Most of your market cannot buy from you today, and no amount of budget will change that.
Not “won’t.” Cannot. They are locked into a contract, halfway through last year’s tooling decision, or simply not thinking about the problem you solve. They have real budgets and real intent, and they are still unreachable by any offer you make this quarter, because the quarter is not their moment.
This is the single most expensive thing a founder can misunderstand about growth. Almost everyone misunderstands it, because the dashboard rewards the misunderstanding.
The number that should be pinned above every growth team’s desk comes from Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, in work he published for the LinkedIn B2B Institute in 2021. Companies replace most of their significant suppliers, from banking to legal to software, roughly every five years. Do the arithmetic he does, and only about 20% of buyers are in the market across a whole year, with something like 5% in any given quarter.
Five per cent.
Ninety-five per cent of the people you would love to sell to will not buy from anyone this quarter, at any price. They are out of market. That 5:95 split is not a funnel-conversion problem you can optimise your way out of. It is the shape of demand itself.
Now look at where the money goes. Performance ads, retargeting, SDR sequences, intent data, bottom-funnel content: nearly all of it is built to find and convert the 5% who are looking right now. That work is necessary. Those buyers are comparing options as we speak, and if you are not in the set they consider, you lose the deal to someone who is. Demand capture is how you monetise the moment.
The trouble is what it quietly teaches you to believe, which is that the 5% is the market. It isn’t. It is the thin visible edge of a much larger thing that never shows up on this month’s dashboard.
Demand capture is measurable, immediate and attributable. Spend on Monday, leads by Friday, a cost per acquisition you can drop into a board deck. It feels like control.
It is really the streetlight effect wearing the costume of rigour. The drunk hunts for his keys under the lamppost, not because he dropped them there, but because that is where the light is. Marketing does the same. We measure what is easy to measure, then quietly promote it to the status of the thing that matters. The in-market 5% stand directly under the streetlight. The other 95% are out in the dark, which is inconveniently where most of the future is standing.
Demand creation is the opposite in every way. Building the memory that makes an out-of-market buyer think of you when they finally do enter the market is slow, diffuse and stubbornly hard to attribute. It pays off in eighteen months, to a buyer who will swear they “just knew about you,” through a channel your analytics never credited.
So the rational, time-poor operator does the rational thing. They pour budget into the measurable 5% and starve the invisible 95%. For a while it works beautifully. Then it stops. You have harvested every in-market buyer who was ever going to find you, your CPAs climb, and growth flattens. Not because the market shrank, but because you never planted anything in the 95% who were supposed to become next year’s 5%.
This is the stall that surprises people. It should not. You cannot harvest a field you never sowed.
Here is the mechanism, stripped of the mysticism that makes founders roll their eyes at the word “brand.”
Advertising, Dawes writes, mainly works by building and refreshing memory links to a brand, and those links lie dormant until a buyer comes into the market, at which point they fire. Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow gives the idea a name: mental availability, the probability that your brand comes to mind in a buying situation, built through what he calls category entry points, the cues and needs and moments a buyer attaches to the category.
The LinkedIn B2B Institute puts the job in one line: make your brand easy to mind and easy to find. Not loved. Not admired. Remembered, in the right moment, by the person who was not even looking when you reached them.
This is not a box you tick once. Dawes notes that even well-established brands rarely get more than 20 to 30% of buyers to link them to a given buying situation, and market leaders often top out around half. Memory fades. Buyers churn in and out of the category. The 95% is a population that refreshes constantly. Mental availability is not a monument you build and walk away from. It is a garden that dies the week you stop tending it.
That is what “brand” actually buys you. Not a feeling, but a place in memory that pays out later. The out-of-market 95% are not a waiting room. They are the entire pipeline of everyone who will ever be in-market, and the decision about who they will shortlist is being made right now, quietly, whether or not you are spending against it.
The 95% who can’t buy today are deciding who they’ll call when they can. That decision is being made now, with or without you in the room.
Which brings us to the split. Les Binet and Peter Field, working through the IPA, gave us the 60/40 rule: across a large body of campaigns, the most effective long-run allocation was roughly 60% to brand building and 40% to sales activation. Their later B2B work for the LinkedIn B2B Institute nudged it to a 50/50 split between long-term brand and short-term activation, alongside a harder-edged principle. Set your share of voice above your share of market and you tend to grow.
Now the honest part, because a strategist who quotes 60/40 at a pre-seed company is selling you a rule with the context torn off.
Those ratios are steady-state settings for established brands with a base of demand to defend. If you are pre-seed with forty customers, a 60/40 brand tilt is malpractice. You do not yet know who your buyer really is, or whether the product holds. You need the fast feedback of activation, and you need proof of pull before you spend on memory at scale. Early on the balance sits heavily toward capture. Sometimes as far as 80/20 the other way, and rightly so.
The mistake is treating that emergency setting as permanent. As you move from Series A to B to C, the in-market 5% you can reach starts to run dry, your CPAs creep up, and more and more of your growth is simply other people’s demand that you are intercepting rather than demand you created. That is the signal to shift the ratio, deliberately, before the stall rather than after it. Series B is usually where the neglect starts to cost real money. It is the stage where you finally have the budget to build mental availability, and the most temptation to spend every penny of it chasing the quarter.
You do not need a brand campaign. You need to stop pretending the 5% is the market.
Split the budget on purpose. Ring-fence a portion, even 20% to begin with, for work aimed squarely at the buyers who cannot purchase yet. Reach the whole category rather than the in-market sliver. Show up against the moments and needs your buyers will one day feel. Aim to be remembered, not merely found. Judge that spend on the timescale it truly works, in quarters and years rather than clicks, and hold your nerve while the attribution stays stubbornly grey.
Here is the sentence to sit with. Every in-market buyer you will ever win was, until recently, an out-of-market buyer that somebody chose to invest in, or chose to ignore. The only question is whether that somebody was you.
The best work starts with a conversation, and a decision worth making.
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