have purchased from in the past, and the rest are companies and brands they have never heard of. If you were, which search result would you put your money on as most likely to be clicked?
And don't be thinking they will click more than three; people don't have time.
Brand building is vital in B2B marketing because it de-risks the buyer's decision
In B2B, people buy brands they know and trust, not from brands they have never heard of.
Some truly lowest-price obsessed buyers may choose the lowest price from an unknown (we call them "bottom feeders") - but so rarely you don't need to worry about it, and you can't build a business by always being the lowest bidder.
In practice, that means splitting your budget and your mind-share:
- Build Mental Availability through broad‐reach storytelling, distinctive assets and reminder-style touch points so you’re top-of-mind when the buying trigger fires.
- Activate In-Market Buyers with targeted search, account-based outreach, and three-tier proposals that guide decision-makers through value trade-offs.
