Article Summary
Before they even complete a form, most business buyers have already decided on their preferred supplier, meaning that a great deal of the actual work involved in your website takes place well before anyone is ready to engage in a conversation. The 95/5 rule explains this situation: at any one time only a small portion of your potential customer base is in the process of making a purchase, and this proportion differs from one category to another. This article examines what you actually need to build for all the other people, employing a good/better/best approach that is based on real projects rather than another gated PDF.
Key Takeaways
- According to 6sense's 2025 Buyer Experience Report, 94% of buying groups ranked vendors before making their first contact and their preferred vendor at that stage won the deal 77% of the time.
- The 95/5 rule is a heuristic used in planning and not a fixed figure; Forrester estimates the in-market share for B2B martech specifically to be around 15-30%, so regard the number as only indicating a general direction for your category.
- People are currently overwhelmed by the amount of content available. Instead of making it easier to take action, more general or duplicate material tends to make it more difficult to locate the useful content.
- The approach of enabling buyers—that is, helping rather than selling—works since the individual visiting your website is usually collecting information with the aim of persuading somebody else within their organisation. They are not typically the person who makes the final decision.
- A straightforward tool that is linked to a genuine and frequently asked question is often more practical than an expensive interactive version, although the outcomes will depend on the particular project.
- Just because content is interactive doesn't mean that it is more useful; the criterion should be whether it helps a buyer to make progress quickly, not whether it is digital.
- According to McKinsey's 2024 B2B Pulse research, channel preference is divided about equally among the three stages of the buying journey (in-person, remote, digital self-service), which means that buyer enablement tools should support all three channels, not just one.
Related Video
Full Article
According to 6sense's 2025 Buyer Experience Report, 94% of the buying groups that were surveyed stated that they had ranked potential vendors before making first contact, and in 77% of cases the vendor who had been ranked first ended up winning the deal. When a person fills in a form on your website, they might be supporting a decision that is already in motion, rather than initiating it from the beginning.
For many B2B websites, that's an uncomfortable truth since the majority of them are designed for the kind of person who is ready to make a purchase today. The forms, the calls to action, and the case studies placed at the bottom of the page are all aimed at the small portion of your market that is currently shopping. The much larger group of people, meanwhile, receive almost nothing.
The 95/5 rule and what it means for B2B websites
The 95/5 rule—which was promoted by the LinkedIn B2B Institute and is based on research carried out by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute—states that at any one time around 5% of your potential customers are actually in the market. The other 95% are at an earlier stage: they may be aware of a problem, but haven't yet started looking for a solution.
It’s a planning heuristic, not a law of physics. The in-market share shifts with purchase cycles and category maturity. Forrester argues that 5% actually understates it on average across B2B and estimates the in-market share for B2B marketing technology at closer to 15-30%. Whatever the exact number in your category, the underlying point holds. Most of the people you want to reach on any given day aren’t ready to talk to you.
The useful point mentioned in Gartner's buyer research, which was published in 2018, is that when buying between businesses people spend about 17% of their total buying time meeting vendors, and that time is divided among all the vendors they are considering, not just you, so any one vendor will only receive 5 to 6% of that time. The remainder is spent on independent research, internal discussions, and reaching a consensus within a buying group, none of which involves a vendor being present.
Increasingly, that independent research is AI-assisted. A 2025 Google B2B buyer journey study found that around 60% of respondents used AI tools like ChatGPT or Gemini at some point in the purchase journey, from expanding vendor lists to summarizing information to surfacing competitors. In G2’s 2026 software buyer research, four in five said AI chatbots accelerated their purchasing decision. That research happens without your sales team in the room. If your site is what that assistant reads and repeats back, you’re in the conversation. If it isn’t, you’re not, a problem we’ve dug into separately.
Buyer enablement, or helping, not selling
Gartner and analyst Brent Adamson gave this a name in 2018: buyer enablement. It’s a fine term, if a little consultant-flavoured. A simpler way to say it, one we’ve written about before: helping, not selling. Helping people learn, decide, and do the internal work required to become a customer, long before they’re ready to buy.
Most companies don’t ignore this idea. They just end up building the wrong thing in response to it. Gartner’s original point in 2018 wasn’t “make more content.” Buyers are already drowning in it, and more generic or duplicative content can make it harder to find what’s actually useful rather than easier to decide.
There’s a detail that gets missed here, too: the person on your site is often not the final decision-maker. They’re the person collecting material to bring back to their team. Demand Gen Report found that 72% of B2B buyers share content with relevant team members, and 57% of those recipients actually download and review what’s shared. A useful tool or piece of content isn’t just marketing, it’s ammunition for someone else’s internal argument you’ll never be in the room for.
Teranet is a good example of this playing out over time rather than in a single visit. Teranet’s business is big data, but every quarter, they ship curated data snapshots and interactive charts to their audience for free. No one downloads a quarterly market snapshot and buys enterprise data access on the spot. It keeps Teranet in front of the right people and builds enough trust that Teranet is the name that comes to mind when someone finally needs what they’re selling.
A good, better, best ladder for what to build
When it comes down to it and the aim is to provide assistance, the actual issue then becomes: exactly what should you help them to do? Most companies come to a standstill at this point since they aren't familiar enough with their own buyer to be able to answer that question. If you have already carried out that task, then consider your product as being like a ladder.
Good is the entry point, and there’s no excuse to skip it. Take a question you get asked constantly and give a real, useful answer. Tennis is often asked about accessibility compliance, so we partnered with AccessiBe to add a free accessibility checker directly on our site. Someone runs their URL through it, gets a real report, and can hand it to a developer the same day. Whether they come back to us or not is beside the point. Someone out there is now closer to fixing a real problem.
Better is where you build something around an actual decision your buyer is stuck on. One national certification organization we worked with had prospective students who couldn’t figure out where to even start based on their existing qualifications. People would show up, get overwhelmed, leave, and come back months later, sometimes over a multi-year window. We built an interactive tool that walked them through their own situation to a real decision. Support calls dropped. Self-serve completions went up. It stopped being a brochure and started being infrastructure.
The best comes with a caution. Interactivity doesn’t automatically make content more useful. A slow calculator that produces little value after five minutes is worse than a plain checklist someone can use in ten seconds. The real test is whether it helps a buyer make progress quickly, digital or not. Some of our own best-performing resources are static templates that people just take away and fill in on their own.
Don’t build around the humans, build with them.
When creating anything you have to ensure that it connects with your sales process from the very beginning, rather than adding it on afterwards. This is the way in which marketing and sales tend to become separate from each other: a tool may be built with a clear purpose in mind, but no one has considered how a sales representative would actually use it in a real conversation.
Tools don’t replace people. McKinsey’s 2024 B2B Pulse research found channel preferences split roughly evenly across the buying journey: about a third of customers prefer in-person interaction, a third prefer remote conversations, and a third prefer digital self-service. Build for all three. And make sure whatever you build is easy for sales to send mid-conversation, not just something sitting on a page hoping to be found.
Where to actually start
It's not necessary to develop all of this at once—select one actual question that your buyer is having trouble with and create the single item that will enable them to move past it. This item can be placed anywhere on the ladder. Release it, check whether it makes a difference, and then build upon it from there.
A website that serves only the person ready to buy today is doing only half its job. The other half is the person who might be ready in eighteen months and needs to trust you long before they get there.
Provide the help first, and the selling will look after itself.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What do you mean by the 95/5 rule in B2B marketing?
The 95/5 rule, popularized by LinkedIn’s B2B Institute and grounded in research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, holds that most potential buyers aren’t ready to purchase today. It’s a planning heuristic rather than a fixed measurement. Forrester, for example, estimates the in-market share of B2B marketing technology at 15-30%, so the exact split depends on your category.
What is buyer enablement?
Buyer enablement is the practice of providing potential buyers with the information and tools they need to make a decision well before they’re ready to talk to a salesperson. Gartner and analyst Brent Adamson introduced the term in 2018. A simpler way to think about it: helping, not selling.
Is buyer enablement the same as sales enablement?
No. Sales enablement equips your internal sales team with training and materials to close deals. Buyer enablement focuses directly on the buyer, giving them what they need to decide and justify that decision internally, often without a salesperson involved at all.
Should I produce more content in order to assist those buyers who aren't ready to make a purchase?
It doesn't have to be so. Since buyers are already inundated with white papers and password-protected PDFs, increasing the amount of content generally makes the decision more difficult rather than easier. A single helpful tool or checklist that relates to a real and recurring question is usually better than yet another long-form asset.
How can you get started with buyer enablement in a low-cost way?
Start with a real, repeated question your prospects ask and build something genuinely useful around it, like a free checker, calculator, or checklist. It doesn’t need to be interactive or expensive to be effective; it needs to give someone a real answer they can act on.
Does content that is interactive work better than content that is static?
It is not automatic; a slow or confusing interactive tool is worse than a simple checklist that someone can carry out in ten seconds. What matters most are usefulness and speed, not the format.
How can I ensure that a buyer enablement tool really supports the sales process?
Get your sales team involved when you're developing the tool, not after it has been launched. According to McKinsey's research, buyer preference for channels splits about equally between in-person, remote, and digital self-service, so the aim should be to have a tool that your sales representatives can send during a conversation just as easily as the buyer can find it themselves.
